Free Republic

Since the 2016 elections, politicians, journalists, and many others have raised the alarm about “foreign election influence” and “disinformation,” demanding greater “content moderation” by social media platforms. It is too easy, they argued, for foreign and malign actors to quickly “go viral” at low cost, leaving the good guys unable to correct bad information. We must become more “resilient” to disinformation. It’s now clear that all of that rhetoric was cover for a sweeping censorship effort by the federal government and government contractors. Since December, a small but growing group of journalists, analysts, and researchers have documented the rise of...

A left-wing think tank erroneously claiming to track Russian online activity was responsible for thousands of bogus stories asserting the nation’s influence in US politics, according to the latest batch of Twitter Files. The Hamilton 68 “dashboard” was the brainchild of former FBI special agent and MSNBC contributor Clint Watts and operated under the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a think tank founded in 2017 — shortly after former President Trump took office. The ASD Advisory Council included such figures as top Clinton ally John Podesta, Obama-era acting CIA Director Michael Morell, former US Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, and former...

Major AI service providers continue to deploy content moderation algorithms designed to suppress and manipulate viewpoints, actively enforcing censorship under the guise of moderation. From Foreign PsyOps to Domestic Thought Control The censorship and content manipulation we see today did not emerge organically—it was the result of government-directed psychological operations (PsyOps) repurposed for domestic control. What was once used in foreign influence campaigns to destabilize adversarial regimes or control narratives abroad was turned inward—against the American people. The Twitter Files, exposed by investigative journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, provided irrefutable evidence that U.S. government agencies used taxpayer dollars to...

Two years ago, Twitter emails offered voters a peek at state censorship. Now, they can be a road map for incoming investigators. Where they might search for wrongdoing In May, 2022, an agent from the FBI’s San Francisco office sent Twitter Trust and Safety Chief Yoel Roth a formal inviation to join an “exclusive group” for “an Executive-level roundtable” on June 8th of that year that would include the Assistant Director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, Bryan Vorndran. Roth was unavailable, so he passed the invite to other team members, who balked for a strange reason. “I’m guessing they’re probably...

With its censorship capacity limited and reputational cancellation attempts no longer working the way they once did, the regime has largely resorted to a combination of law fare (and potentially assassination) to go after Trump and his supporters in the 2024 cycle, a deeply troubling phenomenon about which we’ve written extensively. With Elon’s takeover of X, the public exposure of the Twitter Files, and the looming extinction of key censorship think tanks such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Censorship Industrial complex has taken a number of severe blows in the past couple years. The little known but deeply important...

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is the most famous of the 18 US government agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community (IC) of the United States of America. Unlike the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the law strictly prohibits CIA employees or contractors from spying upon or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil. But now, a new Twitter Files investigation reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of the CIA’s mission-driven venture capital firm and ostensibly “former” IC and CIA analysts were involved in a 2021-2022 effort to take over Twitter’s content management system. The effort...

The ‘Twitter Files Brazil’ reveal how Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes led a ‘sweeping crackdown on free speech’ and targeted conservative voices in the lead-up to the presidential election. (LifeSiteNews) — Internal information from Twitter has shown how the deep state in Brazil pressured the platform to censor content and interfered in the 2022 presidential election. Journalist and author Michael Shellenberger released the “Twitter Files Brazil,” which show “a sweeping crackdown on free speech led by a Supreme Court justice named Alexandre de Moraes.” Online censorship has been a known issue in Brazil for a while. According to...

Government-Backed Censors Who Rigged The 2020 Election Are Now Stealing 2024Tucker Carlson’s interview with Mike Benz should be a wake-up call for all Americans that our government is waging war on us.If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing. In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become. Most importantly, Benz, the executive...

Explosive new evidence adds another terrifying chapter to the incestuous collusion story between President Joe Biden’s administration and Big Tech to censor free speech. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan unleashed a trove of subpoenaed documents on X (formerly Twitter) exposing the Biden admin pressuring leftist tech giant Amazon to censor books that went against government narratives. Amazon — already notorious for how it nuked free speech platform Parler in 2021 from Amazon Web Services for allowing wrongthink to remain uncensored — was ironically disturbed by the White House pressure. “Is the [Biden] Admin asking us to remove books,” asked...

A 45-year-old immigrant from India and Twitter's top lawyer, Vijaya Gadde, spearheaded the decision to permanently suspend US President Donald Trump's Twitter accounts.

Before the COVID lockdowns, social media companies had started contracting with new third-parties organizations called fact-checkers to assist in “content creation.” Getting a pass meant the post or story was amplified but getting dinged for inaccuracy meant that the post would be throttled or deleted.For a while we believed it but certain revelations changed that. We came to realize that the posts labeled false were typically contrary to regime narratives. And a close look at the supposed refutation revealed that many points were very much in dispute. The companies developed a talent for seeming to reveal something false that was...

On Tuesday’s broadcast of NewsNation’s “Cuomo,” Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi discussed the newest Twitter Files and pointed to one email exchange where Twitter “immediately” suspended accounts flagged by the FBI without investigation on Twitter’s part that Twitter later couldn’t point to solid proof to back the FBI’s allegations. Taibbi said, “In one shot, you can see the FBI asks to remove three accounts, that gets forwarded to Twitter, Twitter immediately suspends them, the accounts. But more importantly, when there’s a glitch, and the accounts remain up, the FBI immediately writes back and says, what’s the deal? We just wrote...

Is Obama the architect of the illegal government and Big Tech censoring machine? With the release of the Twitter files by Elon Musk, we learned that the FBI was working with Twitter in censoring and managing messaging on the social media site. From information being gathered in the case between Missouri and Louisiana and the US government, where The Gateway Pundit is the lead plaintiff, we have also learned that this was taking place with other government departments and other Big Tech companies How did this ever get started? It looks like Obama had much to do with this. Jason...

Just as CNN didn't blink twice when it described "fiery but mostly peaceful protests" in 2020, the joke of a media outlet is telling Twitter Files readers "don't believe your lying eyes" when it comes to Big Tech-Big Government censorship collusion. CNN published what amounted to a Big Tech-Big Government press release June 6 headlined: “Twitter’s own lawyers refute Elon Musk’s claim that The ‘Twitter Files’ exposed US government censorship.” CNN’s sources? The lawyers for the censorship-obsessed, pre-Musk Twitter regime in Donald J. Trump v. Twitter, Inc. Wow, who would have thought that people paid to defend pre-Musk Twitter would...

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows was heavily criticized by his home-state paper, The Charlotte Observer, over his texts about alleged efforts last year to overturn the 2020 presidential election.... ...The Charlotte Observer pointed out that Republicans should be "worried" about Meadows' texts instead of the "Twitter Files",,,

Ooooh, this is turning out to be such a good show. Before I get into the latest, let’s recap quickly, shall we? The Missouri v Biden lawsuit sprang from underhanded censorship dealings the Biden administration began with the social media companies almost the second they ascended to the throne. Literally 3 days after Biden took office, the government’s censorship operation was flying. The White House immediately launched a pressure campaign on social media platforms to suppress supposed “COVID misinformation.” The Surgeon General launched his signature “disinformation” initiative at a Virality Project event at the Stanford Internet Observatory. And, Biden himself...

A Democratic delegate to Congress appears to have threatened “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi with up to five years in prison for purportedly lying under oath when he testified before Congress last month. Stacey Plaskett (D-USVI) made the threat in an April 13 letter to Taibbi, accusing the Racket News journalist of contradicting his congressional testimony about Twitter in a subsequent interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Intercept reporter Lee Fang. Hasan invited Taibbi onto his show after his March 9 testimony before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of...

The biggest concern is what GEC paid Park Advisors to do: fund and coordinate the censorship of Americans’ speech and our supposedly free press. The State Department’s Global Engagement Center used a cutout corporation headed by a former intelligence officer to fund and promote the blacklisting of conservative media outlets and other censorship endeavors, research by The Federalist reveals. When Elon Musk gave a group of independent journalists access to internal Twitter communications, the resulting “Twitter Files” quickly revealed the existence of a Censorship-Industrial Complex that included an array of federal agencies colluding with social media companies to censor disfavored...

An IRS agent stopped by the home of Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi the same day of his congressional testimony on the weaponization of the government, according to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who’s demanding an explanation over the oddly timed visit. Jordan sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and the Department of Treasury on Monday in hopes of getting to the bottom of why the federal agent appeared at Taibbi’s New Jersey home on March 9 and left a note, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that cited the letter. The note reportedly instructed...

Matt Taibbi provides more disturbing evidence of how extensive the government’s desire and the outlets’ cooperation were to kill accurate information. Matt Taibbi has just posted the latest batch of internal messages from the social media giant: The Twitter Files #19. This latest release comes just after he and Michael Shellenberger made an appearance before a House Committee regarding the activities at Twitter, and the contentious attitudes and belittling of these reporters by certain House members on March 9 are made even clearer as a result. ... These latest revelations lay out cleanly the organized effort that took place to...