Free Republic

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Saturday launched a page on his campaign website he says is to combat "misinformation and disinformation" being spread online and by political leaders regarding the ongoing wildfires in Southern California. He says the site will "continue to update and provide valuable, fact-based information to the public around policies, budget allocations, personnel on the ground and more.." The webpage is notably located on Newsom's campaign website funded by Newsom for California, and not on an official government site. “There is an astonishing amount of mis- and dis-information being spread online -- much of it by so-called leaders...

History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.” Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight...

Under the Digital Services Act, Elon Musk and his social media platform, X, could face heavy penalties should investigators for the European Union find that he manipulated the site's algorithm in order to influence voters. The DSA was adopted in 2022 to prevent disinformation and other illegal activities online. In July, the European Union found that X had violated multiple tenets of the DSA by not providing access to data to researchers, failure to complay with advertising-transparency requirements, and selling access to its "blue check" verification system in a way that allowed fraudsters to impersonate celebrities and public officials. On...

Axios reports that Meta is eliminating its biggest DEI efforts, effective immediately, including ones that focused on hiring a diverse workforce, training, and sourcing supplies from diverse-owned companies. Its DEI department will also be eliminated. In a memo leaked to the outlet, Meta said it was making these changes because the “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing.” Meta is not alone: Microsoft and Zoom have rolled back their DEI efforts. Lawsuits have emerged against programs that were targeted toward specifically the Black and Latino communities. Meta also announced this week...

Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people.Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship policies and moving towards a “community notes” model for policing content like X. This includes terminating their “third party factchecking program” where the company paid legacy media organizations to “fact check” content on the site and then used those judgments to censor content.At this point there’s little reason to...

Meta is scrapping its fact-checking program with trusted partners and replacing it with a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday. The change will affect Facebook and Instagram, two of the largest social media platforms in the world, each boasting billions of users, as well as Threads. "We're gonna get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms," Zuckerberg said in a video. "More specifically, here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with...

Leave it to the former Twitter worker to call for more social media censorship during a Miss America contest. During Sunday night's Miss America contest, Miss Georgia, Lulu Louizaire ended up with the "Censorship" topic and couldn't wait to tell the country that MORE censorship is the answer to social media's ills. According to Lulu's LinkedIn account, she was with the company until March 2023 when she was working as a Customer Success Specialist II. Lulu's job, according to her resume was to manage "a book of 100+accounts across the different verticals with a focus on government and causes." Yeah,...

The State Department laid to rest the alleged "censorship nerve center" of the federal government last week after Congress refused to reauthorize the interagency Global Engagement Center, known for teaching youth to distrust populism and allegedly squelching American small businesses online. While it may have a peaceful afterlife – State plans to "realign" GEC staff with other entities that handle purported "foreign information manipulation and interference activities" – GEC also faces an unquenchable fire and undying worm on multiple fronts. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Monday against State, with nine exhibits, because it...

A major Russian telecommunications company appears to have begun providing an Internet connection to North Korea. The new link supplements one from China and will provide back-up to Pyongyang at a time the US government is reportedly attacking its Internet infrastructure and pressuring China to end all business with North Korea. The connection, from TransTeleCom, began appearing in Internet routing databases at 09:08 UTC on Sunday, or around 17:38 Pyongyang time on Sunday evening. Internet routing databases map the thousands of connections between telecom providers and enable computers to figure out the best route to a destination. Until now, Internet...

Brownstone Institute has been tracking a little-known federal agency for years. It is part of the Department of Homeland Security created after 9-11. It is called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. It was created in 2018 out of a 2017 executive order that seemed to make sense. It was a mandate to secure American digital infrastructure against foreign attack and infiltration. And yet during the Covid year, it assumed three huge jobs. It was the agency responsible for dividing the workforce between essential and nonessential. It led the way on censorship efforts. And it handled election security...

VIDEO Jonathan Karl, who has a history of extreme TDS to the extent of even writing TDS books, was shocked that Senator John Fetterman was NOT also infected with Trump DERANGEMENT Syndrome during an interview with him. Fetterman's willingness to act like a normal person in regard to Trump also earned him the ire of the Bluesky Bolsheviks as you can see here.

With everything going on in the world, I wanted to reach out to see what other Freepers are doing online to protect yourselves, whether its subscribing to a monitoring service for activity under your name, using VPN (which one & why), password managers, multi-factor authentication etc. What else should a person consider?

Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk’s X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner’s support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta’s Threads and its algorithms. The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter’s core mechanic. That’s unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky’s growth trajectory — with a user...

The 1,547 page funding bill includes an extension for the Global Engagement Center—a massive contributor within the Censorship Industrial Complex, who pressured social media companies to censor Americans. This bill would extend their existence for another NINE YEARS! ... This is why the bill is 1500 pages long... to ensure it never gets read. ... We need to go back to single issue bills ... The Global Engagement Center should not be included in a funding bill!

New email records released by the National Archives show then-Vice President Joe Biden was briefed about sensitive foreign policy matters by then-advisor Antony Blinken on his private email account, including details about a failed North Korean missile launch. Joe Biden, now president, first faced scrutiny about potential private accounts after emails contained on Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop showed the then-vice president in the Obama administration was using an email address with a pseudonym to communicate about business and official matters with his son, other family members, and senior staff. One new email, part of several batches released by the National...

Finally, Republicans and conservatives have gotten smart about social media. For years conservative groups whined about social media companies like Facebook discriminating against conservative voices – and they did and in some cases still do. But the Trump campaign got smart and employed social media highly effectively – and much more so than the Democrats. That decision proved crucial to his victory. He passed on a second debate with Kamala Harris. He passed on high-profile interviews with 60 Minutes, NBC, and CNN. Instead, Trump appeared on countless new media platforms, sitting down with Joe Rogan and other podcasters. Some 30...

@naval Elon’s purchase of Twitter was the single most consequential act of the last decade. It restored free speech, broke the Overton window, and enabled the second American revolution. @elonmusk May or may not be most consequential – history will be the judge – but probably within the top 5. Buying Twitter caused me mega pain, but it had to be done to ensure humanity took the good fork in the road.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer demanded answers from the Selective Service agency for reposting a vulgar social media screed last month suggesting the US may be on a similar trajectory to Nazi Germany. Although the report was subsequently scrubbed from the Selective Service’s official X account, Comer (R-Ky.) is keen on obtaining additional information on the matter and wants to ensure the perpetrator is fired.... One day after the Nov. 5 election, the Selective Service X account reposted a remark by user “SloJoe” likening the incoming Trump administration to Nazi Germany. “For all you stupid [xxx] out there that...

After an extremely annoying weekend that involved seeing a stand-up comedy set where this Gen-Z kid performed a whole routine around “screw that guy, he deserved to die,” narrowly beating a team called “More CEO Murders Please” at bar trivia, and witnessing an Instagram yoga chick account called “thisbadasslife” offer safe harbor to the shooter (before we knew his identity) while spreading her legs wide on a terrace, I decided I had to say something. Our compass was broken. It was up to me to correct it. So I took to Facebook and posted, “Anyone making excuses for the UnitedHealthcare...

The story behind Elon Musk firing 80% of Twitter's staff.. FUNNY AS HELL!............. 1:17 VIDEO AT LINK...................