Free Republic

In China’s bid to acquire advanced technology from the United States, officials from the north-central city of Baoding tried to meet with Silicon Valley executives and discuss deals for companies to set up offices there, according to internal government documents that The Epoch Times obtained recently. Citing the Chinese regime’s key strategy of “bringing technologies in, exporting our products out,” the Baoding government detailed a successful example: it attracted AXT Inc., a U.S.-based designer and manufacturer of semiconductor substrates, to set up a factory in Dingxing county, Baoding. The semiconductor substrates are components for making electronic chips, which power nearly...

Together with a few other tech and media corporations, Microsoft has formed a coalition focused on fighting “disinformation” and fake news. The other founding members of the coalition are Truepic, Intel, BBC, Adobe, and Arm. Disinformation and fake news have become prevalent buzzwords to create a justification to censor in this digital age. It’s now very easy for people to formulate and spread falsehoods, according to the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity. “There’s a critical need to address widespread deception in online content — now supercharged by advances in AI and graphics and diffused rapidly via the internet. Our...

If any single platform can be fingered as the favorite of the rioters, it appears to be Facebook. Yet Facebook remains unmolested by app stores and untargeted by opportunistic politicians.It’s been more than a month since the app stores of Google and Apple joined forces with Amazon Web Services to knee-cap an upstart competitor, Parler. The stated reasoning was Parler’s lack of content moderation policies, which Apple, in particular, claimed led to Parler’s use as a forum to “plan, coordinate, and facilitate the illegal activities in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.”This reasoning was confidently repeated across the corporate press....

The Biden administration is working with Facebook, Google, and Twitter to target “COVID misinformation” and overcome “vaccine hesitancy,” according to senior officials in the administration who spoke to Reuters. Via Reuters: The White House’s direct engagement with the companies to mitigate the challenge has not been previously reported. Biden’s chief of staff Ron Klain has previously said the administration will try to work with Silicon Valley on the issue.

Poland is taking a stand against the Big Tech conglomerate, proposing whopping fines for platforms that censor or remove posts for ideological reasons, according to the country’s Deputy Minister of Justice Sebastian Kaleta. In a Fox News interview, Kaleta said social media companies have been targeting Christianity, conservatives and traditional values through their blacklisting and removal of posts. “We see that when Big Tech decides to remove content for political purposes, it’s mostly content which praises traditional values or praises conservatism,” Kaleta said. “It is deleted under their ‘hate speech policy’ when it has no legal right to do so.”...

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

Former President Donald Trump said he was not interested in returning to Twitter after he was permanently banned from the platform last month. “It’s become very boring. We don’t want to go back to Twitter,” Trump told Newsmax’s Greg Kelly on Wednesday. “I’ll tell you, it’s not the same. If you look at what’s going on with Twitter, I understand that it’s become very boring and millions of people are leaving.” Trump, who has been one of the most active presidents on social media, was permanently suspended from Twitter following the Jan. 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol. The targeted...

Gab, a social network favored by the alt-right that exploded in popularity after the riots at the US Capitol, was offline Friday evening, and its Twitter account also went dark. Twitter users first started posting that the website and its associated social media account went down at around 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. At least one Twitter user who claimed to be on Gab just before it went dark Friday night speculated that the site was hacked as a part of a cryptocurrency scam. The Post could not verify that theory.

You are used to ignoring the lying, outrage-seeking, politically manipulative media. But this time, they are spinning lies directly about you. They are exploiting the awful travesty of some people’s inexcusable violence to delegitimize and shame every responsible citizen who took reasonable and lawful means to raise legitimate questions about election integrity. Perhaps you hope you can offer some perspective, tell your side of things. But it’s too late. The media spin is overwhelmingly effective. Nobody will listen, they have made up their minds. They sincerely believe the lies, the disinformation, the emotional manipulation. They sincerely believe you are a...

Big Tech’s efforts to restrict user access to various Internet platforms are a serious challenge, President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with leaders of parliamentary factions on Wednesday. He responded to the recent statements made by Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the State Duma (lower house), who put the spotlight on Big Tech’s violation of freedom of speech. “What you said about these so-called platforms, IT companies, is a serious challenge not only for us – we see what has happened in the [United] States,” Putin noted. According to him, it is quite obvious that such an “ideological divide” runs...

Facebook has blocked Australians from accessing and sharing news in protest at a new law which would have forced the site to pay for the content it hosts. Furious Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the move shows tech companies 'think they are bigger than governments and that the rules should not apply to them' while others branded it 'an assault on a sovereign nation' and an 'abuse of power'. The backlash quickly went international, with one Democrat politician in the US saying it shows 'Facebook is not compatible with democracy' while the hashtag 'Delete Facebook' quickly began trending on rival...

Democrat politicians don’t want healing, love, or compassion. They want power. If long-lasting, their reign will ensure America is never united again.On Friday, the president and first lady meandered through a Valentine display Jill Biden designed to decorate the front lawn of the White House. With Champ, Major, and a handful of media lap dogs in tow, the Bidens nodded with approval at the large white, red, and pink heart-shaped cut-outs adorned with trite truisms: “unity,” “healing,” “love,” and “compassion.” But Democrat politicians don’t want healing, love, or compassion. They want power. If successful and long-lasting, the policies they push,...

Twitter claims it suspended the account of Rep. Devin Nunes (R- CA) on Tuesday in “error” after Nunes allegedly failed to complete the social media platform’s anti-spam filter. His account was restored shortly after. Twitter said its automated systems blocked Nunes’ account in “error,” and that it has since reversed his suspension, according to a report by Business Insider.

A law professor who’s been sitting on Facebook’s oversight board stepped down to accept a position in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice. Stanford’s Pamela Karlan will serve as principal deputy assistant attorney general in the DOJ’s Civil Division after spending less than a year on the Facebook board set up in 2019 to review the social media behemoth’s content policing decisions. In 2019, she testified at Trump’s first impeachment trial, making a quip at the expense of his son, for which she later apologized. During one public appearance she joked that she “had to cross the street” to avoid...

After months of hearing that life could never return to normal until we get a vaccine, we got a vaccine (two, actually), but life did not return to normal. In fact, life got worse. We were instructed to take the new vaccine as soon as possible and then to put on more masks. Anyone who complained about that was punished. Most people obeyed the orders (not like they had a choice), but the whole thing made them nervous. Why exactly did the rules change all of a sudden? Was there a good reason for that? When are we finally going...

China's Communist Party uses the Great Firewall to block information from its citizens. Blocking speech based on politics has been a hallmark of every totalitarian government“That is all right. I had them on my list, too,” a prominent public figure joked after learning that he had been blacklisted by a political opponent. Who said this? Was it Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., after Simon and Schuster canceled his book deal because he challenged the Electoral College results from Pennsylvania, even though Democrats had similarly objected in 2001, 2005, and 2017? Was it a Trump administration official responding to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s...

Time magazine's article intones the 'Trump is crazy' mantra over his claims of a 'rigged' election while telling anyone who reads it how powerful people conspired to rig the 2020 election.Time magazine's article intones the 'Trump is crazy' mantra over his claims of a 'rigged' election while telling anyone who reads it how powerful people conspired to rig the 2020 election. Corporate media has spent the last year arguing that Donald Trump’s claims about 2020 election integrity amount to “seditious” conspiracy theories. While maintaining that narrative despite the cognitive dissonance, Time magazine’s Feb. 15 cover story pulls back the curtain...

Free speech social media platform Gab received 272 million visits during the month of January, outperforming legacy media competition such as NBC News, The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart, and TMZ by a wide margin. Gab’s success is particularly remarkable, considering the fact that the website has been “deplatformed” from mobile app stores, PayPal, and email marketing services. The official Gab Twitter account revealed that the website had far outperformed legacy media on Monday, posting “Gab: ~272 million in Jan” next to a screenshot of traffic numbers from various corporate legacy media outlets. A total of 272 million visits would put...

Joe Biden has faced nearly no public scrutiny over the fact that the U.S. president's son has raked in millions of dollars from U.S. adversaries who use business deals to push goals against the U.S. interest.On Feb. 7, CBS Anchor Norah O’Donnell asked Joe Biden in an interview that aired prior to Super Bowl LV about his son Hunter’s new memoir, but failed to ask about the scandal implicating him in Hunter’s many business deals with China, Russia, and Ukraine. Worse, President Biden failed to condemn Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, who is responsible for ethnic cleansing and other forms of...

When we first got cameras on our smartphones or signed up for social media, none of us realized that they would come to control our lives. In our technological age, we’ve all participated in creating our surveillance state, whether as enforcers or self-censoring victims. Thanks to the technology in our smartphones, each one of us has the capability to contribute, and many on the left seem to revel in the power. The rest of us must weigh every action we take, every word we say. If we say or do the “wrong” thing, we may no longer have the right...