Free Republic

A new study found that Google’s Gmail favors liberal candidates, allowing the vast majority of emails from left-wing politicians to land in the user’s inbox while more than two-thirds of messages from conservative candidates are marked as spam. North Carolina State University’s Department of Computer Science published, "A Peek into the Political Biases in Email Spam Filtering Algorithms During US Election 2020," last week in order to determine if spam filtering algorithms (SFAs) are biased toward a particular political party or ideology. The extensive study took place over a course of five months, from July 1, 2020 to November 30,...

(Via NBC) – […] three U.S. officials told NBC News this week there is no evidence Russia has brought any chemical weapons near Ukraine. They said the U.S. released the [mis]information to deter Russia from using the banned munitions. […] Coordinated by the White House National Security Council, the unprecedented intelligence releases have been so frequent and voluminous, officials said, that intelligence agencies had to devote more staff members to work on the declassification process, scrubbing the [mis]information so it wouldn’t betray sources and methods. […] The idea is to pre-empt and disrupt the Kremlin’s tactics, complicate its military campaign,...

It seems like terrible public relations for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to publicly refer to himself as the Dark Lord of Mordor while running one of the internet’s largest censorship operations. Zuckerberg joined The Tim Ferriss Show on March 24 to discuss his management style. After praising Zuckerberg as having “a lot of founder-driven control,” Ferris asked Zuckerberg about his “15-year roadmap for metaverse.” Ferriss asked Zuckerberg how he manages his personal psychology and his employees as they work toward near-term and intermediate-term steps to develop the metaverse. Then came the cringe moment for Zuckerberg: “I do think managing energy...

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...