Free Republic

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...

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly offered the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) nearly $1 billion to keep a case out of court that could break up his social media empire. Zuckerberg sat for a third day of testimony on Wednesday in an antitrust case brought against his company by the FTC, which is attempting to force Meta to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp over what the government has said are Meta’s anticompetitive business practices. Zuckerberg called the head of the FTC, Chairman Andrew Ferguson, in March to try to settle the case out of court. Zuckerberg initially offered the...

A former Meta executive turned whistleblower just dropped a political nuke that has rocked Capitol Hill and should terrify every American who values freedom, privacy, and national sovereignty. Sarah Wynn-Williams, once Facebook’s director of global public policy (now Meta), appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on Wednesday and leveled jaw-dropping allegations against her former employer. That Meta knowingly briefed the Chinese Communist Party on advanced U.S. technologies, including artificial intelligence, beginning in 2015—just to get a seat at Beijing’s lucrative tech table. “These briefings focused on critical emerging technologies, including artificial intelligence – explicit goal being...

The FTC is not suing Meta for its past leftism or current MAGA-ism but for its longstanding, documented monopolism. Even Big Tech’s toughest conservative critics must admit Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have had a good few months. In the wake of President Donald Trump’s reelection last November, the $1 trillion company finally scrapped its worst woke initiatives, from Facebook’s infamous “fact-checking” regime to its internal DEI programming. Its sites are apparently no longer throttling political content. And Zuckerberg has even rebranded himself — going “all-in on a MAGA-dominated Washington,” buying a $23 million home two miles from the White House,...

I confess that I had no intention of reading “Careless People,” the tell-all memoir from former Facebook executive Sarah Wynn-Williams. I figured I knew all I needed to know about the company’s history and its leader, Mark Zuckerberg, from following it for the better part of a decade.But then Zuckerberg, whose company changed its name to Meta Platforms in 2021, moved to suppress the book by obtaining an arbitrator’s ruling prohibiting Wynn-Williams from promoting it herself, whether through a book tour or other means, or from repeating the supposedly “disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments” about him or his company...

Amazon, Google, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta have joined a growing list of energy-intensive companies calling for governments and utilities to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050, signaling a significant boost for the nuclear industry’s revival. The Financial Times reports that tech giants Amazon, Google, and Meta have stepped forward to support the goal of tripling nuclear power capacity by 2050. The companies, along with oil group Occidental and chemical producer Dow, signed a pledge coordinated by the World Nuclear Association (WNA), an advocacy group for the sector. This move follows a similar pledge made in September by 14 of the...

Joe Biden’s final act of shamelessness was pardoning his entire crime family in the final hours of his presidency. There’s a mountain of corruption that’s yet to be fully revealed. On the weaponization of government front, you’d think the sustained lawfare launched against President Donald Trump from the Department of Justice was evidence enough. Pro-life activists and the January 6 defendants also being ensnared by the Biden DOJ’s extralegal crusade on political dissidents. That’s only the tip of the iceberg. The Media Research Center found not one, not ten, but 57 anti-free speech and censorship initiatives aimed at chipping away...

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly favouring foreign workers over American citizens in its hiring practices. A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the lawsuit, which claims Meta prefers H-1B visa holders because they can be paid less, must proceed. The lawsuit was filed by three U.S. citizens—Purushothaman Rajaram, an IT worker; Ekta Bhatia, a software engineer; and Qun Wang, a data scientist. They allege that they applied for multiple positions at Meta between 2020 and 2024 but were not hired despite being qualified. They argue that Meta...

Meta Platforms (META), the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, is in discussions to construct a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence projects, with potential costs exceeding $200 billion, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. Meta executives have informed data center developers that the company is considering building the campus in states including Louisiana, Wyoming or Texas, with senior leaders having visited potential sites this month, the report said. Since the launch of Microsoft (MSFT) backed OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, investment in AI has surged as companies across various sectors strive to incorporate...

Apple (AAPL) announced Monday that it will spend and invest more than $500 billion in the US over the next four years, including plans to build a new manufacturing factory, double its advanced manufacturing fund, and hire 20,000 people. "We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we're proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement. "From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund, to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing. And we’ll keep working...

Apple is partnering with Alibaba to roll out artificial intelligence features for iPhone users in China, the Information reported on Tuesday, citing one person with direct knowledge of the decision.The development could clear months of uncertainty over Apple's AI strategy for China, where it has been losing market share to domestic rivals, including a resurgent Huawei whose smartphones have included AI tools since last year...Apple had selected Baidu as its main partner last year, but the Chinese company's progress in developing models for Apple Intelligence fell short of its standards, the report said.After that, Apple considered models developed by Tencent,...

BEIJING, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Chinese tech company Alibaba (9988.HK), opens new tab on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3. The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max's release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition. "Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms ... almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,"...

The revelation that The New York Times and Politico received millions collectively in taxpayer dollars from a slew of US government agencies sparked public outrage. But a new investigation by MRC Business will make the scandal of government-funded media even worse. MRC Business found that the Poynter Institute for Media Studies — which houses the notoriously censorial International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) — was a recipient of at least $2.4 million in obligations from the U.S. government between 2013 and 2025. Notably, the majority of the funding occurred after April 2020 and throughout the Biden administration years. This is the same...

After an internal Q&A with CEO Mark Zuckerberg made headlines over the tech tycoon’s pro-President Trump commentary, Meta threatened to fire staffers for leaking information to the media — in a memo that then also got leaked. Meta “will take appropriate action, including termination,” for any leakers, Meta’s chief information security officer, Guy Rosen, said in a memo obtained by the Verge. “When information is stolen or leaked, there are repercussions beyond the immediate security impact,” Rosen said. “Our teams become demoralized and we all waste time that is better spent working on our products and toward our goals and...

...former Facebook diversity executive Bärí A. Williams criticizes Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to disband the company’s DEI programs, signaling a shift in priorities as he aligns with the incoming Trump administration. Williams, author of Seen Yet Unseen: A Black Woman Crashes the Tech Fraternity and the founder of Facebook's Supplier Diversity Program, published an opinion piece on MSNBC on the shutdown of Meta’s DEI initiatives. Williams expressed her disappointment in the abandonment of Meta’s Supplier Diversity Program, an initiative she spent countless hours developing. She writes, “From October 2014 to October 2016, I spent nights, weekends and even part...

Meta and Amazon are axing their diversity programmes, joining firms across corporate America that are rolling back hiring and training initiatives criticised by conservatives, citing legal and political risks. The move comes just days after Meta Platforms, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, said it was ending a fact-checking programme criticised by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans. In a memo to staff about its decision, which affects, hiring, supplier and training efforts, Meta cited a "shifting legal and policy landscape". Walmart and McDonalds are among the other companies to have made similar decisions regarding diversity efforts since Trump won...

Several Meta employees who said they received positive performance ratings in their mid-year reviews last year had their jobs cut Monday, as the company let go of nearly 4,000 workers in its latest round of job reductions. Business Insider spoke to eight terminated employees, who said they received “At or Above Expectations” ratings — the middle tier in Meta’s three-level mid-year review system — in their 2024 assessments. These employees said they were surprised to learn their ratings had been downgraded to “Meets Most,” one of the lower tiers in Meta’s year-end performance system that refers to meeting most, but...

Mark Zuckerberg has laid off 3,600 staff at Meta in a shock culling spree designed to target 'low performing' staff. But impacted employees are coming forward to challenge the perception that Zuckerberg simply wanted to cut the dead weight, insisting that excuse was a 'corporate facade.' 'This wasn't about performance; it was about workforce reduction in favor of AI initiatives,' former Meta content manager Kaila Curry said. 'Maybe I ''lacked masculine energy'' (to quote Mark Zuckerberg himself). Who knows?' Curry said she received an 'exceeds expectations' result in her most recent mid-year review. 'I was always told I was doing...

One of Donald Trump's campaign promises was to combat the erroneous assertion that a person's sex could be changed. Now that he is President, Trump has issued an executive order "designed to protect children from being seduced by this delusion. Across the country, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child's sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation's history, and it must end." "Accordingly, it is the policy of the United States that...

Chinese tech company Alibaba has unveiled a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that it claims outperforms its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek. The announcement of the Qwen2.5-Max model yesterday (Jan. 29) is the second major AI announcement from China this week, after DeepSeek's R1 open-weight model took the world by storm following claims that it performs better and is more cost-effective than its American competitors. Now, Alibaba claims that Qwen 2.5-Max, which is also partly open-source, is even more impressive — surpassing a number of rival models in various tests run by the company. "In benchmark tests such as...