Free Republic

There was a bit of good news about the future of public discourse this week. The United States Supreme Court, even though stacked with right-wingers, sounded like it was ready to give the Biden administration the go-ahead to try to persuade social-media platforms not to put out content promoting nonsense about the presidential election, conspiracy theories about the pandemic and other assorted bilge and crackpottery... When other communications revolutions like the printing press, radio, and television came along, they were still largely controlled by the elites. But when the internet came along, regulatory bodies like Canada’s CRTC backed off. It...

The covert disinformation campaign was secretly codenamed ‘Operation INFEKTION’. In July 1983, an Indian newspaper in New Delhi published an article alleging “U.S. experiments” were the likely cause of a new mysterious disease dubbed ‘AIDS’. Five years later, CBS anchor Dan Rather announced to millions of concerned Americans allegations that their own military might have been behind the deadly virus. On that very day, a few KGB operatives in the secret agency’s Lubyanka headquarters in Moscow likely praised each other for a job well done. The story about U.S. military experiments that might have produced AIDS caught up slowly but...