Free Republic

Google has found a new way to police the speech of its users: scolding them for typing factual terms into its search bar. After a Justice Department lawsuit resulted in Texas ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens at state universities, I used Google to look up more details about the case. In response to the search “texas scholarships for illegal aliens,” the search engine’s AI overview slapped a patronizing warning at the top of the page, scolding me that “the term ‘illegal alien’ is considered pejorative and offensive.” “It is more accurate and respectful to use terms like ‘undocumented students’...

A fame-seeking teenager died attempting an alarming social-media challenge called “dusting,” according to her heartbroken parents. Renna O’Rourke, 19, of Arizona, passed away Sunday after trying the viral trend, also called “chroming,” in which netizens film themselves inhaling keyboard cleaning spray to get high for views online. “She always said, ‘I’m gonna be famous, Dad. Just you watch. I’m gonna be famous,’ and unfortunately, this is not under the most optimal of circumstances,” her grieving father, Aaron O’Rourke, told AZ Family. The Tempe teen went into cardiac arrest and was rushed to the hospital. She remained unconscious in the intensive...

Hackers have leaked what they claim is AT&T’s database which was reportedly stolen by the ShinyHunters group in April 2024 after they exploited major security flaws in the Snowflake cloud data platform. But is this really the Snowflake-linked data? We took a closer look. As seen by the Hackread.com research team, the data was first posted on a well-known Russian cybercrime forum on May 15, 2025. It was re-uploaded on the same forum on June 3, 2025, after which it began circulating among other hackers and forums. After analyzing the leaked data, we found it contains a detailed set of...

Google is launching AI Mode, a new AI-powered search feature for US-based users. After a short testing period in its Labs environment, the feature will be rolling out for everyone in the coming weeks via a new Search tab and the Google app. The company describes AI Mode as its “most powerful AI search, with more advanced reasoning and multimodality, and the ability to go deeper through follow-up questions and helpful links to the web.” New features of AI Mode include Deep Search with longer-than-usual, report-style responses, Search Live, which enables users to talk with Search about what they see...

An Irish man has died and a child has been injured in a shooting incident at a shopping centre in County Carlow on Sunday. Emergency services are currently at the scene at the Fairgreen Shopping Centre, with an army bomb disposal team also in attendance. Gardaí (Irish police) were alerted to the incident shortly after 18:15 local time. The girl was treated by paramedics at the scene. Gardaí said it is not yet known how her injuries were sustained. The shopping centre has been evacuated and the area has been sealed off by police. The cordon will remain in place...

The Transportation Security Administration has issued a major warning for all travelers that they may be in danger of being tricked by USB malware. In a recent post on social media, the agency warned that travelers may find their devices hacked by scammers who install malware in the USB port in the airports. "In this technology age, cybersecurity has never been more important," the Facebook post read. "You’ve likely heard about things like email scams and social media scams (tip: don’t accept that friend request from your buddy’s 'new' profile), but today we want to share our two best tips...

Security researcher Jeremiah Fowler stumbled upon a large database of login information and passwords containing over 184 million records recently. He mentioned the discovery in an article on Website Planet. The data was not encrypted in any form and stored publicly, which meant that anyone with knowledge of its existence could download the data. The sheer size of the database, more than 47 gigabytes of data, makes it one of the largest leaks in recent history. In early 2024, a 70 million records password dump was discovered. A preliminary sampling of the data unveiled emails, usernames, passwords, and also links...

Left-wing darling Hasan Piker has been booted from the streaming platform Twitch after he suggested that the killing of two Israeli Embassy diplomats in Washington, DC looked like it could be a “false flag” operation. Piker, 33, claimed his account, which has more than 2.8 million followers, was suspended because of his “critical examination” of the manifesto of suspected terrorist Elias Rodriguez, who was charged with executing embassy staffers Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum on Wednesday night. He said the attack had all the hallmarks of a “false flag operation,” a term used for an...

An Indigenous tribe from the Brazilian Amazon has sued The New York Times, saying the newspaper’s reporting on the tribe’s first exposure to the internet led to its members being widely portrayed as technology-addled and addicted to pornography. The Marubo Tribe of the Javari Valley, a sovereign community of about 2,000 people in the rainforest, filed the defamation lawsuit seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages this week in a court in Los Angeles. It also names TMZ and Yahoo as defendants, alleging that their stories amplified and sensationalized the Times’ reporting and smeared the tribe in the process....

OnlyFans users in Sweden could face prison sentences under a harsh new law that treats buying online sex shows the same as paying a prostitute for sex. The law, which will take effect July 1, also criminalizes profiting from or promoting others who perform sexual acts for payment on demand. “This is a new form of sex purchase, and it’s high time we modernize the legislation to include digital platforms,” Swedish member of parliament Teresa Carvalho said after the bill passed. Under the new law, it will be illegal to pay someone to carry out a sexual act remotely —...

All major mobile networks went down in Spain on Tuesday, just four weeks after the country was hit by a national power outage. Movistar, Orange, Vodafone, Digimobil and O2 were all reported to have been affected by outages hitting professional services, including health centres. Complaints soared as landline, internet and emergency contact services were knocked offline early this morning. Madrid, Andalucía, Galicia, the Basque Country, Aragon, Navarra, Extremadura and the Valencian Community were all reportedly affected. Networks contracted with Telefónica appeared to have been hit, but outages did not appear to be affecting individuals' network access. The company told MailOnline...

‘This was far beyond negligence. It was systemic criminal conduct — monetized sexual abuse on an industrial scale, driven by willful corporate decisions,’ said Justice Defense Fund CEO Laila Mickelwait.Disclaimer: This article discusses child sexual abuse material and sexually explicit terms.When Republican lawmakers across the country rolled out plans to crack down on on-screen sex companies for failing to verify the age of their users, the porn lobby, Democrats, and their allies in corporate media threw a fit. They defended the on-screen “sex work” as consensual and constitutionally protected. In reality, mass abuse, exploitation, and sex trafficking of children is...

FBI officials say they are growing increasingly concerned about a loose network of violent predators who befriend teenagers through popular online platforms and then coerce them into escalating sexual and violent behavior -- pushing victims to create graphic pornography, harm family pets, cut themselves with sharp objects, or even die by suicide.

Despite its dark image, the dark web is not entirely criminal. Human rights organizations use the platform to circumvent government censorship and spread life-saving information.As social media networks continue to attract more users and as we get increasingly addicted to them, a new phenomenon is emerging: new underground movements that are changing cities and raising concerns. While most people are busy documenting every detail of their lives, some are heading in the opposite direction. In the streets of Tel Aviv, New York, and Berlin, secret communities have been sprouting in recent years – groups of activists and change-seekers who prefer...

Automated traffic now accounts for the majority of activity on the web, with the share of bad bot traffic surging from 32% to 37% annually last year, according to Thales. The French defense giant’s 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report is now in its 12th year, and based as always on data collected by Imperva’s global network, which apparently blocked 13 trillion bad bot requests across thousands of domains and industries last year. Bot traffic accounted for 51% of the total last year, the first time it has surpassed human activity in a decade, the vendor claimed. It said that malicious...

The Controversial Use of AI Bots by the University of Zurich to Manipulate Reddit Discourse In a shocking revelation, the University of Zurich has been implicated in a clandestine operation involving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) bots to influence discussions on Reddit since November 2024. This information was brought to light in a recent tweet from the account @reddit_lies, which highlighted the significant impact of these AI bots in swaying the opinions of Reddit users. With claims that these bots were six times more effective at changing minds compared to a baseline, the implications of this discovery raise crucial...

Content creator Misha Agrawal, known for her witty sarcasm and relatable rants, passed away on April 24, just two days before her 25th birthday. Her family confirmed the heartbreaking news on Instagram, though the cause remains undisclosed. Fans and friends are still coming to terms with the loss, amidst widespread disbelief

Meta’s Oversight Board expressed indignation at the social media giant for its January policy overhaul that axed fact-checking and eased restrictions on discussions about immigration and gender identity. The independent oversight board railed against the company for implementing the changes “hastily” with supposedly no transparency about “what, if any, prior human rights due diligence” was performed. Zuckerberg acknowledged that previous content moderation efforts had resulted in “too many mistakes and too much censorship.” President Trump had frequently criticized Facebook during his first term, culminating in his platform suspension following the January 6, 2021, Capitol events — a ban eventually lifted...

For years, a smug, self-righteous activist named Nandini Jammi made it her mission to silence conservative voices by labeling everything she didn’t like as “disinformation” or “hate”—including Revolver. We covered Nandini Jammi and her dark censorship empire way before anybody else caught on. While the left was busy fawning over her brand safety activism, we peeled back the curtain and showed you what was really going on—an evil censorship racket that shook down conservative companies with empty threats, fake outrage, and social media mob tactics. Here’s a look back at what we uncovered about Jammi’s operation—how she went from memeing...