Free Republic

Twitter, Facebook and YouTube allow seven dictators, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, unfettered access to post on their platforms, influencing approximately 50 million followers as of March 28. Meanwhile, former leader of the free world President Donald Trump is still banned. MRC Free Speech America found seven dictators that Big Tech allows to post online. Twitter grants verified status to six of the seven dictators on the platform: Putin, Saudi Arabian King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, and Rwandan President Paul Kagame. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah...

The digital town square is undergoing an unexpected shake-up with Elon Musk taking a nine percent majority stake in Twitter. Ramifications will be felt on both sides of the political divide through the midterm elections and beyond. In a Monday filing with the U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), it was reported that Elon Musk has taken a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter with 73.5 million shares in the company. His investment was estimated at roughly $2.89 billion. This makes him the majority shareholder in the company. Musk is among the richest people in the world. Forbes lists his worth as...

On Monday, news broke that Elon Musk, the world's richest man, in one fell swoop also became the single largest stakeholder in Twitter, for he now owns 9.2% of its shares. The big question now is whether he intends to use his position to push for change in a platform that has become a toxic echo chamber for "woke" ideas and cancel culture, even as it relentlessly silences opposing views. If I had to describe Musk, I'd call him an eccentric libertarian who is, nevertheless, just a little suspect in that role, given his commitment to alternative energy and climate...

DirecTV will drop far-right cable news outlet One America News Network on Tuesday, April 4, according to Bloomberg’s Gerry Smith. The satellite TV cable behemoth said earlier this year that it planned to no longer carry OAN, which was criticized for spreading false information about the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 presidential election, and its general spread of conspiracy theories, once its contract expires. OAN began airing on DirecTV in April 2017. DirecTV is going through with the move despite Herring Networks Inc., which owns and operates OANN, having sued parent company AT&T on March 7, seeking $1 billion in damages,...

Will this dumpster-fire site improve now that @elonmusk has a large share of it? Tune in for my analysis.

Over the weekend, Twitter locked me out of my account for stating the obvious fact that Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, is a man. The corporate press, Big Tech, and even the U.S. government all refer to Levine, 64, as a “trans woman.” But this only means he dresses and presents himself as a woman, and asks the rest of the world to indulge him in what amounts to at best a flight of fancy, and at worst a dangerous delusion. And for the most part, the world obliges. But there is no way around the stubborn...

Big Tech censors: We know what we’re doing. Their algorithms: April Fools! It’s a tall task for Big Tech companies to justify mashing the censorship button on conservative speech when the systems they use to do their dirty work are so stupid that they always come back to kick them in the pants. MRC Free Speech America has logged over a whopping 3,500 cases of censorship into its CensorTrack database. But some of the cases were so flat-out ridiculous that they undermine the whole system of censorship and so-called fact-checking. MRC Free Speech America combed through CensorTrack to unearth the...

Major social media platforms' strict content moderation and censorship policies are making people more isolated and polarized, causing more dangerous extremism in society, a new study shows. “When you deny people the ability to express opinions and engage in cancel culture, the data shows you send them to nefarious platforms where much worse behavior occurs,” Ottman told the WashingtonExaminer. “People who get canceled or deplatformed just move to somewhere with an echo chamber that reinforces their beliefs, and [that] leads to shootings at synagogues and mosques and what happened in Charlottesville,” he added. He added that rampant censorship and the...

Facebook's corporate parent sought to cast its rival as harmful to teenagers and a danger to society. In an increasingly desperate bid to reduce the appeal of TikTok, Facebook’s parent company Meta quietly paid a Republican consulting firm to smear the social media rival as a danger to society. Internal emails obtained by The Washington Post show how Targeted Victory, a GOP strategy group, seeded anti-TikTok stories in local media across the country at the behest of Meta as Meta’s family of apps failed to attract young users. One email from a Targeted Victory director in February, for instance, instructed...

Facebook pushes climate sceptics towards increasingly extreme disinformation and conspiracy groups, a human-rights body's research suggests. A report released Wednesday by Global Witness found Facebook's algorithm amplified doubts rather than nudging people towards reliable information. Facebook says its systems are "designed to reduce misinformation". Researchers created two users - climate sceptic "Jane" and "John" who followed established scientific bodies. They then tracked what Facebook's algorithm suggested to both accounts. Jane soon saw content denying man-made climate change, including pages calling it a "hoax" and attacking measures to mitigate its effects. Meanwhile, John's account began by liking the page of the...

With the 2022 midterm elections just a little over seven months away, a shadowy new network of left-wing social media communities have emerged to spread Democratic talking points in key swing states. According to Axios, the network is called Real Voices Media (RVM); the site specializes in first drawing in and creating large audiences with normal, nonpolitical content, then subsequently posting left-wing propaganda to convince their audience to vote for Democrats in November. One such example in Michigan involved a brand new publication called the Main Street Sentinel, which is most active on Facebook and Instagram. The site started boosting...

BRUSSELS - The European Union set the stage for a stepped-up crackdown on big tech companies with an agreement on landmark digital rules to rein in online “gatekeepers” such as Google and Facebook parent Meta. EU officials agreed late Thursday on wording for the bloc’s Digital Markets Act, part of a long-awaited overhaul of its digital rulebook. The act, which still needs other approvals, seeks to prevent tech giants from dominating digital markets, with the threat of whopping fines or even the possibility of a company breakup. For instance, they face tighter restrictions on using people’s data for targeted online...

Joe Rogan took aim at woke “activist” employees of large Silicon Valley tech firms, calling them “mentally ill” and “lunatics who are running the asylum to a certain extent.” Rogan made the comments on his Spotify podcast during an interview Wednesday with Antonio García Martínez, an ex-engineer at Apple and Facebook who parted ways with the iPhone maker after employees complained of “misogynistic” writings in his book. During the segment, Rogan asked Martínez what it was like to work for a large tech firm. “For someone from the outside, we look at it and say: ‘How are those #### places...

Big tech is doing its best to stop you from seeing news and comments from conservatives and conservative websites and anyone else who tells the truth. Here are some tips on what you can do to fight back. I know everyone makes these grand pronouncements about how they’re leaving Facebook, Twitter, etc., for Gettr, Parler, Gab, Truth, or whatever. They are all excellent platforms, but they don’t reach anywhere near enough people. The top social media sites are Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, Tik-Tok, etc., and that’s not going to change anytime soon. We will have to fight an information war...

Fox News host and Daily Caller cofounder Tucker Carlson was censored by Twitter after pointing out the factual accuracy of tweets regarding transgender Assistant Secretary for Health and “Woman of the Year” Rachel Levine.

Charlie Kirk, founder of TPUSA, talk radio host and outspoken conservative commentator, was suspended from Twitter on Tuesday after identifying President Joe Biden's assistant health secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services as a man. "Richard Levine," Kirk wrote, "spent 54 years of his life as a man. He had a wife and family. He 'transitioned' to being a woman in 2011, Joe Biden appointed Levine to be a 4-Star Admiral, and now USA Today has named 'Rachel' Levine as a 'Woman of the Year'[.] Where are the feminists??" Twitter said that the tweet was in violation of...

New York Times story seen as effort to put spin on bad news Long before the New York Post's blockbuster, election-eve stories on Hunter Biden's laptop in 2020, investigative reporter and author Peter Schweizer documented the Biden family's international business of selling access to the White House for millions of dollars. Schweizer's 2018 book "Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends" and a follow-up, "Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite," presented evidence that five members of the Biden family cashed in while Joe Biden was vice president.

There’s a whole lot of rats under this rug. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to help your neighbors see them scurrying.On March 17, 2022, The New York Times stated it had verified the authenticity of a laptop and its data as belonging to the president’s son, Hunter Biden. This was the same laptop holding information that Twitter, Facebook, and other corporate media immediately suppressed when The New York Post, a right-leaning competitor of The New York Times, reported on it three weeks before the 2020 presidential election.If they had known about one of the Biden family...

MRC Free Speech America’s CensorTrack database reached an important milestone as it continues to monitor the war Big Tech companies have waged on free speech online. CensorTrack has now surpassed 3,500 total censorship cases documented by the MRC Free Speech America team. People and accounts across the internet were suppressed for various reasons, including COVID-19 commentary, criticism of President Joe Biden, election-related content, and much more. One reality is clear, censorship algorithms will target anyone who disagrees with established narratives, regardless of their status.

So The Babylon Bee hilariously named Rachel Levine its "Man of the Year," playing off the fact that USA Today even more hilariously named Levine its "Woman of the Year" despite the fact that Rachel Levine (AKA Richard Levine) is a biological male.Here's the Bee article that got the world's best satire company, and our beloved sister site, booted from Twitter:The Babylon Bee's Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine