Free Republic

Google has found a new way to police the speech of its users: scolding them for typing factual terms into its search bar. After a Justice Department lawsuit resulted in Texas ending in-state tuition for illegal aliens at state universities, I used Google to look up more details about the case. In response to the search “texas scholarships for illegal aliens,” the search engine’s AI overview slapped a patronizing warning at the top of the page, scolding me that “the term ‘illegal alien’ is considered pejorative and offensive.” “It is more accurate and respectful to use terms like ‘undocumented students’...

The headline from Politico’s “Playbook” would have been unthinkable eight years ago: “Meta sends Trump a friend request.” After all, Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is a political lightning rod in conservative political circles, especially after the $300 million worth of “Zuckerbucks” spent during the 2020 election to elect like-minded politicians. Yet lately, Zuckerberg has been singing a much different tune. He referred to President-elect Trump as “badass,” visited him at Mar-a-Lago, and donated one million dollars to his inaugural fund. This week, Meta made news by adding Dana White, a longtime Trump ally and head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship...

History will remember this era as the moment when America’s most sacred principles collided with unprecedented institutional power – and lost. The systematic dismantling of fundamental rights didn’t happen through military force or executive decree, but through the quiet cooperation of tech platforms, media gatekeepers, and government agencies, all claiming to protect us from “misinformation.” Meta’s sudden dismantling of its fact-checking program – announced by Zuckerberg as a “cultural tipping point towards prioritizing speech” – reads like a quiet footnote to what history may record as one of the most staggering violations of fundamental rights in recent memory. After eight...

The State Department’s controversial Global Engagement Center (GEC) shut down this week after congressional lawmakers nixed reauthorizing the agency in spending legislation to keep the government open. “The Global Engagement Center closed on December 23, 2024,” read a message on the agency’s website. The GEC came under fire from House Republicans after journalist Matt Taibbi uncovered evidence that it pressured US social media platforms early in the COVID-19 pandemic to censor Americans online, purportedly to counter “disinformation,” such as theories that the virus leaked out of a laboratory in China. “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a...

Microsoft's unchecked monopolistic practices and deep ties to the Censorship Industrial Complex demand a conservative-led investigation to safeguard free markets and free speech. It’s no secret that many of the tech giants operate as monopolies, and one of the worst offenders is Microsoft. The Federal Trade Commission recently launched an antitrust investigation against Bill Gates’s creation, alleging it works unfairly to stifle competition and control various sectors of the tech market. The FTC wants to inquire into how Microsoft offers its cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity products. The agency is particularly concerned with the tech giant’s bundling services that...

German Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck said that Europe must enact strict speech regulations on Elon Musk’s X platform to fight so-called “disinformation”. Habeck, the likely candidate for chancellor for the leftist Green party in the upcoming elections, laid out his vision for Germany and Europe in a speech to the Neuhardenberg Castle Foundation on Saturday, including more internet censorship in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory. “We cannot put democratic discourse in the hands of Elon Musk and Chinese software,” Habeck said, per Welt. Therefore, he argued, strict EU regulations must be applied to platforms such as TikTok and X.

Despite all that Google did to suppress former President Donald Trump’s website and news about him from right-leaning websites, the GOP nominee overcame the censorship and was victorious on election day. From suppressing right-leaning media in searches for Trump for six straight weeks to suppressing Trump’s website prior to every presidential debate and during the Republican National Convention, Google appeared to try its hardest to hinder candidates whose names were not President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris. On Tuesday, President-elect Donald Trump showed that although election-interfering censorship is a serious problem that must be addressed it is not...

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...

I'm telling you that Barrett has decided she's a politician, not a Justice...' Tech companies are once again colluding with Democrats to push disinformation and censor legitimate conservative opinions, this time with the imprimatur of legitimacy conferred by the U.S. Supreme Court that allows them to do so more shamelessly and aggressively than ever. Today’s censorship is being made possible by the letters A, C and B—as in Justice Amy Coney Barrett. While the court’s two other centrists, Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts, are equally culpable (along with its leftist bloc) in allowing the atrocity that is...

YGTBFKM Until today, I didn't realize that individuals are now being assigned ESG scores that some institutions use to decide whether they will do business with a person. I obviously knew about ESG scores that huge investment firms are using to force corporations to conform to ideological demands. I knew that in some cases, prominent individuals or troublemakers have been blackballed by banks and other firms. And, of course, I know that some companies that sell politically incorrect items are getting deplatformed by PayPal and even web providers. But I didn't know that an industry has sprung up to analyze...

Digital Kill Switches: How Tyrannical Governments Stifle Political Dissent“No president from either party should have the sole power to shut down or take control of the internet or any other of our communication channels during an emergency.”—Senator Rand PaulWhat’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?After all, it’s happening all over the world.Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in...

I completely missed this when it was published at the end of last month. Fortunately, Jesse Singal did a great write-up about it which I noticed today. As you may know, Bill Adair is the founder of Politifact, a site which has generate a lot of content for this blog over the years. Last month, Adair was asked to share his predictions for 2024 and he wrote a piece titled “Fact-checking needs a reboot.” Part of that reboot would be pressuring social media companies to “suppress misinformation” more often.After I founded PolitiFact in 2007, I often said that our goal...

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech. “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their...

Leftist internet traffic cop NewsGuard is the farthest thing from being the unbiased media referee it purports to be. It is a government-funded operation designed to attack right-leaning media by going after their advertiser funding. There are at least five core reasons why Congress should strip funding from NewsGuard in the latest National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) since it received a $750,000 taxpayer-funded grant from the Department of Defense. The state funding of a leftist, so-called journalism gatekeeper that deceptively bills itself as “apolitical” is case in point. Such efforts by the government to censor media it does not approve...

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to freeze an appeals court ruling blocking it from coercing or encouraging social media companies to censor speech. The Fifth Circuit found Friday that the White House, Surgeon General, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FBI violated the First Amendment, partially upholding a lower court’s decision in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden. While it ruled that the July injunction issued by District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty was “vague and broader than necessary,” it issued a revised version prohibiting the Biden administration from taking actions to...

A 19-year-old woman named Chloe Cole, who was medically transitioned as a minor and has since detransitioned, was censored by Instagram over the weekend. It’s unclear why Cole was censored, but the teen captioned a photo of her bio on the social media platform, wherein she identifies herself as a detranstioner. Cole’s bio notes that she’s “female” with two X chromosomes and a “former trans kid.” It also says that she was started on testosterone and puberty blockers at age 13, underwent a double mastectomy at 15, and finally detranstioned at 16. “The big tech overlords think I’m too cute...

We have been waiting for almost a month for the decision from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in this groundbreaking government censorship case. Its implications touch every single American citizen, and enormous precedent was set with this ruling. The following is a detailed analysis of the decision, and I hope that you will spend the time to read it. First, a brief review. The case, Missouri v. Biden, was filed last May by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with private plaintiffs, against numerous agencies in the federal government. Plaintiffs alleged that the government (including the FBI, White...

Google has partnered with the United Nations, World Health Organisation and others in a new global censorship tool that was introduced last Monday, according to LaToya Drake, head of Google News Lab.Google News Lab is “a team within the Google News Initiative whose mission is to collaborate with journalists to fight misinformation” and other things. And, the Google News Initiative (“GNI”) “works with publishers and journalists to fight misinformation.” The GNI and its Lab seem to be one and the same thing with the Lab simply being a page on the GNI website.Below are the short descriptions from GNI’s ‘About’...