Free Republic

Twitter staff relented to a pressure campaign spearheaded by a Democratic lawmaker in the fall of 2017, changing its advertising policy to allow for a closer relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies, according to internal documents published Tuesday by independent journalist Matt Taibbi. Twitter executives did not believe that there was significant activity by Russian election interference groups on the platform as of Sept. 6, 2017, and had internally decided to direct concerned reporters to Facebook, who they believed to be facing the brunt of congressional scrutiny, according to Taibbi. However, Twitter faced renewed pressure after Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of...

Matt Taibbi shared the ask from Schiff's office sent to Twitter, which said that Schiff's office claimed that there had been "harassment from QAnon conspiracists" against a Schiff staffer. In November 2020, California Congressman Adam Schiff reached out to Twitter to ask them to specifically ban journalist Paul Sperry. Schiff alleged that Sperry, who is an investigative reporter for Real Clear Investigations, had "repeatedly promoted false QAnon conspiracies and harassed [name redacted.]" Matt Taibbi shared the ask that Schiff's office sent to Twitter as part of the latest Twitter Files drop on Tuesday, which said that Schiff's office claimed that...

Twitter users called the Biden HHS official's remarks 'evil' and an example of 'fascism' Conservatives on Twitter blasted a recently surfaced video of the Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine calling on Big Tech companies to censor "misinformation" about "gender-affirming care" for kids on the internet. Levine, a transgender woman, made the statements in May, though the video gained newfound attention on Twitter just after Christmas. Prominent Twitter users expressed horror that a government official was asking tech companies to censor content disputing that gender-affirming care for youth is a thing of "positive value." During a...

Consequences can come at you fast or slow. If you’re a trillion-dollar company, you get to choose which, a bit, but you can never escape completely. Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized. Google Cloud is $700 million in the red as of last earnings and heading south to a state of madness like a New Jersey retiree. These are mature products in saturated markets. You don't need an MBA to know what will happen. But even the dean of Harvard Business School can't say when.The big confounding factor is reputation....

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their...

[SEE ALL THE TWEET LINKS AT SITE....TOO MANY TO POST..............] The Twitter files on the government's coordination with Twitter to silence experts and control the narrative around Covid just dropped and I just have to say, the "conspiracy theorists" are batting 1000. It's not surprising that these things were happening. Anyone who was paying attention KNEW that the government was pressuring Twitter to censor inconvenient facts if they contradicted the official state narrative. David Zweig – a journalist who has written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Wired...

The Biden White House pressured Twitter to both “elevate” and “suppress” users based on their stances on COVID-19 — ultimately “censoring info that was true but inconvenient” to policy makers, according to the latest edition of the “Twitter files” revealed Monday. The coercion campaign during the pandemic began with the Trump administration — which asked Twitter to crack down on stories about panic buying and “runs on grocery stores” in the early days of the outbreak — but was stepped up under Biden, whose administration was focused on the removal of “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to The Free Press reporter David...

Another round of Elon Musk’s Twitter files were released on Saturday. The latest Twitter files were released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve. 1.THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES” — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022 After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday. 2. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” 3. They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI....

The FBI may have violated the First Amendment rights of Twitter users when it flagged accounts for the social media platform to review, several legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter became an “agent of the government” when it worked with the FBI to silence specific accounts at the agency’s request, Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow, told the DCNF. Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom, told the DCNF that while the findings of the Twitter Files were “interesting,” he doesn’t believe there are “many legal...

There’s bad news and there’s good news for Washington’s anti-monopoly movement. The bad news is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has done precisely what many long feared he would: While rhetorically supporting two bipartisan antitrust bills targeting Big Tech for months, he effectively killed the effort by never bringing the legislative package for a vote on the Senate floor in the final days of the congressional term.... .....As a consolation, Schumer put an extra $85 million into the nation’s two antitrust enforcement agencies: $50 million to the Federal Trade Commission and $35 million to the Department of Justice’s Antitrust...

* Mint Press' Alan MacLeod found that former CIA agents made up some of the top ranks in almost every politically sensitive department at Meta * He also found that former FBI agents migrated to Twitter in droves * DailyMail.com has been able to track down many of these former intelligence officials who are now working at top tech companies Former US government intelligence agents are now working across Silicon Valley in senior roles dedicated to censoring 'misinformation', DailyMail.com can disclose. A large number of ex-officers from the FBI, CIA, NSC and State Department have taken positions at Facebook, Twitter...

That so few people are curious about the nexus between intel agencies and Big Tech should be a national scandal. ... According to the latest drop of “Twitter Files” from Michael Shellenberger, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — ‘Bu alumni’ — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” It appears that Twitter still has 14 employees on the payroll who worked at the FBI and CIA. The problem isn’t just confined to Twitter. My colleague and Federalist contributor Ben Weingarten recently...

The latest installment of the “Twitter Files” in which Elon Musk is releasing deep-seeded documents from executives at Twitter before he accumulated the company is quite juicy. The sixth installment of the expose series reveals that between January of 2020 and November of 2022, over 150 emails were exchanged between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety head Yoel Roth. In a multi-part series of tweets, journalist Matt Taibbi goes into further detail. One tweet reads: “The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded...

What the Rhine case reveals is the danger that a partnership between an equally politicized federal government and Big Tech presents to disfavored groups. Google gave the feds the personal data of nearly 1,500 individuals based on cell phone location data indicating their presence near the Capitol complex on Jan. 6, 2021. The Department of Justice sought substantially more information, as well, according to a recent court filing, including data on Jan. 6 cell phone users wholly outside the Capitol. These facts, coupled with Google’s apparent disregard for the privacy rights of its customers, expose the potential for the government...

I’d like for you to imagine a scenario where employees in the federal government reached out to Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather a few weeks before an election and convinced them to not do a news story that could affect the outcome. Just called them up and said, “Hey, we know you have the facts of a story exactly accurate, but what if you hold off on running that story until after the election, because it might hurt our guy’s chances…” Like they do in, you know, Communist China. "Twitter Gate" exposes how government manipulates Big Tech for their own...

The social media coordination between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI isn’t limited to Twitter, former Congressman and current CEO of President Trump’s Truth Social, Devin Nunes, alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14. The Twitter Files, a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, confirmed what many Conservatives have alleged for years. Namely, Twitter was shadow-banning accounts that didn’t fit a specific ideology and suspending accounts that bucked the chosen political narrative, Nunes claimed. But, the most concerning revelation in...

New documents reveal how the United States government used a secret Twitter portal to censor COVID-19 content that contradicted the government’s narrative. In its ongoing probe into Twitter’s censorship practices, America First Legal has obtained a fourth set of documents (pdf) exposing a secret Twitter portal, which U.S. government officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views in violation of the First Amendment. It’s a revelation Elon Musk described as “extremely concerning.” The documents reveal that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was collaborating with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Mafindo to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook...

A 10-year-old boy accused of shooting his mom dead because she refused to buy him a $500 VR headset has asked for his bond to be lowered from $50,000 to $100. Prosecutors said Quiana Mann, 44, was shot in the face by her son, who went on to use her credit card to purchase an Oculus VR headset before telling his grandma he was 'sorry' for killing his mother and asking where his package was. The boy's attorney, Angela Cunningham, argued in court on Wednesday that his bail should be lowered to only $100, the amount he has in his...

"Today I'm announcing my plan to shatter the left-wing censorship regime and to reclaim the right to free speech for all Americans" President Donald Trump Speaking Today 12/15/2022 President Trump proposing actions to preserve free speech in the US and go after collusion between the federal government and tech companies to censor speech online. In the short-term Trump asking Republicans in the US House to get involved parties to preserve their records that might show such collusion. Trump said that: "a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, Left-Wing activists and Depraved Corporate news media have been conspiring...

More damning evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to stifle free speech and censor the public was revealed in the fourth batch of explosive documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released by the nonprofit organization America First Legal (AFL). Twitter allowed government officials and other “stakeholders” to use a secret portal called, “Partner Support Portal” to report anything they believed to be “misinformation.” Previously, back in July 2021, TGP reported on Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and his investigation, where he uncovered Twitter’s “partner support portal.” Dr. Shiva discovered that Twitter...