Free Republic

Twitter has set its search algorithms so that searching the words ‘Nazi’ or ‘racist’ brings up President Donald Trump as the top ‘People’ account resul

Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don't seem to know what's true anymore. "Facts" this year got put in quotation marks. All the other political difficulties of the Donald Trump era are subsumed in this one. If we aren't sure what's true, how can we act to make things better? If we don't know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions — not about facts. We can all choose our favorite...

USA Today is touting a report out this morning that “ID’ed 4500 Trump golf-club members through” their social media accounts as well as an online service that lets golfers track their handicaps: Do they not see how awful this looks?

In September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will begin construction on President Trump’s infamous 130-mile wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. At times like these, the symbolism of barriers hits hard. It’s no surprise that on Saturday, attendees at Chicago’s Ruido Fest – a rock en español festival in the city’s Pilsen neighborhood – decided to stage a protest against a Home Depot branded booth that featured a mock wall installation. The activity invited festivalgoers to decorate tiles and glue them onto the wall as artists played sets across the grounds. In addition to the symbolism of the installation, protesters expressed...

Camila Castello, 34, and Akahi Ricardo, 36, are what is known as “Breatharians” - they eat just three times a week, and only ever a piece of fruit or some vegetable broth at a time. “Humans can easily be without food, as long as they are the connected to the energy that exists in all things and through breathing,” The couple met in 2005 and first discovered Breatharianism in 2008. They eventually transitioned from vegetarians, to raw vegans, to fruitarians and finally to Breatharians.

I was a member of the Tea Party back when Obama first got elected. A lot of meet ups were organized through meet up.org. I haven't been involved in anything in a long time, but I still get emails occasionally. I just received this in my inbox. Not ONCE, during the Tea Party heyday, did I receive any mass emails in support of the Tea Party. But they themselves created all these #resist meet ups. Unbelievable. I am unsubscribing and sending a note as to why. ----------- Meetup has always served as an organizing platform for a wide range of...

I subscribe to Meetup to see what groups are meeting in my area. I received a company email that stated: Meetup has always served as an organizing platform for a wide range of political views, welcoming everyone from the Howard Deaniacs to the Tea Party. Meetup will always welcome people with different beliefs. But after the recent executive order aimed to block people on the basis of nationality and religion, a line was crossed. At a time when core democratic ideals feel under attack, we feel a duty to spark more civic participation. Last week, we created 1,000+ #Resist Meetup...

When 21-year-old Shifa Abuzaid decided in May to begin wearing a hijab, she said her parents worried it might bring about incidents like the one she says she recently experienced. A man passing Abuzaid, along with her younger cousins and siblings, called them a "bunch of terrorists" on Saturday in Sugar Land Town Square, Abuzaid recounted in a Facebook post that has since been shared on the medium more than 2,500 times. Abuzaid was the eldest of her family members present at the time. The youngest was 10. The group had been walking to their car after lunch when they...

You may not recognize Josie Ramon’s face or even her name, but if you’ve been following the wave of anti-Latinx harassment that’s accompanied Donald Trump’s political rise, there’s a good chance you’ve caught a glimpse of what the Michigan tween’s life was like in the days following the 2016 Presidential election. Ramon, who is 12, was a student at Royal Oaks Middle School outside of Detroit during the final months of the presidential race. On November 9, just one day after Donald Trump was elected president, Ramon was sitting in the lunchroom at school when a group of students began...

A close and — to pundits, journalists, and Democrats — unexpected victory like Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s is always overdetermined, and no one particular thing pushed Trump over the edge on Tuesday night. His chosen party’s lately increasing openness to explicit white nationalism, the still-recent global-scale failure of the liberal economic consensus, the apparently deep-seated misogyny and racism of the American electorate, Hillary Clinton’s multiple shortcomings as a candidate, or even the last-minute intervention of FBI director James Comey might each have been, on its own, sufficient to hand the election to a man who is, by any reckoning,...

On October 3, 2016 Twitter deliberately “shadowbanned” (censored) 32 of Trump’s tweets, plus it deleted one other tweet. When Twitter shadowbanned Trump’s tweets, the general public can no longer see any of the tweets, and only users who replied or re-tweeted the tweet’s can see said censored tweet — or if one knows the URL/web address of the tweet, one can see said censored tweet.

Social media giant Twitter's got 99 problems, yet the politically correct company is far more worried about the "optics" of cooperating with federal agents trying to stop jihadist plotters online. Hashtag it: #TwistedTwitterPriorities. The company's stock hit a record low this month. Half of the company's senior executives abandoned their posts earlier this year. Ad growth is sluggish. Desperate attempts to mimic Facebook have turned off users. And the micro-blogging network's political pandering to liberals through the formation of an Orwellian Trust and Safety Council earned global scorn Despite these existential troubles, Twitter bigwigs turned their attention this week to...

Lisa in Waukesha, Wisconsin, has two Facebook accounts. One reflects her liberal politics; the other is for acquaintances and family members to whom Lisa shows only her cat photos. Christina, in Milford, Massachusetts, has a sign in the back window of her car proclaiming support for a Democratic candidate. But as soon as she parks in the company lot, she puts it facedown on the backseat. Byron has lived in the same small town of Pomeroy, Iowa—population 662—his entire life. He brings his partner to family dinners but has never actually said to his conservative sister that he’s gay. Lisa,...

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, locked in a tight race in Iowa with front-runner Hillary Clinton, dominated conversation about the state's caucuses on Facebook Inc (FB.O) on Monday, the social network said. From midnight to noon CST (0600-1800 GMT), 42.2 percent of conversations about the caucuses were about Sanders, the senator from Vermont, compared with 21.7 percent for Republican front-runner Donald Trump and 13.1 percent for Clinton, according to Facebook. Iowans begin choosing candidates at 7 p.m. CST (0100 GMT on Tuesday), with results expected within a few hours. The contest is the first of the state-by-state battles to pick...

Take note Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith: Getting political has its risks. After the actress declared Monday that she will be boycotting the Oscars after her husband was snubbed, Alexis Arquette took a major swing at the pair for what she alleges is hypocrisy. The transgender actress and gender-rights activist "outed" the married couple with a Facebook post that argued that Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s comments on race and the Oscars were invalid because they won't ’fess up about their alleged homosexuality. "When Jada comes out as Gay and her beard husband admits his first marriage ended when she...

Update, 3:53 a.m. ET: Twitter is now back online for some, but many users are still experiencing delays and outages. Twitter is down. We know your first instinct is to whip up your Twitter client and complain about it, but you can't because, well, Twitter is down.

Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis. The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year. The new agreement makes it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate speech to specialist teams at the three companies, German Justice Minister...

Lena Dunham is taking over the Hillary Clinton campaign Instagram account as she stumps for the candidate in New Hampshire this weekend. "Hey y'all! I made it to New Hampshire and I'm thrilled to be taking over the HRC Instagram! Warning: I'm pretty focused on my outfits," Dunham wrote. The post got almost 10,000 likes as of Friday, but also some critical reactions to Dunham's involvement in the campaign. Dunham also has been making campaign appearances with FIFA Women's World Cup champion Abby Wambach. Meanwhile, Clinton will appear on "The Ellen Show" on Monday.

Posting a Gawker article that pinned the San Bernardino shooting on "whites," Black Lives Matter leader DeRay Mckesson retweeted a comment that blamed "whiteness" for the attack: Gawker claimed "San Bernardino shooting suspects are probably Americans, not "terrorists."" It included lines such as, "The current suspects are supposedly white. In which case this is just another isolated incident of a loner gone wrong-isolated like the hundreds that came before it." Another Twitter user called on Mr. Mckesson to "Watch whiteness work," in reference to the shootings. Instead of just tweeting the article itself, Mckesson retweeted the "whiteness" message so it...

The "hashtag" is the pound, or number, sign on a keyboard. Many on social medial place the symbol before words, allowing those words to be tracked as keywords on social media. Listeners to my radio show, for example, often tweet with #EERS at the end for "Erick Erickson Radio Show," making it easy for listeners to see each other's tweets. In 2014, State Department spokes child Jen Psaki held up a sign for twitter showing the #UnitedForUkraine hashtag. She then followed it up a month later tweeting, "The world stands #UnitedforUkraine. Let's hope that the #Kremlin & @mfa_Russia will live...