Free Republic

Key Points Christians are called to be in the world but not of it, a principle that applies directly to social media engagement and digital communication. Every post, comment, and share reflects our witness for Christ and can either advance or hinder the Gospel message in the digital public square. Biblical discernment requires believers to pause and evaluate their online activity through the lens of Scripture before engaging with others on social platforms. In an age where a single click can broadcast our thoughts to the world, Christians face a unique challenge in maintaining their witness while engaging on social...

Last November, a few days after the election, thousands of people gathered for a rally in New York to protest Donald Trump. The Guardian reported on the scale of the Nov. 12 rally at the time: More than 10,000 people indicated on Facebook that they would attend a noon march from Union Square to Trump Tower, the future president’s home and corporate headquarters.As marchers mustered at East 17th Street and Broadway, organisers estimated the turnout at 2,000. As the march began to move, however, the true figure seemed closer to the promised 10,000.Chanting “Not my president!”, the crowd set...

Days after Donald Trump won the presidential election in November 2016, thousands flocked to the streets of New York City to demonstrate against the president elect in a protest organized by a Kremlin-connected Facebook page called BlackMattersUS, The Hill reports. Between 5,000 and 10,000 people attended the protest organized by the Facebook page, which, according to an archived screen grab, had more than 99,000 likes.“Join us in the streets! Stop Trump and his bigoted agenda!” the Facebook event page reads for the protest, which was called “Trump is NOT my President. March against Trump.” “Divided is the reason we just fell,” it reads. “We must...

All Elite Wrestling (AEW) star Tyson "Kenny Omega" Smith blasted a social media user over a remark made about Will Ospreay and Charlie Kirk. The X user made a critique about Ospreay’s mic skills on Thursday, writing, "Will Ospreay is as bad on the mic as Charlie Kirk, but can't sell the neck as well as he did." Mr. Smith, who is friends with Mr. Ospreay inside and outside the ring, slammed the poster. "What the Foxtrot is wrong with you? It isn’t hard to try having some class," he wrote in response. "A dear friend battles back from a...

Be Careful What You Write Online: ‘Dark Triad’ Traits Are Detectable, Facebook Study ShowsIn a Nutshell *A new study found machine learning can estimate where people fall on the Dark Triad traits (narcissism, *Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) from Facebook posts. *No single model proved reliably better or worse than the others on systematic prediction errors (bias); the gaps between models on that measure were small and statistically negligible. *Words people use in social media posts, especially language tied to perception, action, and emotional tone, were consistently among the strongest signals linking text to Dark Triad traits. Every time someone fires off...

This week, the House of Representatives is considering a bill to radically expand the government’s power to regulate online speech platforms. Framed as a child safety measure, the KIDS Act imposes a litany of restrictions on social media apps and other platforms... The KIDS Act would fundamentally overturn this status quo by allowing the government to decide how platforms can be built and imposing restrictions that will censor the speech of adults and minors alike...

Image that’s going viral, supposed to be the boy beat to death in Narbonne The endless slaying of France by the invaders. The Southern French town of Narbonne, located in the Occitania region has been rocked by the brutal beating of a 17-year-old boy who was found seriously injured on Friday on a construction site, and later died. The public prosecutor of Narbonne, Jean-Philippe Rey, confirmed that five people, including three minors, were indicted for attempted murder and placed in pre-trial detention. Images of the attack have gone viral on social media platforms, where multiple users identified the attackers as...

They’re flipping off social media. Nostalgic ’80s tech firm Commodore is hoping to combat tech addiction by releasing a retro flip phone that banishes social media apps. Dubbed the Commodore Callback 8020, this vintage phone reboot is billed as a “retreat from Black Mirror technology” designed to “help you spend less time staring at a screen,” per the blog. This throwback perhaps marks a fitting release for a nostalgic company that kickstarted the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and released the Commodore 64 — the best-selling PC of all time. The Callback, which will be available later this year,...

I’m learning to never underestimate the sores of racial discontent. have now written two essays in which the blacks introduced new social media trends to protest the Karmelo Anthony verdict. The first was where they would randomly attack and violently assault unwitting white people and accuse them of being involved with the “jury” or “jury selection.” The second involved them using AI to photoshop themselves into a picture of Austin Metcalf’s grave, making it look like they were urinating all over it. Now, for the third time in two weeks, they’ve got a new one, and this one is called...

What began with a concerned mother calling police on her son ended in the thwarting of a terror plot involving drones and snipers aimed at members of U.S. Congress attending Sunday's UFC event at the White House, the government alleges in a criminal complaint filed against one of the plot's admitted leaders, an Ohio teen. Tycen Proper, 19, of Danville, Ohio, told federal investigators on June 11 he intended to "jump-start" a revolution in the U.S. with an attack on June 14 that would begin with drone bombings over the north side of the arena. Co-conspirators, the charging documents allege,...

The plot to attack the White House’s UFC Freedom 250 event Sunday involved at least 12 suspects across the US who adhered to an “accelerationist” ideology and hoped to bring down American capitalism, according to federal law enforcement sources. The FBI foiled their plans by infiltrating a Signal chat group planning the explosive attack — with a parent of one kid in the messaging platform reporting it to the police, sources told The Post. The suspects are in at least four states — California, Ohio, Missouri and Nebraska. They were plotting to gather in Fredericksburg, Virginia, to launch an explosive...

Britain will ban children under 16 from using a range of social media apps including Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube to protect young people from harmful content and excessive screen time, Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday, Starmer told a news conference that he will fight back if technology companies resist the move, and acknowledged some teens would try to find their way around a ban. But he said he is "not prepared to compromise on the safety and happiness of our children." "Every parent can see it with their own eyes. Social media is making children unhappy," said Starmer, who...

The Supreme Court just issued a unanimous ruling, and the case behind it has everything: Twitter, Saudi dissidents, federal prosecutors, and a fake invoice. The decision came down June 11, 2026, in Abouammo v. United States, No. 25-5146. Justice Elena Kagan wrote for a 9-0 Court, reversing the Ninth Circuit and sending the case back. Legal reporter Katie Buehler summed up the ruling this way: The defendant is Ahmad Abouammo, a former Twitter employee accused of giving confidential information about Saudi dissidents to a high-level Saudi official. According to the Court, the Saudi official wired Abouammo $300,000. Later, after Abouammo...

The Brief A judge who approved a search warrant that led to the arrest of a Henderson County resident over a Facebook post concerning Trinidad's water supply says he was misled by the Trinidad Police Department. Judge R. Scott McKee sent a letter to outgoing Trinidad Police Chief Charles Gregory that questions "the accuracy, completeness, and reliability of information presented" by his officers when he approved the warrant. The woman arrested has since filed a lawsuit against the city after her charges were dropped, while the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality is investigating the city's water supply. SNIP

Alice Smith reposted Nina Wysocka @realninawysocka Elon Musk to Starmer: “Murderous migrants beheading innocent people in their hometown is what’s making people angry, not social media!”

The paper, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, notes that the fertility rate in the U.S. has fallen by 22 per cent since 2007, when the first iPhone went on sale in the country... Until 2011, the iPhone was only available in the U.S. to subscribers of AT&T, allowing the researchers to compare birth rates in counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to counties with little or none in the four years since the first iPhone’s release. Their findings suggest a striking relationship between iPhone access and declining birth rates... As for why exactly this is, the researchers present...

The official account for the Obama White House was hacked on Sunday and spammed with bizarre memes. The unidentified hacker added some pictures to the @obamawhitehouse account, including an AI-generated image that claimed the White House was now under Shiite control, according to TMZ. He also added some posts to the page's Instagram Stories. But a representative for Meta - the parent company of Instagram - said the account has now been secured and all of the unauthorized content removed. The account had previously last been updated in 2017, when President Donald Trump took office for his first term. However,...

“Hell on Wheels” murderer Mackenzie Shirilla whined to her mother because she missed her iPad and wasn’t satisfied with the quality of prison food, demanding a cushier lifestyle while locked behind bars. Shirilla, 20, made the demands over the phone after she was jailed for intentionally driving her car into a brick wall, killing her ex-boyfriend Dominic Russo and friend Davion Flanagan back in 2023, according to the US Sun. Shirilla, then 19, was caught on camera deliberately flooring her Toyota Camry to 100 mph before it jumped a curb and flew into a brick warehouse in Strongsville, Ohio, back...

Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, is following in his father’s footsteps when it comes to attacking the Jewish state. Khamenei’s official social media account on Tuesday posted a series of posts against Israel, including one describing it as a “cancerous tumor" and one predicting the end of Israel. “The shaken Zionist regime and the cancerous tumor of Israel are approaching the final stages of their wretched existence," read one post. A subsequent post said, “By God’s grace - and in accordance with the decisive and forward-looking words of our martyred Leader ten years ago - the Zionist...

TRINIDAD, Texas - A Facebook post about problems with the city of Trinidad's water quality led to the arrest of a resident, who now says she's filed a lawsuit against the city for what she calls a "political retaliation" arrest. What we know: Police in the City of Trinidad, located in Henderson County around an hour south-east of Dallas, arrested Jennifer Combs on May 8 and charged her with felony false alarm or report. Her arrest stems from a Facebook post she made on her ‘Southern Belle Watch' account, where she claimed that the city's water issues had led to...