Free Republic

The Associated Press has some nerve browbeating readers over the alleged scourge of Israel-Hamas war “misinformation” on social media despite its own guilt of pushing terrorist propaganda. AP pontificated in its Oct. 24 headline how “Misinformation about the Israel-Hamas war is flooding social media. Here are the facts.” The leftist outlet lectured how “[i]n the days since Hamas militants stormed into Israel early Oct. 7, a flood of videos and photos purporting to show the conflict have filled social media, making it difficult for onlookers from around the world to sort fact from fiction.” Yes, AP actually sought to humanize...

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., blasted the mainstream media on Thursday for taking the Gaza Health Ministry's account of a hospital explosion at face value. See video

Democratic congressman lashed out at New York Times and Los Angeles Times for pushing false narratives on Palestinian hospital strikeRep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., accused The New York Times of doing something far "worse" than making a mistake, after the outlet quoted Palestinian claims blaming Israel for the explosion that rocked the al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City earlier this week. President Biden said that U.S. intelligence confirmed Israel was not to blame for the attack and backed up Israel's military investigation, which found the strike was caused by Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Users on X roasted the paper for...

"System Update" host Glenn Greenwald looks into an article from the New York Times warning that Russian disinformation could undermine the U.S. effort in Ukraine: GLENN GREENWALD: Here's an article from the New York Times, and you're going to see so many of these articles. We've already seen so many of them, they are going to come one after the next. This is a particularly vivid one that I think is really worth looking at because it is just so flagrant, in terms of how it functions, in terms of the manipulative and deceitful nature of what this instrument is....

Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter (now X), he relaxed its misinformation policies on the platform and has become increasingly critical of Democrats and the Biden administration, federal agencies have begun probing X, Tesla, and SpaceX, raising questions about targeting of the billionaire’s breadth of companies. Following Musk’s takeover of Twitter last year, his companies have been probed by the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission as he has been an advocated for free speech on the platform. The probes include the Justice Department’s Immigrant and Employee Rights division investigating a complaint of employment discrimination from a non-U.S....

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) said Tuesday that parents who want to be notified by schools if their children want to change genders have been “ginned up” by misinformation produced by Republicans and conservative news outlets. The Newsom administration is currently suing the school district of Chino Valley in Riverside, California, over its new policy of parental notification, claiming that it violates the rights of transgender minors to “out” them to their parents. Newsom was asked about the issue Tuesday in a live forum by Politico‘s California bureau chief, Christopher Cadelago. We’re winning. Instead of answering @ccadelago’s question on parental...

Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before a House Judiciary subcommittee on the 'weaponization of the Federal Government.'

“Misinformation” is an elastic term. It can cover anything from intentional falsehoods to incorrect information to contested claims to unverified claims.But it’s hard to argue that it covers things known to be truthful.Now I am, to say the least, not a fan of any efforts to suppress “misinformation” because it empowers some authority somewhere to impose a standard of what is true and what is not, and doing so is dangerous in itself. While I would agree that in a perfect world everything we read, hear, and speak would be entirely true and completely in context, the reality is that...

Fox News retracted a hit piece against former President Donald Trump and admitted they “inaccurately attributed” an anti-Trump quote to former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price. Fox News’s story had the following headline: “Former Trump Cabinet member tells him to ‘kiss’ his ‘butt.” The since-retracted, purportedly exclusive story read, in part: EXCLUSIVE: Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price told Fox News Digital there’s “no way” he will support former President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential bid. When asked whether he will endorse Trump, Price said, “After he fired me? No way.” “The only thing that guy has...

A federal judge has made a historic ruling by partially granting an injunction that blocks various Biden administration officials and government agencies like the Justice Department and the FBI from working with big tech firms to censor posts on social media. The injunction came in response to a censorship-by-proxy lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who have accused Biden administration officials and various government agencies of pressuring social media companies to suspend accounts or take down posts. The judge, Terry A. Doughty, wrote in the July 4 judgment (pdf) that various government agencies, including the Cybersecurity and...

Aaron Berman, a 17-year veteran of the CIA who already held a senior position in Facebook’s “misinformation” team during the 2020 election, has been promoted to “Head of Elections Policies” at the company now known as Meta. Berman served at the CIA between March 2002 and July 2019. During that time, he wrote for and edited the President’s Daily Brief, an influential top-secret document prepared by the U.S. intelligence community given to the president each morning. According to Berman’s Linkedin, he enjoyed positions of considerable influence at the agency, including “supervising teams of dozens of analysts and with multi-million-dollar budgets,”...

Online platforms spreading misinformation could face millions of dollars in penalties under new proposed government legislation that bolsters the power of Australia's media watchdog. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would be armed with the ability to require digital platforms to keep certain records about matters regarding misinformation and disinformation and turn them over when requested. Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said this would "essentially mean that the regulator is able to look under the hood of what the platforms are doing and what measures they are taking to ensure compliance". The ACMA would also be able to request the...

Barack Obama, who was instrumental in fueling the media’s “misinformation” narrative before he left office, has a new buzzword — “digital fingerprints.” The former Democrat president wants the origin of digital information such as photos and videos to be clearly traced, to fight the spread of deepfakes. “That technology’s here now,” said Obama in a discussion with his former advisor David Axelrod on the latter’s CNN podcast. “So, most immediately we’re going to have all the problems we had with misinformation before, [but] this next election cycle will be worse.”

It is a tight contest over which U.S. regulatory agency is most captured by industry. But leading the pack is surely the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Many of us in the past believed the main problem with the agency was the costs it imposed on industry. The situation turns out to be more complicated. Whatever its past, it’s become an industry-dominated vending machine for drug approvals enacted with a very expensive rubber stamp.The ordeal of the COVID vaccine proved it. So long as the check cleared, the FDA was ready with committee-based approvals for which no one in particular...

Readers likely remember when in early December 2020, Google-owned social media platform YouTube began enforcing a new policy about what it considered “misinformation” about the results of the 2020 presidential election. The platform admits that due to the policy, it took down user videos numbering in the “tens of thousands.”Now, the Big Tech company has announced it’s doing an about-face on the policy—beginning immediately. YouTube wrote in a blog post Friday that it will stop its policy of removing the videos from the platform:As of June 2, 2023, YouTube has reversed that decision: The video giant announced that it “will...

Wealthy organizations with a history of backing left-wing causes are partnering with a new worldwide group of researchers to combat online misinformation. The International Panel on the Information Environment (IPIE) convened in Washington for its first official meeting on Wednesday, bringing together over 200 researchers from 55 countries to focus on the decline of public comprehension and confidence in science, according to The New York Times. It is partnered with groups such as the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and the Skoll Foundation, according to its website. Many of IPIE’s backers have a history of bankrolling left-wing groups and...

...Across the tech industry...wide swaths of people tasked with protecting the internet's most-populous playgrounds are being shown the exits. The cuts come at a time of increased cyberbullying...and as the spread of misinformation and violent content collides with the exploding use of artificial intelligence....Twitter effectively disbanded its ethical AI team in November and laid off all but one of its members, along with 15% of its trust and safety department, according to reports. In February, Google cut about one-third of a unit that aims to protect society from misinformation, radicalization, toxicity and censorship. Meta reportedly ended the contracts of about...

During an interview with NBC News aired on Tuesday’s edition of “Hallie Jackson Now,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that one reason he visited East Palestine, Ohio in the wake of the train derailment there was “all of the misinformation that came to the people of East Palestine” and that “had I known the amount of misinformation that would be directed at the people of East Palestine, we would have taken more steps to make sure that they got more accurate information sooner in the process.

Investigative independent journalist Lee Fang weighs in on his reporting surrounding Ukrainian intelligence and disinformation

“Misinformation” is the Left’s new boogyman, up there with White Supremacists, carbon dioxide, and transphobes.We are supposed to believe that all these things are threats to human existence itself and that all of them must be ruthlessly suppressed in order to save humanity.Yeah, whatever.The FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf has apparently been traveling the country making a rather amazing claim: that misinformation is the leading cause of death in America.If so, that’s pretty shocking. A number of studies suggest that medical errors may be the third-leading cause of death in America, resulting in 250,000 to 440,000 deaths a year, depending...