Free Republic

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

Meta’s senior software engineer recently admitted to an undercover journalist at O’Keeffe Media Group that Facebook censors conservatives.BREAKING: Senior Meta Engineer Reveals Anti-Kamala Posts Are "Automatically Demoted,” Admits Shadowbanning Tactics "Say your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because she doesn't have a child, that kind of sh*t is automatically demoted,”… pic.twitter.com/4DSkvzvKmO — James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) October 16, 2024Jeevan Gyawali added that those who oppose Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in their posts would see their accounts shadowbanned and their posts demoted.“Say your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris [being]...

Meta provides workers with $25 meal vouchers for use at the office.. Meta fired roughly two dozen staffers based in Los Angeles for abusing the company's $25 meal vouchers to purchase non-food household items... Meta fired the workers last week after the company discovered that the workers were abusing its food credit system by using the funds to buy other household items, ranging from acne pads and wine glasses to laundry detergent. According to the report, Meta staff are given daily allowances of $20 for breakfast, $25 for lunch and another $25 for dinner — similar perks to what other...

Senior Meta Engineer Reveals Anti-Kamala Posts Are "Automatically Demoted,” Admits Shadowbanning Tactics "Say your uncle in Ohio said something about Kamala Harris is unfit to be a president because she doesn't have a child, that kind of sh*t is automatically demoted,” reveals @Meta Senior Software Engineer, Jeevan Gyawali ( @JGyawali ), to an undercover @OKeefeMedia journalist during a hidden camera date. He confirmed, “The person would not be notified,” but would see a decline in their post engagement and impressions, explaining that Meta’s “Integrity Team” is responsible for controlling content through “civic classifiers,” a system that “shadowbans” posts without notifying...

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger has said that “U.S. and U.K. military contractors” have used “sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics… against the American people” in sworn testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH) on suppression of free speech by the government, Shellenberger presented the information he received from a whistleblower about the origins of the so-called “Censorship Industrial complex.” Shellenberger, one of the “Twitter Files” authors, coined the phrase “Censorship Industrial Complex” to describe the network of government and private entities...

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Here is a disturbing story. It demonstrates intrigue, corruption and disdain for American principles at the highest level. Perhaps the saddest thing about this story is that you probably won’t be surprised. Especially if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years. The story is this: Twitter and other social media platforms have been cozy with the Department of Homeland Security ... But you knew that. And maybe Elon Musk did in his purchase of Twitter last week. ... Job one for Musk was to not only fire CEO Parag Agrawal but also Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and...

The Twitter Files show how the FBI deputized Twitter to conduct illegal censorship of American citizens and undermine the First Amendment. ... Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to...

There were a lot of dramatic moments at the House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday. Among the most informative was when Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) nailed former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth for Twitter’s contact with the Biden team to suppress tweets. He showed the email contact even as Roth was professing not to remember, yet showing that Roth knew enough to know what random URLs were referencing. One of the other big concerns among many conservatives over the past few years was being “shadow banned” — where you are still being allowed to tweet but your...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

We naturally think of our Founding Fathers as the heirs of the early settlers – those courageous men and women whose grandparents and great grandparents had come from England, Scotland, or Holland, fleeing religious persecution as Christians of a different denomination than the ruling class, or seeking freedom and opportunity in a new land. And many certainly were. But some of our Founding Fathers – some of the greatest heroes, in fact – were foreigners who heard about our cause and felt it in their hearts. New arrivals, from Europe or the Caribbean, who heard of the American independence movement...

Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey once testified under oath in 2018 that his company never shadowbanned or censored conservative users. The claims have blown up amid a series of disclosures by the company — now under new management by billionaire and free-speech advocate Elon Musk, who bought it in October — showing a systemic effort to silence prominent conservative voices on the platform. Dorsey appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on September 2018 to discuss “Transparency and Accountability” at the company. While there he came in for a grilling from GOP lawmakers.

VIDEO I had originally intended to put together a compilation of liberal reactions to Senator Kirsten Sinema ditching the Democrats. However, I changed gears when I began doing a YouTube search for such videos. What came up on the search results filtered for the past day was an OCEAN of nothing but liberal outlets with a couple of obligatory Fox News videos tossed in there in order to give YouTube the lame excuse that their search results are not biased because of the inclusion of Fox News. I hope the new Congress will look into the scandal of YouTube presenting...

Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter: "So here’s a question for @elonmusk and @bariweiss: were any political candidates — either in the US or elsewhere — subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?" / Twitter Elon Musk on Twitter: "@stillgray @bariweiss Yes" / Twitter https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601059434330890241 Related:Who is Vijaya Gadde, the Twitter exec involved in censoring Post’s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell?

Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a poll on the platform on Friday to ask users if they believe former President Trump’s account should be restored. Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection following tweets he made that the company determined to be in violation of its policy against glorifying or inciting violence. But Musk, who completed his acquisition of the company last month, has indicated a hesitancy to continue Trump’s suspension and a general opposition to lifetime bans. Musk commented on the poll, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” a Latin phrase meaning “the voice...

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash. The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard. Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own...

The only way remaining to truly protect freedom of expression and, in turn, our democracy, is by building free and open internet.In a meeting of a House antitrust subcomittee last week, members took turns lamenting the market supremacy of Big Tech — and making pledges to curtail it. Bipartisan consensus on this is refreshing, and it is in fact the charge of government to ensure free markets by breaking up monopolies.Americans, however, should not put their trust in princes. While these hearings make for good campaign ads, Congress has a bad track record of helping Americans, and American innovators can...

I don’t normally write in first person. It’s not a matter of being pretentious or anything, but the monks trained me well: in high school English, with our trusted copies of Warriner’s Guide to English Grammar and Composition perpetually at hand, we were reminded that the first person is to be avoided at all costs. Write like the dispassionate observer, out of the action, unless you’re penning a film noir or a personal letter. But when you find yourself in jail, and you need to write about the experience, well, there’s no substitute for the first person. If you need...

Instead of being a vital technology empowering average people to learn and act for themselves, the internet now mostly succeeds in making users feel small, paranoid, and helpless. Some people might take issue with Facebook’s decision to remove posts attempting to organize protests against shelter-in-place orders, Twitter’s stance against presumed misinformation, and major news outlets acting as mouthpieces for the Chinese government. But by now, most people hardly blink at these heavy-handed moves to control public speech. They are told that dissent is either misinformation or hate speech, and, in the midst of a pandemic, such freedoms are positively dangerous.This...

It was tech giant Twitter that let the phrase "Die Trump" trend overseas. It was Twitter from which Disney walked away because of its "nastiness extraordinary." It is Twitter that has been accused countless times of shadowbanning or otherwise suppressing the speech of conservatives. (snip) But things may be changing as a result of a judge's decision to allow a $250 million lawsuit brought by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., against Twitter to go forward. The Federalist reported the case soon could be a "nightmare" for the company. Judge John Marshall, who was assigned the case in Virginia, is considering a...