Free Republic

Another piece of Trojan Horse legislation is moving through Congress. The so-called “RESTRICT Act,” introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Tom Thune (R-S.D.), is supposedly aimed at blocking or disrupting transactions and financial holdings linked to foreign adversaries that the powers that be claim are a threat to national security. In truth, though, the RESTRICT Act appears to have been intentionally designed to target the free speech rights of everyday Americans. Warner, who is described as “a longtime opponent of free speech,” crafted the RESTRICT Act in such a way as to weaponize Big Tech, according to Instagram co-founder...

At today's House Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee hearing, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) questioned D. John Sauer, Special Assistant Attorney General at the Louisiana Department of Justice, about Biden Administration attempts to curb speech on social media. WHITE HOUSE STAFFERS ARE SOME OF THE MOST POWERFUL PEOPLE ON THE PLANET EARTH. OFTENTIMES, THEY GET THE DISPOSITIVE OPINION ON APPOINTMENTS TO DIFFERENT POSITIONS WITH THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. THEY INFLUENCE STATEMENTS OF ADMINISTRATIVE POLICY. THEY INITIATED REGULATORY REFORM. THEY OFTEN HAVE A SIGNIFICANT VOICE ON WHICH ASSIMILATION THAT IS CONSIDERED AN APPROVED. MR. SOUR, I WANT TO UNDERSTAND HOW MANY OF...

For years, conservatives have complained of apparent censorship of their voices on the principal social media platforms, like Facebook, Google and Twitter. Posts or tweets get taken down, or de-boosted, or de-monetized, or degraded in search results, or “shadow-banned,” or slapped with content warnings, or otherwise suppressed. But the response from Big Tech has always been, hey, we’re private companies, and we’re not subject to the First Amendment. We can do as we please. Then Elon Musk took over Twitter, and followed by giving several journalists access to Twitter’s electronic archives to investigate any untoward government manipulation. The result has...

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’s a movement brewing to shut down conservative websites that offer views and information contradicting left-wing orthodoxy. Investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky did an excellent job of uncovering how activist organizations, some partnered with the State Department, work to blacklist and defund conservative media. His ongoing series at the Washington Examiner is worth reading and explains how this is part of a larger effort to effectively shut down conservative media publications. It’s predictable—yet nevertheless disturbing—stuff. “Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly ‘nonpartisan’ groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online ‘disinformation.’” Kaminsky wrote. “These same ‘disinformation’ monitors are...

The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed "disinformation" tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm. The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged "disinformation," the Washington Examiner reported . This same "disinformation" group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress. "Any...

Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates said AI should be considered as a tool to combat “digital misinformation” and “political polarization” in an interview published on Thursday with Handelsblatt, a German news media outlet. In response to a question about the spreading of “misinformation” via AI, Gates referred to the events of January 6, 2021, as an “attack on the Capitol. He said: I’m certainly concerned about political polarization, and I know the U.S. situation best of all. I wouldn’t have expected people to attack the Capitol, or people to deny the validity of election results. I‘m in a state...

The Washington Examiner revealed on Thursday that it is on GDI's list and spoke to an ad-buying source who said Breitbart News is also. Separately, GDI has said that the 10 "riskiest" news outlets for purported disinformation are the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News Network, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics, Reason, and the New York Post.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign think tank headquartered in the United Kingdom, released an assessment of American online media designed to blacklist conservative media outlets and choke off their advertising revenue. The information is kept on what GDI calls its “Dynamic Exclusion List.” Ad networks — including most prominently Xandr — which is owned by Microsoft — are now using this list to refuse to allow advertising on conservative media websites.

The FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars to cover the costs of processing the agency's requests. "I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!" wrote someone with Twitter's Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement (SCALE) team in a February 2021 email, according to internal messages reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger today.

It took $44 billion of Elon Musk’s money to uncover how national-security agencies like the FBI and Homeland Security — as well as Adam Schiff — conducted censorship on Twitter. Those revelations are still continuing, even while not much else seems to be changing on that platform. But what about Facebook? Who’s got $100 billion or so to buy out Mark Zuckerberg and get a peek under Meta’s hood? Reason Magazine certainly doesn’t, but it turns out that all Robby Soave needed was a lawsuit and a court order or two. Internal documents show that Facebook essentially allowed the CDC...

Has Barack Obama gone from ex-president to Democrat party crime boss? It sure looks like it, based on a new report about his treatment of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Investigative reporter Lee Smith has got a stunning report that ran this week in Tablet, comparable in impact to that report by Molly Ball at Time who wrote about how elites conspired to "fortify democracy" by rigging the election against President Trump in 2020 and afterwards thought it was a smart thing to crow about.

Twitter users called the Biden HHS official's remarks 'evil' and an example of 'fascism' Conservatives on Twitter blasted a recently surfaced video of the Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine calling on Big Tech companies to censor "misinformation" about "gender-affirming care" for kids on the internet. Levine, a transgender woman, made the statements in May, though the video gained newfound attention on Twitter just after Christmas. Prominent Twitter users expressed horror that a government official was asking tech companies to censor content disputing that gender-affirming care for youth is a thing of "positive value." During a...

[SEE ALL THE TWEET LINKS AT SITE....TOO MANY TO POST..............] The Twitter files on the government's coordination with Twitter to silence experts and control the narrative around Covid just dropped and I just have to say, the "conspiracy theorists" are batting 1000. It's not surprising that these things were happening. Anyone who was paying attention KNEW that the government was pressuring Twitter to censor inconvenient facts if they contradicted the official state narrative. David Zweig – a journalist who has written for The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, New York Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Wired...

The Biden White House pressured Twitter to both “elevate” and “suppress” users based on their stances on COVID-19 — ultimately “censoring info that was true but inconvenient” to policy makers, according to the latest edition of the “Twitter files” revealed Monday. The coercion campaign during the pandemic began with the Trump administration — which asked Twitter to crack down on stories about panic buying and “runs on grocery stores” in the early days of the outbreak — but was stepped up under Biden, whose administration was focused on the removal of “anti-vaxxer accounts,” according to The Free Press reporter David...

Another round of Elon Musk’s Twitter files were released on Saturday. The latest Twitter files were released by journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve. 1.THREAD: The Twitter Files TWITTER AND “OTHER GOVERNMENT AGENCIES” — Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 24, 2022 After weeks of “Twitter Files” reports detailing close coordination between the FBI and Twitter in moderating social media content, the Bureau issued a statement Wednesday. 2. It didn’t refute allegations. Instead, it decried “conspiracy theorists” publishing “misinformation,” whose “sole aim” is to “discredit the agency.” 3. They must think us unambitious, if our “sole aim” is to discredit the FBI....

The FBI may have violated the First Amendment rights of Twitter users when it flagged accounts for the social media platform to review, several legal experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Twitter became an “agent of the government” when it worked with the FBI to silence specific accounts at the agency’s request, Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow, told the DCNF. Ari Cohn, free speech counsel at TechFreedom, told the DCNF that while the findings of the Twitter Files were “interesting,” he doesn’t believe there are “many legal...

I’d like for you to imagine a scenario where employees in the federal government reached out to Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather a few weeks before an election and convinced them to not do a news story that could affect the outcome. Just called them up and said, “Hey, we know you have the facts of a story exactly accurate, but what if you hold off on running that story until after the election, because it might hurt our guy’s chances…” Like they do in, you know, Communist China. "Twitter Gate" exposes how government manipulates Big Tech for their own...

The social media coordination between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI isn’t limited to Twitter, former Congressman and current CEO of President Trump’s Truth Social, Devin Nunes, alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14. The Twitter Files, a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, confirmed what many Conservatives have alleged for years. Namely, Twitter was shadow-banning accounts that didn’t fit a specific ideology and suspending accounts that bucked the chosen political narrative, Nunes claimed. But, the most concerning revelation in...

New documents reveal how the United States government used a secret Twitter portal to censor COVID-19 content that contradicted the government’s narrative. In its ongoing probe into Twitter’s censorship practices, America First Legal has obtained a fourth set of documents (pdf) exposing a secret Twitter portal, which U.S. government officials used to censor dissenting COVID-19 views in violation of the First Amendment. It’s a revelation Elon Musk described as “extremely concerning.” The documents reveal that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was collaborating with UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and Mafindo to mitigate “disinformation.” Mafindo is a Facebook...