Free Republic

If Twitter wants to editorialize and 'factcheck' President TrumpÂ’s tweets with disclaimers, then it should be treated like any other publisher. TwitterÂ’s decision this week to append a disclaimer to President TrumpÂ’s tweets about the risks of mail-in ballot fraud should be enough, at long last, for us to dispense with the fiction that Twitter is nothing more than a neutral platform.ItÂ’s not, it never has been, and itÂ’s time to stop pretending otherwise.Set aside the relative merits of TrumpÂ’s comments and the entire debate about whether mass voting by mail is a good idea, because thatÂ’s not whatÂ’s important...

Did you hear Governor Murphy's response to Assemblyman Kevin J. Rooney’s call for Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo's to fix NJ's backlogged unemployment system or resign? During Thursday's daily news briefing, Murphy stated that anyone unhappy with Asaro-Angelo's efforts should "go to another state." Is he serious?! We need elected officials with a clear vision who provide our citizens with hope and solutions during this pandemic — NOT someone who ignores serious concerns and suggests folks flee their homes. Join Assemblyman Rooney, Simonsen, McClellan and me in sending a clear message to Governor Murphy: it's time to REOPEN #NewJersey for business

Facebook says it has removed several groups, accounts and pages linked to QAnon, taking action for the first time against the far-right U.S. conspiracy theory circulated among supporters of President Donald Trump. The social-media giant made the announcement Tuesday as part of its monthly briefing on “coordinated inauthentic behavior” on its platforms. That’s Facebook’s term for fake accounts run with the intent of disrupting politics elections and society. In addition to the QAnon accounts, Facebook also removed accounts linked to VDARE, a U.S. website known for posting anti-immigration content, as well as accounts in Russia, Iran, Mauritania, Myanmar and the...

When the Alliance Defending Freedom helped a local church sue Chattanooga for banning its drive-in prayer service, the article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press repeated the Southern Poverty Law Center's smear of the religious civil rights organization as a hate group. But the reporter who wrote the article was no ordinary employee. Wyatt Massey was one of the 225 members of Report for America's 'corps' who are planted in local newsrooms to promote the radical agendas of the left-wing group. “Will Trump’s new public charge rule close door on immigrants’ hope of the American dream?” Manuel Obed asked at...

Facebook's COVID-Protest Ban Renews Censorship Concerns COMMENTARY . By Kalev Leetaru April 22, 2020 (AP Photo/Paul Sancya) Facebook’s growing power over the public square is back in the news this week as the company announced it is banning the promotion of certain kinds of back-to-work protest events on its platform. While the company’s previous bans have largely focused on blocking digital speech it finds objectionable, the move to thwart protests in the physical world underscores just how central the social media giant has become to the expression of democracy and just how much power it now wields over even our...

Facebook didn't provide much confidence in its ability to navigate the uncharted waters of a pandemic in the age of Big Tech on Monday. Experiencing a pandemic on the scale of the Wuhan coronavirus in the age of Big Tech is a journey into uncharted territory, making the industryÂ’s often cozy relationship with the political class a recipe for new abuses of personal data and speech policing. Facebook didnÂ’t provide much confidence in its ability to navigate these waters on Monday. At first, the company seemed to be bragging about its work with state governments to remove posts promoting protests...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced that the company will hold no real-life meetups for more than a year, and has encouraged his staff to continue working from home during the pandemic. Zuckerberg posted today that all planned Facebook physical events with 50 or more attendees were canceled until June 2021, but that some virtual events would be possible. “As we start to think about what it will look like to re-open society, I wanted to provide an update on how we’re planning for our teams at Facebook,” Zuckerberg wrote. “The summary is: we’re slowing our plans to return to...

Chinese state media has been flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political ads blaming President Donald Trump for the Wuhan coronavirus. Facebook said in a statement that it was an “error” that the ads were not classified as political and is correcting them. The Telegraph reports that Chinese state media has been posting undisclosed political ads to Facebook and Instagram in an attempt to downplay China’s role in the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and blaming President Donald Trump. Three Chinese state media outlets, Xinhua, China Central Television, and the Global Times, have targeted ads towards users across the world in English,...

SAN FRANCISCO — Since the 2016 election, when Russian trolls and a tsunami of misinformation turned social media into a partisan battlefield, Facebook has wrestled with the role it played in President Donald Trump’s victory. Now, according to a memo obtained by The New York Times, a longtime Facebook executive told employees that the company had a moral duty not to tilt the scales against Trump as he seeks reelection. On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the...

Thousands of UK political ads went missing from Facebook’s searchable advertising database on Tuesday, hampering researchers’ ability to track political ads two days before Britain’s general election. Facebook’s ad library, which it launched in the UK in 2018, is a public tool for users to track political advertising on the platform. The problem, first reported by Sky News, affected ads from the ruling Conservative Party, the Brexit Party and the Liberal Democrats. It was not immediately clear if any Labor Party ads were affected. Facebook declined to answer what caused the issue or when it would be resolved. …

Tim Berners-Lee, a British engineer credited with having invented the World Wide Web in 1989, has released an ambitious plan detailing steps for better online governance, addressing problems like misinformation, data surveillance and censorship. The Contract for the Web was created by Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Foundation in cooperation with representatives from governments, companies and civil society to “keep knowledge freely available,” while strengthening laws, regulations and companies “to ensure pursuit of profit is not at the expense of human rights and democracy.” The plan is backed by more than 150 organizations, including internet giants like Google, Microsoft and Facebook,...

House members summoned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Washington, D.C., and grilled him -- harshly -- about his plan to create a new currency, Libra. “Why should we trust you?!” asked Congressman Mike Doyle. I liked it when Zuckerberg said, “I actually don’t know if Libra’s going to work, but I believe that it’s important to try new things.” He was right. That’s very important. The Libra would make it easier to transfer money anywhere in the world. It also promises stability. Its value would be based on a basket of currencies from different countries, which would protect Libra owners from...

In response to a guy who didn't recognize the threat posed by Islam, I posted: "I like my head where it is. What's with shouting "allah akbar" before muzzies slowly slice off infidel's heads?" This did not meet FB's Community Standards and went nowhere. The screws tighten.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10220621329827579&id=1364854861

Top Republicans are privately worried about a new threat to President Trump’s campaign: the possibility of Facebook pulling a Twitter and banning political ads. Why it matters: Facebook says it won't, but future regulatory pressure could change that. If Facebook were to ban — or even limit — ads, it could upend Trump’s fundraising and re-election plan, GOP officials tell Axios. Trump relies heavily — much more so than Democrats — on targeted Facebook ads to shape views and raise money. Red flag: Kara Swisher, of Recode, the super plugged-in tech writer, predicted on CNBC's "Squawk Box" that Mark Zuckerberg...

In the not too distant past, most adults realized that not everything one saw on the internet or on social media was to be taken as true. Today, however, what used to be a sarcastic phrase – “I saw it on the internet so it must be true” – is taken quite literally, regardless of the online source for such information; especially if it confirms our existing opinions and beliefs. This reflects a deep-seated cultural problem far beyond the ken of the Congress to solve; yet, of course, they try. And, as is par for the congressional course, they are...

"We don't fact-check political ads," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent speech. "We don't do this to help politicians, but because we think people should be able to see for themselves what politicians are saying." That might be simple common sense to many Americans, but to some Democrats these days, and particularly the Joe Biden campaign, it's a dangerous point of view. Biden recently complained when Facebook declined to censor an ad from the Trump re-election campaign that said, "Joe Biden promised Ukraine $1 billion if they fired the prosecutor investigating his son's company." Even though that is...

After a month of blistering criticism over Facebook’s decision to help more politicians lie in online advertisements, the company has conveniently announced an update on its efforts to shield American voters from the misinformation chronically afflicting its platform. “We have a responsibility to stop abuse and election interference on our platform. That’s why we’ve made significant investments since 2016 to better identify new threats, close vulnerabilities and reduce the spread of viral misinformation and fake accounts,” four senior Facebook officials blogged on Monday, while announcing several changes intended to “help protect the democratic process.” For weeks, Facebook, which makes the...

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that Facebook strives for diversity in its workforce -- and not just on the basis of race or gender. The CEO says he works hard to recruit people who attended a state school, are rooted to their local communities and come from traditional backgrounds. "We certainly do," Zuckerberg said of his 40,000 mostly U.S.-based employees in an interview with the New York Post. "There's a woman who runs our commerce product and is deeply religious," he said. "The person who runs policies of the company is quite a prominent Republican. So we have people...

Facebook blocked the account of ResistanceFeed.com from posting links on October 15 and said that the ban would last until October 22. The link that Resistance Feed had posted on on its page was about the footage that ABC had posted claiming that it was video from the Middle East from an attack on the Kurds. ABC retracted the story, admitting that the video footage was not from the Middle East and not of the Kurds and/or Turks but rather a video of an explosion in the United States in Kentucky from 2017. So Resistance Feed wasn't posting an unsupported...