Free Republic

New Twitter owner Elon Musk is vowing to reform the social media platform. "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated," Musk said in a statement after his $44 billion bid to buy the company was accepted. Many, many conservatives hope Musk succeeds. But as much as Twitter needs freer speech, it also needs to tell the world precisely what it has been doing for the last few years. That is why it should conduct a full and comprehensive audit of all...

Last month, Google announced a massive planned acquisition of the cybersecurity firm, Mandiant. The $5.4 billion purchase comes as part of a concerted effort on Google’s part to better protect its customers. More specifically, the acquisition will be targeted at both growing and securing Google’s cloud services. Given the recent hacks of U.S. government agencies and critical infrastructure, it is more important for large companies like Google to strengthen their cybersecurity than ever before. Unfortunately, new, aggressive antitrust regulators at the Department of Justice have already announced a probe into the merger. Further, a number of proposals currently in the...

As we mark World IP Day, it provides an opportunity to marvel at the critical role the American system of protecting IP, particularly patents, has played in the United States’ global innovation leadership. Unfortunately, recent years have seen too many efforts to undermine those critical property rights. One recent bill is a perfect example of that trend. If someone set out to give a gift to Big Tech and the Infringer Lobby, worsen the Administrative State element of our patent system and advantage our innovation adversaries such as China, it would take some doing to check all these boxes more...

You've probably heard of the high-flying Big Tech FAANG stocks -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. Among the five of them, their market cap reached $6 trillion last year, which is more than the GDP of all but a small handful of entire countries. Moreover, their net worth is larger than the entire annual output of India, with more than 1 billion people. These companies got so big and profitable so fast that politicians on the left, right and center started accusing them of monopolistic behavior. "Break them up!" shouted Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar. Some Republicans,...

Channel 4's Dispatches uncovered evidence of Metaverse users boasting that they are attracted to 'little girls aged between the age of nine and 12' and joking about rape and racism in the virtual reality world. An investigation has revealed that sexually explicit comments and threatening behaviour were made minutes after a Channel 4 journalist went undercover into Mark Zuckerberg's 3D community. Yinka Bokinni posed as both a 22-year-old woman and a 13-year-old girl as part of a probe that will be broadcast tonight. Using the most popular VR headset, the Meta-owned Oculus Quest of which eight million have been sold,...

Democrats are terrified. Imagine your political future being dependent on your ability to prevent your opponent from expressing themselves. That seems to be what Democrats are counting on, since every indication is their policies and the resulting inflation and supply chain shortages are wearing thin with the American public. The alternative would be to defend their failures and even they, with all the help of the left-wing media complex, can’t polish that steaming pile. That’s what scares them so much about what Elon Musk is proposing. Musk isn’t a conservative, and it’s pretty clear he’s not even talking exclusively about...

Trump Media and Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes discusses Truth Social, Big Tech's handling of free speech, the impact of an Elon Musk Twitter takeover on Trump's social media platform, and migrating to the Rumble cloud.

LOL. Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz says she has been suspended by Truth Social, former President Donald Trump’s new social media platform that’s set to compete with Twitter. “I’m being silenced by big tech,” she tweeted: I’m being silenced by big tech pic.twitter.com/KbC0IZhiSF — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) April 23, 2022 And she says she didn’t do anything “bannable”: did you do anything "bannable" or did they just ban you? — amanda silberling (@asilbwrites) April 23, 2022 Except, you know, dox the woman behind the Libs of TikTok account: I didn’t do anything! — Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) April 23, 2022 Blue-checks...

"History doesn't repeat itself," Mark Twain observed, "but it often rhymes." Twain's saying seems prophetic when comparing the Gilded Age monopolies he satirized to today's Big Tech monopolies. Like the tycoons who built America's railroads, today's "digital railroad" companies like Google and Facebook that connect us online have generated unprecedented sums of wealth and power for just a handful of enterprises. Modern Robber Barons wear hoodies in Silicon Valley instead of top hats in the Rust Belt. Make no mistake. These underdressed tech titans are the new aristocrats, and their monopolies pervade our lives in ways that Rockefeller and Vanderbilt...

The New York Times sounded a little giddy on the front page of its "Business" section April 21 with the headline "Obama Joins Fight to Curb Online Lies." This spin strongly suggests Barack Obama never lies. He's a valiant warrior against lies. That came after a badly disguised press release at CNN.com on Obama "urgently throwing himself into the fight against disinformation." As usual, they make it sound like a superhero has landed whenever Obama arrives on the scene. Never mind PolitiFact giving Obama the "Lie of the Year" in 2013 for when he said, "If you like your health...

Rachel Maddow leaked a private phone call on her show on Thursday night of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy with Trump-hating lunatic Liz Cheney on January 10, 2021. On January 10, 2021, Kevin McCarthy spoke with several GOP House leaders including Liz Cheney who was third-in-line in the House Republican Caucus at that time. During the call, McCarthy told Liz Cheney that he would counsel President Trump Trump to resign. From the call: Kevin McCarthy: “I think [impeachment resolutions] will pass, and it would be my recommendation you (President Trump) should resign… What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend...

Former President Barack Obama in a major speech on Thursday called for more regulation of social media content, in order to diminish “disinformation.” The former president delivered a speech on the issue at Stanford University after spending months studying the subject.

Former President Barack Obama placed blame on tech companies for failing to address the disinformation problem he said the industry has amplified during a speech Thursday at Stanford University. The new information ecosystem, fueled by the rise of dominant social media platforms, is “turbocharging some of humanity’s worst impulses,” he said in the roughly hour-long speech. “But not all problems we’re seeing now are an inevitable byproduct of this new technology. They’re also the result of very specific choices, made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally, and social media platforms in particular. Decisions that intentionally...

Big Tech’s campaign to protect President Joe Biden and his agenda has continued unabated. The Media Research Center found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticized Biden on social media over the past two years. This included 140 cases of Big Tech censoring people over the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden story in late 2020. MRC Free Speech America tallied 646 cases in its CensorTrack database of pro-Biden censorship between March 10, 2020, and March 10, 2022. The tally included cases from Biden’s presidential candidacy to the present day....

I like Elon Musk’s style, his refusal to conform to the dictates of the dictators, and his cool sci-fi villain’s name, but here’s the thing – I am under no illusions that Elon Musk is going to save us. A visionary thinker? Yep. A useful ally? Sure. But the guy who is going to save America? Nope. That’s not his intention and that’s not how this works. We gotta save ourselves. Elon Musk is useful for discrete tasks that require both money and testicular fortitude, like trying to buy Twitter. Throwing off the censorship of Cupertino’s Dolores Umbridge corps –...

When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech's centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves. A group of former intelligence and national security officials on Monday issued a jointly signed letter warning that pending legislative attempts to restrict or break up the power of Big Tech monopolies — Facebook, Google, and Amazon — would jeopardize national security because, they argue, their centralized censorship power is crucial to advancing U.S. foreign policy. The majority of this letter is devoted to repeatedly invoking the grave threat allegedly posed to the U.S....

Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor teased a soon-to-be-published MRC study proving Big Tech’s obsession with protecting President Joe Biden. Big Tech’s response was to censor people who criticized Biden. Gainor joined the April 20 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News. “Tonight, the Media Research Center has new reporting on the scope of Big Tech’s efforts to keep your opinions hidden,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said. Carlson pointed out that the MRC “found more than 640 examples of bans, deleted content and other speech restrictions placed on those who criticize Joe Biden on social media.” Platforms...

Twitter and Facebook worked in lockstep to restrict the flow of the Hunter Biden laptop story just before the 2020 presidential election. These platforms stifled the spread of that story at the same time that Big Media did, as MRC research found. Facebook’s suppression broke the platform’s own fact-checking policy, and Twitter’s attempt to cancel the story so outrageously violated content moderation norms that it drew criticism from the likes of leftist Poynter Institute fact-checkers. Even then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey criticized his platform after the fact. Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone announced the platform had preempted third-party fact-checks on the Hunter...

The following tweets are the reasons why the Left, in this case the Washington Post, chose to dox — out — the previously unidentified person who runs the Twitter account called “LibsofTikTok.” The article asserts that the LibsofTikTok account is “fueling the right’s outrage machine.” That’s the way the woman who wrote the article framed the issue, but the rest of humanity considers it a public service. That wasn’t the point of the doxxing, however. After the Left’s “outrage machine” got LibsofTikTok suspended from the social media platform twice, WaPo decided to get to the bottom of the account, which...

Let’s all congratulate the Washington Post today! First, for hiring vindictive troll and notorious serial online bully Taylor Lorenz, and second, for covering themselves in glory once again by promoting the antithesis of good journalism as good journalism. WaPo is certainly getting plenty of attention for giving the green light to Lorenz to punish Libs of Tik Tok by any means necessary, means that include doxxing (and harassing family members, of course). But it’s also important to make sure that the Washington Post gets extra attention for what they did to promote endangering the livelihood and life of the woman...