Free Republic

Without consulting with its users, Microsoft has installed an establishment media browser extension, purportedly designed to rate the accuracy of news websites, as a default setting on mobile versions of its Edge browser. In practice, it creates a news blacklist by warning users away from sites including Breitbart News, The Drudge Report, and the Daily Mail. The browser extension, called “Newsguard,” presents users with a red warning label if they navigate to a website that it judges to be unreliable. A “green” rating is given to websites that NewsGuard considers trustworthy. A number of pro-Trump websites, including Breitbart News, are...

The student newspaper of the University of Chicago, the Chicago Maroon, broke some shocking news on January 3 about their school president. It was such a big scoop that the newspaper's Editor-In-Chief, Euirim Choi, wrote it up.  Are you prepared to find out what that newspaper discovered? Well, the news that must have shook up that campus was revealed in the article's blaring headline, "UChicago President Robert Zimmer Voted in the 2016 Republican Primary."

If you think Napoleon Bonaparte was a military genius because he defeated both the Austrian and Russian armies at Austerlitz in 1805 then that must make you a French imperialist. Likewise if you believed that Erwin Rommel was a good general for accomplishing a lot with limited resources then you must be an admirer of the policies of the Third Reich. Oh, and you there. You think that Georgy Zhukov and Vo Nguyen Giap were great generals? Okay, that makes you a lousy Commie! Ridiculous, right? But no more ridiculous than Politico and the Washington Post slamming President Donald Trump for...

Even an occasional glass of wine or beer increases the risk of health problems and dying, according to a major study on drinking in 195 nations that attributes 2.8 million premature deaths worldwide each year to booze. "There is no safe level of alcohol," said Max Griswold, a researcher at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in Seattle, Washington and lead author for a consortium of more than 500 experts. Despite recent research showing that light-to-moderate drinking reduces heart disease, the new study found that alcohol use is more likely than not to do harm. "The protective effect of...

Cue the Papa John vanishing act. Papa John’s, the embattled 5,212-unit pizza chain, has sent precise instructions to its store owners on how to remove every last image and signature of founder John Schnatter from its locations. Store owners should remove Schnatter’s signature from the wooden paddles used to take pizzas out of the oven — and replace it with images of vegetables or cheese...

UNITED KINGDOM, July 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – A doctor who has worked for 26 years with the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) has been “sacked” for refusing to use transgendered patients’ incorrect, “preferred” pronouns. The treatment of the 55-year-old father of four who believes that sex is biological and not a matter of personal preference raises questions about the chilling effect that pro-LGBT policies of government agencies have on freedom of speech, especially when it comes to Christians. Multiple reports from UK media indicate that Dr. David Mackereth was “deemed to be ‘unfit to work’ after he said he would...

As PJ Media is reporting, “YouTuber Calum Long-Collins announced he would be effectively shutting down the channel EnglishShooting, a YouTube channel that racked up more than 15,000 subscribers and more than 12 million views in the past four years. Long-Collins said the police had marked his YouTube channel as a ‘forum of extremism,’ and that he had to ‘show the police that I am a fit character to own firearms within the U.K.'” Here’s the video that Long-Collins made confessing his sins in a last ditch attempt to placate the British authoritarians authorities and convince them to let him keep...

Racist lawyer Aaron Schlossberg will have to find new office space — and an attorney of his own. The 44-year-old was kicked out of his Madison Avenue work space Thursday after he was was captured in a hate-filled rant at Spanish-speaking restaurant workers — and then a Congressman filed a formal complaint to the state court system’s disciplinary committee. Schlossberg had been using a business center in 275 Madison Ave. as an office address for his private law firm — but has been given the boot over the shocking video that went viral Wednesday.

In response to Spotify’s newly launched Hate Content and Hateful Conduct public policy, women’s advocacy group UltraViolet is calling on the streaming service to widen its net beyond R. Kelly and XXXTentacion, which were the first acts to see their music removed from promotional playlists. UltraViolet, a national organization working on a range of issues including reproductive rights, healthcare, economic security, violence and racial justice, published an open letter Monday to Spotify head Daniel Ek, applauding a recent decision to pull Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music from playlists and algorithmic recommendations. However, the group is also imploring that the policy be...

The government should not “criminalise thought”, the UK’s terror watchdog has said, after ministers revealed new laws criminalising viewing “extreme” online material following a wave of Islamist attacks. Earlier this month, Home Secretary Amber Rudd said people could be imprisoned for up to 15 years for “repeatedly viewing” things deemed “far-right propaganda” or “terrorist material” online, but without planning or committing acts of violence. In the wake of recent Islamist attacks, Ms. Rudd said the government could create new criminal offences, including banning orders and extremism disruption orders, backed by potential jail sentences.

British police forces arrested at least nine people a day for “offensive” online comments last year. Figures obtained by The Times through the Freedom of Information Act reveal that 3,395 people across 29 forces were arrested last under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another”, in 2016. The true figure is likely to be significantly higher, as thirteen police forces refused to provide the requested information and two did not provide usable data. Around half of the investigations were abandoned before being brought to prosecution, which...

Transylvania University’s president recently asked Congress to enact legislation that would force Facebook to “remove” any postings of “hate speech” from its website. In an essay for Inside Higher Ed, President Seamus Carey argues in favor of increased government regulation of “hate speech,” a request spurred on by the recent “harassment” of a DACA recipient at the university.

An Australian children’s entertainment company fired a young woman for saying on social media “it’s OK to vote ‘no’” in the country’s current referendum on same-sex “marriage.” Capital Kids Parties owner Madlin Sims may have violated discrimination laws in firing an 18-year-old because Sims said her former employee’s view amounted to hate speech, The Guardian reported. The young woman known thus far as Madeline said in various media interviews that she was let go because her Christian view did not allow her to vote yes in Australia’s voluntary postal survey on gay “marriage.” The plebiscite runs from September 12 through...

Did you know when you search the internet, you're not actually searching the whole internet? Google is the largest search service in the world. But even with trillions of websites indexed, Google’s search only covers about four percent of the net. So what exactly is the 96 percent of the internet that’s ungoogleable? The "mysterious" Deep Web, as tech expert Shelly Palmer facetiously called it in an interview with Circa, is the internet that isn’t indexable by search engines. "It's mostly private information that actually should be private and is set up to be that way," Palmer said. This is...

How Google's Jigsaw is fighting the darkest parts of the internet BY KERRY FLYNN JUL 20, 2017 Fake news, terrorist propaganda, hateful comments — the internet is not the nicest place in the world. Jigsaw is trying to change that. Formerly under Google, Jigsaw now is a subsidiary within Alphabet. The company, under the direction of Alphabet chairman Eric Schmidt and Google Ideas founder Jared Cohen who serves as founder and CEO of Jigsaw, focuses on researching some of the darkest corners of the internet and implementing ways to address them. Yasmin Green, director of research and development at Jigsaw,...

If you're going to create nasty memes to get attention, demand people give you credit for those memes and celebrate when the president of the United States shares one with his roughly 33 million followers, I have no sympathy for you. You're not a martyr for the cause of free expression. There was a time when anonymity allowed Americans with unpopular or unconventional beliefs to make their arguments without fear of retribution. Today, the internet has created an environment that incentivizes people to create detestable messages meant to troll and harass. Then again, this story isn't really about online harassment...

Political correctness is an abstract from the pit of hell, and it smells like smoke. It is dependent upon demagoguing people not to speak truth and the corruption of speech by redefining verbiage. When I speak of the corruption of speech by the redefining of verbiage, a prime example is the word “fascism.” As my son pointed out to me, Google defines “fascism” as: “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization; (in general use) extreme right-wing, authoritarian, or intolerant views or practice.” The Google definition most accurately defines those inhabiting the California state education system. And...

One of the many maddening takeaways from the London Bridge jihad attack is this: If you post videos on YouTube radicalizing Muslim viewers to kill innocent people, YouTube will leave you alone. But if you post a video on YouTube honoring innocent people murdered by barbaric jihadists, your video will get banned. I know. It happened to me in 2006. Eleven years later, the selective censors at Google-YouTube still can't competently distinguish terrorist hate speech from political free speech. Islamic hate preachers such as Ahmad Musa Jibril, whose bloodthirsty rants against non-Muslims reportedly inspired the London Bridge ringleader, have flourished....

The George Soros funded activist organization, Media Matters has targeted Sean Hannity in an attempt to get him booted off of Fox News. Media Matters has posted a list of HannityÂ’s advertisers for liberals to contact, anyone who supports America and the first amendment needs to contact the Hannity advertisers and let them know if they pull their ads, we pull our business. Cars.com, Casper, Crowne Plaza, Leesa Sleep, Peloton, Ring.com and USAA insurance are the only companies that have pulled their ads from his show, but Hannity supporters are letting those companies know that there will be consequences: View...

On Wednesday night, Eric Idle, known to many Monty Python fans as Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir Lancelot, took aim at climate change deniers. "I think that denying climate change is a crime against humanity. And they should be held accountable in a World Court."