Free Republic

Vijaya Gadde, who received a $12.5 million severance package when she was fired as policy director in October by new Twitter CEO Elon Musk, testified before the House Oversight Committee that The Post’s reporting was censored in large part because photos from Hunter’s laptop “looked like they may have been obtained through hacking.” Gadde also admitted that Hunter Biden never claimed to the company that the laptop was hacked — as opposed to legally provided to The Post. The committee’s Republican majority said it planned to press hard for evidence of “collusion” between the FBI and Twitter to censor The...

… He still hasn’t identified the source code, the proverbial ghost in the machine, buried deep in the algorithmic code; however, Twitter owner Elon Musk has finally identified the agency within the U.S. government who spearheaded the creation. The “Global Engagement Center” (GEC) of the State Dept. The GEC mission is described as, “To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations,” (link). However, when...

A Google employee said he and his wife were both laid off by the tech giant in Friday's mass cull. Ashish Kalsi wrote on LinkedIn that they stared at each other in "disbelief" that morning as their daughter slept.Kalsi said he's on an H-1B visa and has a 60-day "countdown" to find a new role or leave the US. A Google engineer said he and his wife stared at each other in "disbelief" upon learning on Friday they'd both been laid off by the company. Ashish Kalsi, an associate principal of global engagement on Google's trust and safety team, wrote...

Over the last few weeks, YouTube has censored some of the biggest firearms channels on the platform for simply uploading videos that show them attaching suppressors to their guns. In response, many of these channels have embraced free speech video sharing platform Rumble and used it to post uncensored versions of their content. The recent wave of YouTube censorship appears to be related to a change in the way YouTube is interpreting its Firearms policy. This policy prohibits content that provides instructions on manufacturing “homemade silencers/suppressors” but there are no explicit restrictions on attaching suppressors to firearms.

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy our economy ” – Chris Hedges The question you might ask these days: how did we weaponize everything in American life against ourselves? Can you name an institution that is not at war with the people of this land? The exact mechanisms for all that bad faith stand in plain sight these days, and persons responsible can be easily identified. What’s missing are discernible motives. For now, it just looks...

Rep. Thomas Massie is taking charge of the House’s influential panel for antitrust policy, putting the Kentucky Republican known as a fierce free-market defender in a key position to determine how the GOP pursues a crackdown against Big Tech companies. Mr. Massie succeeds Rep. Ken Buck, Colorado Republican, a stalwart Big Tech critic who previously worked on the House Judiciary Committee with Democrats on legislation aimed at diminishing major companies’ market dominance. The subcommittee is part of the judiciary panel, on which both members serve. “I’m looking forward to chairing the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform and Antitrust,”...

President Donald Trump Wednesday night joined the outcry against AT&T DirecTV's removal of Newsmax from its satellite and cable systems, calling it "disgusting" and saying that the move was a "big blow to the Republican Party and to America itself." In a post on his Truth Social, Trump wrote: "WOW. AT&T DIRECTV REMOVES NEWSMAX FROM ITS CHANNEL LINEUP. This disgusting move comes after “deplatforming” OAN last year. The Radical Left seems to have taken over the mind and soul of AT&T. This is a big blow to the Republican Party, and to America itself.” Trump continued: “For DIRECTV to drop...

Meta will be ending former President Trump's suspension across its platforms, which include Facebook and Instagram, "in the coming weeks," according to a blog post from the company. In a blog post on Wednesday, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, said that Trump's suspension on both Facebook and Instagram will be lifted. "To assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021 has sufficiently receded, we have evaluated the current environment according to our Crisis Policy Protocol, which included looking at the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the...

Notice how calm Bill Gates is as he just rattles off now that the MRNA vaccines are an abject failure. No big deal! pic.twitter.com/TsqsyG7jEY— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) January 25, 2023

The Supreme Court called upon the Biden administration to weigh in on cases involving Florida and Texas laws aimed at limiting what sort of content social media platforms can censor. Litigation over Florida's SB 7072 and Texas's HB 20 pit the states' goal of maintaining the free expression of ideas online – amid concern that social media giants unfairly censor conservative ideas – and social media companies' own free speech interests in being able to keep and remove content on their own sites. "The Solicitor General is invited to file briefs in these cases expressing the views of the United...

Music streaming service Spotify announced Monday that it is slashing hundreds of jobs in the latest round of layoffs in the tech sector. Spotify said it would cut 6 percent of its staff, or about 600 workers, based on its last earnings report. “Like many other leaders, I hoped to sustain the strong tailwinds from the pandemic and believed that our broad global business and lower risk to the impact of a slowdown in ads would insulate us. In hindsight, I was too ambitious in investing ahead of our revenue growth,” CEO Daniel Ek wrote in a statement. Ek announced...

HERMAN, WI (AP) — A company that operates a southern Wisconsin wind farm is investigating what caused part of a wind turbine and its blades to plummet to the ground, leaving debris strewn across a field. No one was injured Wednesday night when the blades and top portion of a wind turbine collapsed in Dodge County, near the town of Herman. The turbine, which is part of the Butler Ridge wind farm, stands about 400 feet above the ground, according to the National Weather Service. Mark Dietrich, whose father owns the property where the collapse occurred, told WISN-TV that a...

The Centers for Disease Control are looking for new ways to determine the effectiveness of vaccines against seasonal respiratory diseases like COVID-19, and think the answer could be found in leveraging electronic health record data. The agency issued its Fiscal Year 2023 Broad Agency Announcement on Wednesday, calling for vendors to provide white papers outlining solutions that address 37 research topics posed by the CDC. “This effort will address knowledge gaps regarding the preventive benefit of currently available vaccines; aid in identification of populations who can benefit from enhanced vaccine strategies; and improve our ability to respond to seasonal respiratory...

...In the U.S., which relied on a hodge-podge of state and local quarantine orders to ensure compliance with COVID rules, the federal government took the opportunity to build out its surveillance toolkit, including two contracts in 2020 worth $24.9 million to the data mining and surveillance company Palantir Technologies Inc. to support the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ pandemic response. Documents obtained by the immigrant rights group Just Futures Law under the Freedom of Information Act and shared with AP showed that federal officials contemplated how to share data that went far beyond COVID-19. The possibilities included integrating...

It took $44 billion of Elon Musk’s money to uncover how national-security agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security — as well as Adam Schiff — conducted censorship on Twitter. Those revelations are still continuing, even while not much else seems to be changing on that platform. But what about Facebook? Who’s got $100 billion or so to buy out Mark Zuckerberg and get a peek under Meta’s hood? Reason Magazine certainly doesn’t, but it turns out that all Robby Soave needed was a lawsuit and a court order or two. Internal documents show that Facebook essentially allowed the CDC...

EXCLUSIVE: Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday told Fox News Digital that Facebook "needs us more than we need them," but confirmed that his campaign is working to set up a meeting to discuss his reinstatement to the platform with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of the 2024 election cycle. Trump, who announced his 2024 presidential campaign in November, told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview that Facebook has "lost $700 billion since I was de-platformed." "It has been considered a major business mistake for them, Twitter, and others," he said. "If they took us back, it would help...

2010 DHS Contract to General Dynamics Information Systems for Domestic “Media Monitoring and Social Media Networking”December 30, 2022 | Sundance | 110 CommentsDuring my trip to DC in the summer of 2020 there were a myriad of disconcerting datapoints assembled; revelations that made sense of the madness and disappointments found everywhere. However, one of the key notations for future reference was to watch the political evolution of Dept of Homeland Security (DHS) and spot the jump where the ideological outlook turns into specific government action.With that in mind, this recent discovery of a 2010 to 2015 DHS contract to a...

Has Barack Obama gone from ex-president to Democrat party crime boss? It sure looks like it, based on a new report about his treatment of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Investigative reporter Lee Smith has got a stunning report that ran this week in Tablet, comparable in impact to that report by Molly Ball at Time who wrote about how elites conspired to "fortify democracy" by rigging the election against President Trump in 2020 and afterwards thought it was a smart thing to crow about.

The liberal Columbia Journalism Review may now want to consider retracting its 2019 screed dismissing Big Tech bias against conservatives as a “myth” that “refuses to die.” CJR’s August 2019 propaganda was plastered with a blaring headline: “The myth of social media anti-conservative bias refuses to die.” CJR Chief Digital Writer Mathew Ingram decried how “DESPITE AN ALMOST TOTAL LACK of evidence to support the theory, alt-right groups and mainstream conservatives alike—including the ones that currently occupy the [Trump] White House—continue to promote the idea that Facebook, Twitter and Google are somehow biased against them.” Oops! That statement aged like...

Salesforce and Amazon announced major layoffs on Wednesday, beginning 2023 with significant cuts during what has already been a brutal period for the tech sector. Amazon announced that its layoffs will impact more than 18,000 employees - the highest number so far at a major tech company. Salesforce will lay off 10 percent of its workforce - or about 8,000 workers - after a period of over-hiring, according to its Co-CEO Marc Benioff, who said he took 'full responsibility' for the decision. As the tech sector, and the economy as a whole, suffers, rumors have begun to circulate that original...