Free Republic

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday denied multiple appeals to rehear a decision upholding the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) repeal of the Obama-era net neutrality rules. The 2015 net neutrality rules classified internet service providers as common carriers, similar to telecommunications providers, who are not allowed to discriminate against various forms of traffic. The FCC under Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai repealed those rules in late 2017 and also barred states from passing their own net neutrality regulations. Pai's action faced legal challenges but was upheld by a district court and then by the D.C. Circuit in October. The...

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media giant will continue to support free expression and encrypted content on its platform in a new interview. "This is the new approach, and I think it's going to piss off a lot of people. But frankly, the old approach was pissing off a lot of people too, so let's try something different," Zuckerberg said Friday at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit in Utah, CNN reported. "Increasingly we're getting called to censor a lot of different kinds of content that makes me really uncomfortable," Zuckerberg continued. Zuckerberg said the company's...

With the Senate impeachment trial dominating the headlines lately, there hasn’t been much room for other news to break through. Consider, for example, the Trump administration’s publication last week of the final rules that change which agency and which regulations oversee the export of firearms and ammunition. This is newsworthy because the change was initially proposed by the Obama administration and modernizes a Cold War-era export control regime that treated a small-caliber single shot hunting rifle the same as a military tank or jet fighter. These rules still subject the export of sporting firearms and ammunition products to stringent scrutiny...

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday released a plan to fight disinformation and to hold tech companies accountable for their actions in light of the 2016 election. “Disinformation and online foreign interference erode our democracy, and Donald Trump has invited both,” Warren said in a Tweet Wednesday. “Anyone who seeks to challenge and defeat Donald Trump in the 2020 election must be fully prepared to take this on – and I’ve got a plan to do it.” Warren proposed to combat disinformation by holding big tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google responsible for spreading misinformation designed to...

[caption id="attachment_1512" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Image source: Wired.com[/caption] See that over-the-top, anti-Obama comment on Facebook or your favorite blog?  It could be a paid Russian troll.  See the picture above?  He's serving a life sentence without parole because he started an illegal website.  He claims to be a Libertarian, but he certainly made a ton of money (the Feds claim over $100 million) selling--well, everything, sort of like Amazon, but much smaller and very much in the shadows of the "dark web." What do Russian trolls have to do with a guy in prison for life?  One of them was caught...

Democratic U.S. House impeachment manager Adam Schiff said on Sunday he believes Republican President Donald Trump's comment that he has not yet "paid the price" was intended as a threat.

House Democrats claimed Friday afternoon in President Donald Trump’s Senate trial that his comments on Twitter, in press conferences, and at campaign rallies criticizing the impeachment inquiry were impeachable “obstruction.” Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX), opened the impeachment managers’ case on the second article of impeachment, for “obstruction of Congress,” noting that the president had told reporters that “there should be a way of stopping it, maybe legally, through the courts.” She played a clip of him saying that, then continued: Soon after, President Trump took the matters into his own hands. The president used his authority, and his office, to...

Left-wing billionaire George Soros has accused Facebook of helping to re-elect Donald Trump leading up to the 2020 election. Soros, 89, made the comments during a speech in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday. He accused the social media giant of working to re-elect Trump during this year’s election campaign in exchange for protection. “Facebook will work to re-elect Trump and Trump will protect Facebook,” the Hungarian-born U.S. investor said, according to Politico. “It makes me very concerned about the outcome of 2020.” A Facebook company spokesman responded to Politico, saying “This is just plain wrong.” On Jan. 9, Facebook announced that it...

President Trump raised eyebrows on Twitter by sharing a comical image of President Obama spying on him at Trump Tower. Trump posted the image, which shows Obama using a pair of binoculars to eye Trump while hanging outside of his Trump Tower window, without any comment. The photoshopped image appears to date back to early 2017 around the time the president made the claim that Obama had "wiretapped" Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

Reporters complain about business. We overlook the constant improvements in our lives made possible by greedy businesses competing for your money. Think about how our access to entertainment has improved. “When I was a kid,” says Sean Malone in a new video for the Foundation for Economic Education, “my TV broadcast options were PBS, Fox, ABC, NBC and CBS. Depending on the weather, it was hit or miss whether or not they were even watchable.” 1977 brought the first video rental store. “We literally had to rent a VCR along with two or three movies we could get on VHS...

@YouTube just took down @JudicialWatch 's live stream of the impeachment trial for violating "community standards"! What on Earth is going on over there!

In an interview with the New York Times' editorial board, former Vice President Joe Biden made his most stringent call yet for cracking down on free speech on the internet. After being asked by the Times about previous comments Biden has made regarding Facebook's refusal to remove negative ads targeting his campaign, the Democratic front-runner attacked both the social media platform and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. "I've never been a fan of Facebook," Biden says. "I've never been a big Zuckerberg fan, I think he's a real problem." Biden and Facebook have been feuding for months, as Reason has previously...

There are now over 100 million Amazon Prime members. Therefore, a lot of trucks are needed to get those good from here to there and from there to here. I'm seeing more and more of them out on the roadways. I bought a book from them in 1995 when they were just a small outfit. It was the 1994 edition of PASSPORT TO WORLD BAND RADIO.

Arizonans are now paying more money to state and local governments for the items they’re buying online. The Department of Revenue reports it collected an extra $51.5 million in the first two months after a new law went into effect. Of that, $23.4 million is going into the state treasury, with the balance parceled out among cities and counties. What makes this number so impressive is budget analysts predicted the net gain to the general fund for a full fiscal year would be just $85 million. And the collections reported so far don’t even represent December Christmas sales. The new...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blasted Facebook as a "shameful" company on Thursday, further escalating tensions between Democratic leadership and the social media giant. In response to a question about the power held by Facebook (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, Pelosi accused the company of being "accomplices for misleading the American people with money from god-knows where." She also suggested that the company cares about profits above all else. "All they want are their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them," she said, adding that she believes Facebook "schmoozed" the Trump administration. The comments came at Pelosi's weekly press...

Before Robyn Polak attended President Donald Trump's Jan. 14 rally in Milwaukee, she expressed her support for him on Facebook by posting a "MAGA 2020" comment on a news story about the visit. She said that comment, and possibly a few others like it, got her fired from her job. Polak, a South Milwaukee resident who was the only dental assistant at Precision Dental MKE, 6203 S. Howell Ave., said someone found out where she worked, went on her employer’s Facebook page and posted a negative review. The person did not recommend the dental office saying “employees spouting [sic] racist comments on Facebook.” Polak said she didn’t have...

A 21-year-old Texas man has been indicted in New Jersey for posting a comment calling for racial violence in an online group chat, prosecutors in Burlington County, New Jersey said Wednesday. According to authorities, Kenneth Petersen of Stephenville was arrested in September after a multi-agency investigation that stemmed from a message Petersen allegedly sent in a group chat with New Jersey high school students in May 2018. Prosecutors say a Northern Burlington high school student had created a group chat to discuss senior pranks using the messaging app GroupMe when she received a message from a sender she did not...

Network security giant Cloudflare said it will provide its security tools and services to U.S. political campaigns for free, as part of its efforts to secure upcoming elections against cyberattacks and election interference. The company said its new Cloudflare for Campaigns offering will include distributed denial-of-service attack mitigation, load balancing for campaign websites, a website firewall, and anti-bot protections.

In my last column, “Newsweek Hits a New Low,” I wrote about Newsweek’s dishonest description of what I had said on one of my weekly PragerU “Fireside Chats.” A viewer had asked me to respond to a statement Anne Frank made in her epic Holocaust diary. Frank said, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.” The Newsweek headline, “Conservative Radio Host Ridicules Anne Frank,” was simply a lie. In order for readers to appreciate the level of mendacity, I had my entire response transcribed and placed it in the column. A few days later I received...

On Thursday, a Facebook glitch revealed who’s posting on climate change alarmist Greta Thunberg’s Facebook page: her father Svantes Thunberg and “Climate Crisis activist” Adarsh Prathap. “[A] bug that was live from Thursday evening until Friday morning allowed anyone to easily reveal the accounts running a Page, essentially doxing anyone who posted to one,” Wired reported Friday. “We quickly fixed an issue where someone could see who edited or published a post on behalf of a Page when looking at its edit history,” Facebook responded to the controversy in a statement. “We are grateful to the security researcher who alerted...