Free Republic

Former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden, who has fashioned a post-government career attacking and censoring conservatives, is spending his Thanksgiving week smearing patriotic American Christians who own firearms, claiming they are “no different” from Hamas terrorists. On Wednesday, Michael Hayden responded to a post on X that juxtaposed two photos: one of a woman holding an American flag, Bible, and handgun; the other of Palestinian terrorist Reem Riyashi, who killed herself along with four Israelis in a 2004 suicide bombing that was claimed by Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

This conflagration has exposed as rotten a lot of stupid notions and will lead to the demise of things like “open borders, identity politics, corruption power hungry bureaucrats, Gramscian culture.” Murder and MayhemThis week the Ventura County Sheriff arrested Professor Loay Abdelfattah Alnaji in the death of Paul Kessler, a 69 year-old man who had been standing on the sidewalk peacefully supporting Israel. Alnaji, who bashed Kessler with a megaphone, was charged with involuntary manslaughter and battery causing serious bodily injury and both these charges contain special allegations that Alnaji “personally inflicted great bodily injury.” This comes as no surprise...

Misinformation is a key global threat, but Democrats and Republicans disagree about how to address the problem. In particular, Democrats and Republicans diverge sharply on removing misinformation from social media.Only three weeks after the Biden administration announced the Disinformation Governance Board in April 2022, the effort to develop best practices for countering disinformation was halted because of Republican concerns about its mission. Why do Democrats and Republicans have such different attitudes about content moderation?My colleagues Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts and I found in a study published in the journal Science Advances that Democrats and Republicans not only disagree...

A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”The new...

With the 2024 election just a year away, the Oregon Secretary of State signed a contract with an AI-powered threat intelligence program to “identify, advise, and combat harmful MDM information online.” The contract was signed today, October 27th. OFA Media reached out to the Oregon Election’s Division communication team for comment, but haven’t received a response. According to sources, the platform is a company called “Logically Intelligence” whose mission is to “reduce the harms associated with mis- and disinformation” and “provide analysts with content analysis tools to detect harmful online narratives and threats at speed and at scale.” Here’s an...

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...