Free Republic

Big Tech lobbyists are fighting “tooth and nail” against regulation Tech giants have repeatedly said they would welcome government regulation — if it’s the right regulation, of course. But faced with five antitrust bills that could unwind what the House Judiciary Committee described as Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook’s “monopoly power,” Big Tech is bringing out the big lobbying guns. Apple CEO Tim Cook himself called Speaker Nancy Pelosi to “deliver a warning” that the “rushed” antitrust bills could disrupt the iPhone, according to The New York Times, and that’s not all: “Executives, lobbyists, and more than a dozen think...

Liberal tech giant Amazon likes promoting glowing reviews of its company from progressive groups that it funds. Jeff Bezos-owned Amazon put out a press release June 2 boasting how it was ranked the “No. 1 investor in America” by the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). The presser celebrated how “[f]or the second year in a row, Amazon placed first on PPI’s Investment Heroes list.” One problem: Amazon funds the PPI. Fast Company reported in 2019 that “Facebook, Google, and Amazon all donated last year to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), a pro-business think tank that regularly sponsors briefings for Democratic elected...

If Inspector Clouseau and Dr. Joseph Mengele had a love child, it would be Dr. Anthony (“I am science, hear me roar”) Fauci, who fumbled his way through a pandemic he helped create and whose misleading, self-serving and contradictory pronouncements between baseball games, magazine photo-shoots and talk show appearances contributed to the deaths of millions. Leading the pack of Fauci’s unindicted co-conspirators is Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. Facts, as Ronald Reagan would say, are stubborn things. They do not change. So when Facebook went from banning and nuking posts and posters asserting that the China virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute...

A professor of political science has claimed that President Joe Biden's new plan to counter domestic terrorism could be used to silence administration critics. Nicholas Giordano, a professor at Suffolk Community College on Long Island, raised his concerns about the new National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism in an interview with Fox News on Friday. Earlier this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland unveiled the new 32-page strategy document, which came in response to an order issued by Biden on his first full day in office, calling domestic terrorism 'the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.'

Social media companies like Facebook don't show you all your friends’ posts. You may think they do, but they don’t. Instead, an algorithm picks which ones to show you -- and which not to show you. How do they decide? The companies won't reveal the details.

There are few, if any, political issues that now generate the breadth and intensity of bipartisan backlash as does the rise of Big Tech. During Donald Trump's presidency, the major parties largely diverged on their specific grievances against the woke Silicon Valley monopolists who serve as gatekeepers for America's 21st-century public square. Republicans, by and large, focused on censorship of conservative online speech. Democrats, by contrast, tended to focus on economic concentration; the five American corporations with the largest market caps, for example, are tech behemoths Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google Alphabet and Facebook. This divergence has stymied efforts to rein...

It is such an obvious attempt to try to crush political dissent, you wonder if they thought no one was paying attention.The Biden administration just released a “National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism.” It calls for abuses of state power to combine elements of totalitarian government with social and cultural engineering. They decided the Constitution and those pesky old individual liberties won’t stop them from making America the Wokest Place on Earth.It is such an obvious attempt to try to crush political dissent, you wonder if they thought no one was paying attention. If you aren’t, you need to be,...

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...