Free Republic

...Northwestern University received more than $340 million from the country of Qatar from 2012 to 2019 as it operated a campus in the Middle Eastern country and continued a years-long collaboration with Al Jazeera, a media outlet owned by the Qatari government. That’s according to a 2019 Clarion Project report, which found that Al Jazeera and Northwestern University formed a relationship in 2008 when the Qatar Foundation, which the Clarion Project alleges of being linked to terrorism, funded a Northwestern campus in Qatar. Northwestern, one of the top journalism schools in the U.S., partnered with Al Jazeera in an agreement...

On Tuesday Facebook released the results of a study on bias within and by the platform against conservative perspectives and activity on the platform. It was led by former U.S. Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and his team at corporate law firm Covington & Burling LLP.The report confirmed what many had already been experiencing firsthand in the years since social media has become central to global communications, business, governance, and interactivity – that many voices on the right felt subject to arbitrary purposefully targeted restrictions on their ability to operate freely within the terms of services of the platform.Senator Kyl and...

When you send your youngster off to college, you might not mind that they will have to walk on eggshells, respect taboos, snitch on fellow students for politically incorrect jokes and learn to use ad hominem arguments as a means to attack ideas they find "disagreeable." If that's your preference, you can choose from a wide variety of America's top-ranked colleges. If you want to send your youngster to colleges that are seriously committed to civil and diverse debate, pick up a copy of the June 2019 edition of Reason magazine for some guidance. Professors Debra Mashek and Jonathan Haidt...

When the Truth becomes inappropriate, the end of civilization nears. What a tangled web we weave when first we seek to deceive. Consider the mess the World is in. How has that happened? War is the result of dishonest behavior, isn't it? The failure to honestly, openly & effectively communicate with each other results in violent confrontations. Rational objective discussion & debate must rule for there to be peace. At this point, the opposition to the Trump leadership has offered no rational argument with a complicent contolled media propping their idiotic nonsense. It is a sad moment in the history...

Parenting magazine Baby & Family has told readers to beware of families who are “inconspicuous” and “cheerful”, as these warning signs indicate they are right wing and thus “dangerous”. Depicted with illustrations featuring solely blonde women and children, the report says ordinary parents must take action against right-wing families and make clear that their ideology has no place in the world. Asserting that the term “right wing” “stirs up anxiety” and brings to mind “burning refugee homes”, skinheads, and the National Socialist Underground (NSU) group who carried out a string of violent attacks on foreign people, Baby & Family notes...

Two Utah high school seniors lost a round in a debate when they argued against racism and classism by citing the works of two “racist” pundits, psychologist Jordan Peterson and conservative writer Ben Shapiro. A debate judge deemed the writings of “white supremacists” Peterson and Shapiro as inadmissible in the Jan. 5 verbal contest held at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Facebook's massive, secret rulebook for policing speech reveals inconsistencies, gaps and biases... A Message from Yahoo Search What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more What is psoriatic arthritis? Look for symptoms, causes & more The rulebook's details were revealed Thursday night thanks to a Facebook employee who leaked over 1,400 pages of the speech policing rulebook to the Times because he "feared that the company was exercising too much power, with too little oversight — and making too many mistakes."

In his illustrious 50-year career, screenwriter Andrew Davies has forged a formidable reputation for creating strong female characters. But now he says he is not allowed to make his women anything but feisty – by the powerful female executives who run television. Davies, who is known for adaptations of classics such as Pride And Prejudice and War & Peace, says bosses want to see an image of themselves projected on screen, and veto any 'droopy, soppy' girls he wants to pen.

If Twitter hasn’t suspended or banned you yet, don’t feel relieved. You may be next. When Twitter and other big tech companies started banning fringy rightwing characters over the past year or so, few people objected, because even most conservatives weren’t sympathetic to those purged. It’s hard to feel sympathy for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. But once the radicals were banned, it became far easier to ban others. Now, people tend to talk about public issues mostly on the big tech platforms. Minority viewpoints can use them to get around the mainstream or legacy media. A biased article in The...

Hundreds of Facebook employees have criticized a top executive after he attended Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's hearing last week in a show of support for the federal judge, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday.

Representatives from a host of the biggest US tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have scheduled a private meeting for Friday to share their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections.

Executives and creatives are losing their jobs as the entertainment industry becomes less tolerant of offensive remarks, abusive behavior. Disney has severed ties with filmmaker James Gunn, who previously directed two ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ movies. Hollywood’s longstanding say-anything, do-anything culture is rapidly turning into one where the wrong words can have career-killing consequences. Top executives at Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures and Netflix Inc.,as well as creative talent who worked on the “Lethal Weapon” television series and “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies have been fired in recent months after allegations of offensive remarks, verbal abuse and other inappropriate behavior that...

Nigel Farage put Mark Zuckerberg on blast during the Facebook CEO’s testimony to the European Parliament, accusing him of “willful discrimination” against conservatives on the platform, and positing the creation of a “Social Media Bill of Rights” to protect free speech. “Perhaps you’re horrified by this creation of yours and what it’s led to, I don’t know. But what is absolutely true is that since January of this year, you’ve changed your modus operandi, you’ve changed your algorithms, and it has led directly to a very substantial drop in views and engagements for those who have got right-of-center political opinions.”...

Democrats and other supporters of the controversial internet traffic regulations are seeking to turn the tables on Republican opponents by using a legislative tactic, popularized recently by the GOP, to resurrect the rules the Federal Communications Commission struck down last year. ... Democrats are using the maneuver to keep the issue alive heading into this fall's elections, which will determine control of the House and Senate, said Daniel Lyons, an associate professor at Boston College Law School who specializes in telecommunications and internet legal matters. "It keeps the issue in the headlines, and it forces some members of Congress to...

In an interview with Wired magazine, Mark Zuckerberg revealed Facebook’s political agenda — he wants to curb free speech and free expression on the platform in exchange for “safety.” From the Wired interview: I think at the heart of a lot of these issues we face are tradeoffs between real values that people care about. You know, when you think about issues like fake news or hate speech, right, it’s a tradeoff between free speech and free expression and safety and having an informed community. These are all the challenging situations that I think we are working to try to...

MENLO PARK, CA—Giving his arms and legs a nice little stretch while reclining in his office chair Friday afternoon, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, confirmed that he had successfully completed another long day of deciding what people around the world should believe. The tech titan, worth $71 billion, went on to describe the weight that comes along with being the arbiter of moral fitness and objective truth, able to make or break nearly any website on the internet by lowering the organic reach of their posts or outright banning them, based upon Facebook’s opinion of the views expressed in their...

Once upon a time, American schools were something to be proud of, with high expectations and students who – by some accounts – graduated high school with what is now the equivalent of two years of college under their belts. Most schools were under local control and were highly responsive to parents. Today all that has changed. We rank 36th on the world stage. Despite spending on average $12,000 per student per year, public education has become a joke. Why? There are endless reasons, but I’ll give two. One, public education does not permit competition among schools. Journalist and columnist...

<p>Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI director James Comey did not create the social media firestorm Democrats and the mainstream media hoped it would, according to data from SocialFlow. An evaluation by the social media research company found that Facebook postings pertaining to Comey’s firing reached an average of 37,000 users, well below that of other moments in the Trump presidency.</p>

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday confirmed plans for his newest company, called Neuralink Corp., revealing he will be the chief executive of a startup that aims to merge computers with brains so humans could one day engage in “consensual telepathy.” Speaking to writer Tim Urban on the explainer website Wait but Why, Mr. Musk confirmed a Wall Street Journal report last month that Neuralink aims to implant a tiny brain...

Miss Puerto Rico beauty queen, Destiny Velez, was suspended from the Miss America pageant yesterday after blasting Michael Moore and Muslims with a series of anti-Islamic tweets.