Free Republic

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit apparently decided that the federal government maintaining its Orwellian censorship collusion with Big Tech was more important than protecting Americans’ free speech. Louisiana Chief District Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary July 4 injunction prohibiting President Joe Biden’s administration from “engag[ing] in any communication of any kind” with Big Tech platforms for the purpose of pushing censorship of constitutionally protected speech. That ruling had a shelf life of about 10 days. After Doughty initially denied the Biden administration's request for a stay on the injunction on July 10, the Fifth...

It was a couple of years ago when MSNBC's Joy Reid and NBC News warned us that those "radicalized parent activists" who were "targeting school boards" were tied up with QAnon. This was back when parents protested the teaching of critical race theory in schools. Liberals assured us that critical race theory wasn't taught in schools, and yet seemed really upset about the idea of it being banned. If it's not happening, who cares? It was a few months later that the National School Boards Association asked the Biden administration to look into angry parents as "domestic terrorism" and "hate...

In the past several years, the Martin Center has exposed and reported on numerous diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at UNC-Chapel Hill. Since late 2021, we have uncovered DEI plans that pose significant threats to academic freedom and free speech in at least three schools. In November 2021, John Sailer exposed “The UNC School of Medicine’s Quiet ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ Revolution.” In December 2022, Shannon Watkins wrote about the School of Journalism’s “Plan of Action on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI).” And just last month, Harrington Shaw documented Chapel Hill’s latest DEI push in the College of Arts and...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi discussed the newest Twitter Files and pointed to one email exchange where Twitter “immediately” suspended accounts flagged by the FBI without investigation on Twitter’s part that Twitter later couldn’t point to solid proof to back the FBI’s allegations. Taibbi said, “In one shot, you can see the FBI asks to remove three accounts, that gets forwarded to Twitter, Twitter immediately suspends them, the accounts. But more importantly, when there’s a glitch, and the accounts remain up, the FBI immediately writes back and says, what’s the deal? We just wrote...

The judge has issued a Memorandum ruling on the government’s Motion to Stay Injunction in Missouri v. Biden. It’s another amazing day for freedom. The judge first goes through the criteria for granting an injunction. [embedded court document] The court AGAIN states they feel the plaintiffs will succeed on the merits, but he also adds something—that the White House defendants and the Surgeon General Defendants were found to have likely engaged in the coercion of social media companies. He then goes on to AGAIN give examples. [embedded court document] Read this, legacy media. Everyone else should read it too. The...

When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose. Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.” In traditional free speech jurisprudence, ‘chilling effects’ were inflicted by the government, but Douek is worried that...

The federal judge who issued a July 4 preliminary injunction blocking the Biden regime from colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans denied the administration’s motion to stay on Monday.Less than one week after he agreed the federal government appeared to lead “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” and is “alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech,” Judge Terry Doughty of Lousiana’s Western District Court ruled against the Biden administration’s assertion that agencies “face irreparable harm with each day the injunction remains in effect.”“Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies,...

Today, Judge Terry Doughty, of the United States District Court for the Western of Louisiana denied the request for a stay of the injunction against the Biden administration in the case of Missouri v. Biden. The thirteen page order can be read here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.301.0_1.pdf

Things are moving very fast in the State of Missouri versus Biden - Social Media Censorship Case. On the Fourth of July, Judge Doughty filed an injunction against the Biden admin (see details in the Liberty Counsel Press Release Below).Late last week, the Biden administration filed a motion to stay the injunctionThis weekend, The attorneys general for Missouri and Louisiana submitted a petition to oppose the Biden administration’s motion to stay the injunction (see The Epoch Times Analysis below).Today, Judge Doughty rules to deny the Biden administration’s motion to stay the injunction in the State of Missouri versus Biden -...

The Left will fight to the death for the right of the government to silence you. When Judge Terry Doughty issued an injunction in Missouri v. Biden that banned the government from “specifically flagging content or posts on social-media platforms and/or forwarding such to social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression”, all hell broke loose. Evelyn Douek, a Stanford law professor, formerly of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that preventing the government from colluding with corporations to censor citizens would have a “chilling effect on communication between the government and platforms.” In...

This week, Judge Terry A. Doughty detailed the government’s manipulation of social media and enjoined government agencies, officers, and employees from continuing these practices. It’s hardly news that the government has long managed news reporting through a combination of leaks, favored treatment, and threats. With the growth of social media and the COVID-19 “pandemic,” the Biden administration blatantly used every tool in its arsenal to censor constitutionally protected free speech. Posters on the pre-Musk Twitter and Facebook, to take the most obvious examples, were regularly shadow banned and even silenced altogether from posting alternate views to those of the government....

Misinformation about everything from election fraud to Covid-19 vaccines is reaching millions of Americans through a popular but opaque medium: podcasts. Many podcasts -- on-demand audio programs which users can listen to on smartphones -- bluntly promote false and unproven claims. The Brookings Institution found "War Room" from former Donald Trump aide Steve Bannon has aired the most false statements, amassing more than 135 million downloads while promoting allegations of vote rigging in the 2020 US election.

In the wake of the 1986 Challenger space-shuttle explosion, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman knew that the truth would both fuel progress and soothe the nation’s sorrow. “For a successful technology,” he said, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” For three years, pandemic public relations mocked nature, generating fear, illness, inflation and excess death beyond what the virus caused. Digital censorship supercharged the effort to hide reality, but reality is getting its day in court. On July 4, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty temporarily blocked numerous federal agencies and the White House from collaborating...

Social media giant Meta’s new "Twitter killer" Threads app is already facing backlash for appearing to censor conservative users, just days after its launch. Meta’s new app that aims to take over parts of Twitter’s microblog market share hit the digital bazaar this week, garnering millions of signups shortly after launch. It didn’t take long, though, for the new Meta platform to get accusations of censorship from conservatives. "I posted a meme about Twitter being better than Threads, and they removed it after ONE MINUTE for ‘incitement to violence,’" conservative commentator Ashley St. Clair tweeted with four laughing emojis. St....

As a long-standing free speech advocate, the last few years have been alarming and, frankly, depressing. The censorship efforts of the government are, unfortunately, not new. However, what is new is the support of the media and the Democratic Party in such censorship. That was on display on various channels after the recent opinion finding that the Biden Administration had violated the First Amendment in “the most massive attack against free speech in United States history.” However, the New York Times immediately warned that the outbreak of free speech could “curtail efforts to combat disinformation.” Yet, no one expressed more...

Parents claim two southern California high school students were suspended and required to undergo "restorative justice" discipline after "misgendering" a teacher. The incident allegedly occurred in the Glendale Unified School District (GUSD) last spring. GUSD Parents Voices, a group largely comprised of Glendale parents and residents, shared a photo of an email allegedly referencing the incident on Twitter. The email was seemingly sent by a GUSD administrator, who stated that she "suspended two students for five days" after "misgendering" a teacher. When Crisis in the Classroom (CITC) reached out to GUSD to confirm the authenticity of the email, a district...

The popular conservative social media account Libs of TikTok has already experienced censorship on tech giant Meta’s new text-based app Threads, according to a screenshot shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. Libs of TikTok , which is run by Chaya Raichik, posted that “[n]on-binary isn’t real” on Threads Friday morning, and the newly launched app removed it the same day due to its “hate speech” guidelines, a screenshot shared with the DCNF and posted to Twitter shows. Raichik told the DCNF that the removal was unsurprising because of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s history of conservative censorship on Facebook and...

The U.S. government has filed an emergency stay request to lift a recent injunction issued by a federal judge forbidding the government from violating Americans’ First Amendment rights by colluding with social media companies to censor their constitutionally protected speech. In the emergency stay, the government contended that the injunction was vague and that the attorney generals could not show harm from the censorship, an argument that Judge Terry Doughty had rejected multiple times in the past. “Defendants respectfully request that the Court stay its July 4 preliminary injunction pending Defendant’s appeal of that order,” the government argued. “The Government...

Snip ********************************************** Part of what has made Musk’s Twitter so popular is it’s a free-speech zone where all free speech is tolerated so long as it doesn’t violate the law. Zuckerberg’s platforms, on the other hand, appear to be safe spaces where only state-sanctioned opinions and facts may be openly shared. With this in mind, Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade warned the network’s watchers on Thursday about using the new app. Speaking on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” he reminded everybody that Facebook has a record of working with the government to silence free speech. “Mark Zuckerberg’s trying to get you...

"Facebook Meta launched their new app today “Threads.” Owner Mark Zuckerberg says its vision is to “create an open and friendly public space for conversation” for 1 billion-plus people." (snip) "Attorney Alex Spiro said Meta assigned former Twitter employees to develop ‘Meta’s copycat ‘Threads’ with the intent to use Twitter’s intellectual property.Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey noted that Facebook-Threads was already harvesting user data. That didn’t take long!