Free Republic

The right shouldn't be taking a victory lap. They should be asking why media and Big Tech were allowed to smear everyone who believed in the possibility of a lab leak as crazy conspiracy theorists.A clip of Jon Stewart on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” has blown up on the internet, and for good reason. It’s amazing. In it, Stewart, in a hilarious fake dialogue with a Chinese lab researcher, makes the case for why the theory that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology is way less insane than all the other origin hypotheses.People owe a...

Recently, liberal feminist author Naomi Wolf was banned from Twitter for publishing what the BBC described as “anti-vaccine misinformation.” One would think that, if Wolf’s views on vaccines were mistaken, then the answer would be to explain why she is wrong, to correct bad speech with good speech. Twitter, however, does not believe its users capable of deciding the truth for themselves, and so it promptly banned Wolf. The banning of Wolf’s account is, of course, the latest in a long line of such actions by Twitter. Furthermore, Twitter has been using a number of other, subtler tools to dissuade...

In Silicon Valley, 17 years later, another kind of revolution is taking shape. A handful of founders and CEOs—Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, Jason Fried of Basecamp, Shopify’s Tobias Lütke, Medium’s Ev Williams—have said the unsayable. In the face of shop-floor social-justice activism, they’ve decided, business owners should resolve to stick to business. ... In October, a pseudonymous group inspired by Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong came together under the banner “Mission Protocol,” with the aim of getting other companies to start “putting aside activities and conversations” outside the scope of their professional missions. (“Mission focus doesn’t mean being apolitical,” they note. “It...

Did conversations between Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Dr. Anthony Fauci have anything to do with the social media platform’s crackdown on COVID-related speech? House Republicans would like to know. After an exchange between the two showed up in the Fauci email dump last week, Kentucky Rep. James Comer and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan — the ranking Republicans on the House Committee on Oversight and Reform and the House Judiciary Committee, respectively — sent a letter to Zuckerberg on Wednesday demanding the CEO of the social media giant surrender any communications the company has had with Fauci and other federal employees...

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YouTube's position is that content on the site must parrot whatever comes from its narrow set of authorities, even though their positions change frequently and dramatically.Google’s YouTube has stepped up its draconian censorship of a sitting U.S. senator. The powerful video-sharing company removed a video of a speech given by Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and banned him from uploading new videos for at least seven days. The action took place several months after YouTube removed two videos of testimony given at a hearing he hosted of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on the topic of...

Tech giant Apple has paid millions of dollars to settle a lawsuit with a student after repair techs working for its partner company Pegatron leaked explicit photographs and videos from her iPhone that was sent in to be repaired. In 2016, a student in Oregon sent her iPhone to Apple to be repaired. The device was sent to a repair facility in Sacramento, California, where technicians working for Apple partner Pegatron examined the device. The two technicians then reportedly posted “10 photos of her in various stages of undress and a sex video” to the woman’s Facebook account, to make...

Twitter declared a free and open Internet to be "an essential human right in modern society" Saturday morning after the Nigerian government banned access to the social media giant following a dispute with its president – even as critics say it suppresses conservative content and bans its own users. Twitter deleted a fiery tweet from President Muhammadu Buhari that many perceived as a veiled threat against violent separatists in the nation’s southeast – then his government’s information wing responded by banning the social media platform from the country. "We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria," Twitter’s...

Curious. In Twitter’s own words, they are willfully denying Donald Trump “an essential human right in modern society.” https://t.co/nKeH1Ym4Qy— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) June 5, 2021We are deeply concerned by the blocking of Twitter in Nigeria. Access to the free and #OpenInternet is an essential human right in modern society.We will work to restore access for all those in Nigeria who rely on Twitter to communicate and connect with the world. #KeepitOn— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) June 5, 2021

When I taught English to students in Beijing, the most important lesson was one I learned: Government censorship works. My class was conducted in the evenings for adults ranging from college students to middle-aged white-collar workers. We often talked about world events. One day, the topic of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing came up. Older students spoke of the event in hushed tones, knowing it was taboo to discuss the Chinese Communist Party's massacre of pro-democracy students. But younger students? They had little knowledge of the infamous event at all. The Chinese communist government had gone to great...

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"A lot of people have egg on their face" for dismissing the COVID-19 lab leak theory, tweeted ABC News ' Jonathan Karl this week. "Some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them."Or if Arkansas Tom Cotton did. "We still don't know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company," he said in January 2020. "I would note that Wuhan has China's only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus."Cotton never said he was certain the virus came from a lab leak and...

Antitrust laws are some of the most powerful legal tools that the government possesses to intervene in private industry, which is why they’re often touted as a miracle cure for concerns about the power of “Big Tech.” But competition policy hawks like Senator Amy Klobuchar are quick to cite concerns about market concentration everywhere, including “pharmaceuticals, social media and digital technology, telecommunications, agriculture, online ticket sales, transportation, and more.” Too many of the uses lawmakers propose for antitrust, however, are in industries where a lack of antitrust enforcement isn’t the root cause of the problems they propose to solve. Not...

Everyone grew up with someone who obnoxiously would recount everything you’d just gone through, to the people who were, like they weren’t – “Did you see that chick who started talking to you?” Yeah, I was talking to her. “My God, she just walked right up and started talking to you!” For some reason, Facebook thinks commercials feature people like this is a good way to get Congress to allow them to rewrite Internet regulations. If you’ve watched cable TV at all in the last month you’ve seen one of those stupid ads from Facebook calling for new Internet regulations....

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — In an exclusive interview with The Federalist, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis challenged the right to take a proactive stance on cultural issues, not just a defensive one. “Do you want to be the Harlem Globetrotters or do you want to be the Washington Generals? D.C. Republicans, a lot of them are my friends, but they’re like lovable losers,” he said. “They let the corporate media define the narrative and it’s like trying to fight your way out of a wet paper bag. You have to reject these narratives.”Recognizing Americans who “aren’t captive to the Acela corridor or...

Some conservatives seem unmoved by Big Tech’s threat to free speech and the free flow of information. They say: let the market work. But that, perhaps, is the essence of the problem. The tech companies didn’t achieve their monopoly positions in a free market. The U.S. government created a legal and regulatory environment that gave tech companies a massive advantage over their non-tech competitors. All of them received Section 230 protection, and Amazon had the extra benefits of tax-free internet sales, subsidized distribution through the post office, and exemption from liability for counterfeit and/or harmful products...

It has been said that “everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power.” An intriguing notion, but incomplete. Speech, especially the fight to control the speech of others, is also about power. How else to describe Facebook’s ban on users sharing the claim the COVID-19 virus came from a Chinese lab? The sudden lifting of the ban, following a White House plan to investigate the pandemic’s cause, only underscores the social media giant’s desire to restrict ­users’ speech. Now you can’t, now you can. ­Either way, it’s speech control. If just Facebook and others in Big Tech lusted...

A pair of technology trade groups are pushing back against Governor Ron DeSantis after he signed a measure (SB 7072) on Monday that aims to block companies like Facebook and Twitter from censoring politicians from their platforms. A top priority for DeSantis during the 2021 Legislative Session, the new law gives the Florida Elections Commission the power to fine media companies up to $250,000 a day for “de-platforming” any candidate for statewide office and $25,000 per day for de-platforming candidates for non-statewide offices. The lawsuit alleges that the new law violates the Constitution, noting that it infringes on the First...

China was the only major economy to grow during 2020, when the rest of the world—including the United States— suffered economically from the COVID-19 pandemic. China’s perception of the U.S.’s position is summed up by a frequent refrain of Chinese leaders: “the East is rising, and the West is in decline.” Further making their views toward the U.S. clear, China's most senior foreign policy official recently told senior U.S. officials that the U.S. isn't qualified to "speak from a position of strength" when criticizing China. This comes at a time when China has laid out plans to become a global...

oday, we’re launching new ways to inform people if they’re interacting with content that’s been rated by a fact-checker as well as taking stronger action against people who repeatedly share misinformation on Facebook. Whether it’s false or misleading content about COVID-19 and vaccines, climate change, elections or other topics, we’re making sure fewer people see misinformation on our apps. More Context For Pages That Repeatedly Share False Claims We want to give people more information before they like a Page that has repeatedly shared content that fact-checkers have rated, so you’ll see a pop up if you go to like...