Free Republic

Representatives from thirteen states and Washington, D.C., are converging in Washington for a meeting about a possible antitrust lawsuit against top tech companies over alleged bias against conservatives, according to BuzzFeed News. BuzzFeed reported that the meeting is set to take place Tuesday at 10 a.m. between top Department of Justice officials and the attorneys general from Alabama, California, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Tennessee, Utah and D.C. Representatives from Arkansas, Arizona, Missouri, Texas, and Washington state are also expected to attend, according to BuzzFeed. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who will attend with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, originally invited 24...

<p>Recently I spent some time at NJ Best Buy store waiting for service at cell phone department. Loged to their Network and internet access. Loaded FReerepublic page, when trying to load second page, my access got blocked with message about "innapropriet" content. That was it! Looks like communist fingers are getting long.</p>

Violent anti-Trump rhetoric, harassment of White House officials and attacks on the president’s supporters have seemingly become the new norm since Trump took office. In the latest incident on Sunday, Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings joked that it would be a “catastrophe” if anyone saved President Trump from drowning. (RELATED: Dem Rep. Alcee Hastings Jokes About Trump Drowning In The Potomac River) The Daily Caller compiled a list of nearly two-dozen incidents alone since January in which Democratic officials made violent jokes about the president and his supporters, Trump officials were harassed in public and other disturbing incidents that lowered the...

Following the removal of Alex Jones from Facebook, Apple and YouTube, for violating “hate speech” policies, Democrat Senator Chris Murphy tweeted “Infowars is just the tip of a giant iceberg.”Monday afternoon Murphy tweeted, “I know Facebook and Apple and YouTube have gotten so big they sometimes seem like the government. But they aren’t. They are private companies that shouldn’t knowingly spread lies and hate. They took a good first step today removing Infowars. Infowars is just the tip of the iceberg of hate and lies that uses sites like Facebook and Youtube to tear our nation apart. These companies must do more than take down one website. The survival of our...

Elizabeth Heng nearly beat incumbent Democratic congressman Jim Costa in California’s open primaries in early June. The 53–47 outcome would have made her the darling of the national political media, had she been a Democrat. She will face Costa again in the general election in November. My colleague Alexandra DeSanctis wrote an excellent piece last month profiling the young, smart, 33-year-old Republican contender. So this happened yesterday. Heng’s campaign had tried to place this video as an ad on Facebook. It begins with her family’s roots — amidst the horror of Cambodian genocide. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUJXqJ4f_to And Facebook responded with a...

Today’s white supremacist and neo-Nazi social media trolls have much in common with the angry mobs that beat civil rights activists at lunch counters, defaced houses of worship, and stood in the schoolhouse door. Both then and now, these hateful forces sought to disenfranchise and exclude minorities and women from modern society. The tech industry has catalyzed a new generation of hate groups looking to provoke tensions and precipitate violence online. The time has come to deploy civil rights laws to the digital economy. Hateful activities on social media platforms aimed at racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, women, and the...

A new report from left-leaning VICE News revealed that Twitter is hiding the accounts of certain high-profile conservatives from users — which Breitbart News has been covering for years. A new report published on Wednesday by VICE News details the ongoing censorship of conservatives on social media. This time, the offender is Twitter. Through an objective analysis, VICE News reporter Alex Thompson concluded that Twitter is hiding the accounts of certain high-profile conservatives from its user through a process referred to as “shadowbanning.” The Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, several conservative Republican congressmen, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesman no longer...

Pressure is mounting against the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) for its controversial partnership with the San Diego Unified School District in developing an anti-Islamophobia bullying initiative that was enacted last April. Investigative subpoenas were issued Wednesday afternoon to CAIR’s chapter in California that seek all communications and documents concerning its involvement in creating the allegedly unconstitutional initiative. CAIR-California will need to produce the documents within 10 days, or it risks facing legal penalties for being held in contempt of court, according to the Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF), a religious liberty group that issued the subpoenas.

YouTube Shows Dennis Prager's Claim Of Discrimination Against Conservatives Is Laughable You will recall that Dennis Prager, the conservative commentator who also runs a YouTube channel to inform his viewers of his perspective on a variety of topics, recently sued YouTube. The meat of Prager's claims is that YouTube is censoring some of his videos purely because he is a conservative -- with the clear implication being that YouTube is a liberal bastion of conservative-hating video hosting. Just to be clear, there is no real evidence for that. What there is evidence for is that YouTube is trying very hard...

[FULL TITLE] [Report: Facebook Algorithm Change Hits Fox, Breitbart, Conservative Sites – CNN, New York Times Unaffected] A report from the Outline finds that conservative sites including Breitbart News and Fox have also seen dramatic falls in engagement, while mainstream sites like CNN and the New York Times were unaffected. Using data from analytics service Buzzsumo, the online publication found a stark contrast in the engagement rate for conservative media vs. mainstream media, with the former dropping sharply while the latter held steady. The Outline also found a decline in engagement for what they call left-wing “clickbait” sites, including Shareblue...

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...

314 Action Wants to Elect Scientists, But Only if They're Democrats The U.S. Congress is made up mostly of professional politicians and lawyers. This comes as a surprise to precisely no one, but the sheer numbers are rather striking.According to the Congressional Research Service (PDF, Table 2), the 115th Congress consists of 168 Representatives (out of 435) who are lawyers, and the Senate has 50 lawyers (out of 100). Combined, lawyers make up nearly 41% of Congress.How many lawyers are in the U.S.? One law firm (with a nifty interactive map!) estimates roughly 1.3 million. Given that the U.S. population...

A former Union High School teacher who in 2011 called homosexuality a "perverted spirit" that "breeds like cancer" has agreed to a three-year suspension of her teaching certificates. The posts on Jenye "Viki" Knox's personal Facebook page eventually caused the special education teacher and faculty adviser to the school's Bible study group to resign. She later filed a federal lawsuit claiming school officials had violated her free speech and religious rights.

Germany is set to start enforcing a law that demands social media sites move quickly to remove hate speech, fake news and illegal material. Sites that do not remove “obviously illegal” posts could face fines of up to €50 million (£44.3 million; $60 million). The law gives the networks 24 hours to act after they have been told about lawbreaking material. Social networks and media sites with more than two million members will fall under the law’s provisions. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube will be the law’s main focus, but it is also likely to be applied to Reddit, Tumblr and...

The new rules took effect today. Twitter began enforcing new rules today to suspend users affiliated with hate groups “on and off the platform” — a policy that already has led to the disabling of some alt-right accounts. Initially announced in November, Twitter also started penalizing users whose profiles include “hateful imagery and display names,” presumably including Nazi insignia, or those who use a “username, display name, or profile bio to engage in abusive behavior.” For Twitter, the two new restrictions are attempts to combat rampant harassment and abuse on the site. Users affiliated with the alt-right or neo-Nazi movements...

Can we just get along? This question is being asked more and more, what with the bitter polarization of the nation. The answer, right now, would appear to be a resounding no. It’s not because we can’t. We don’t want to. I had that thought the other day when I was listening to the Seattle City Council. Many council meetings of late involve left-wingers shouting at other left-wingers for not being left-wing enough. But on this day, a new purity test of left-wingedness was revealed. The council was debating the juvenile-justice issue. Not everyone agrees whether a new jail should...

Next week’s scheduled speech by right-wing pundit Ann Coulter at UC Berkeley is off — for now — because campus officials say they won’t be able to protect participants from rioting if it should happen. "We have been unable to find a safe and suitable venue for your planned April 27 event featuring Ann Coulter," vice chancellors Scott Biddy and Stephen Sutton emailed the student groups co-hosting the event — the Berkeley College Republicans and BridgeUSA — Tuesday evening.

The former Federal Election Commission chairwoman Ann M. Ravel says that political speech must be controlled on social media. She presented her remarks in a speech at UC Berkeley, calling for regulations against “fake news.” Speaking at an event called “Future of Democracy,” Ravel argued the proliferation of “fake news” and political advertising on platforms like Facebook influenced elections. She warned that the lack of disclosure by the creators of these campaigns was becoming a huge problem. “We know that there’s a lot of campaigning that’s moved to the internet, whether it’s through fake news or just outright advertising and...

A radio station that covers the greater Washington, D.C. metropolitan area stopped running a pro-life ad this week after the abortion lobby complained. WTOP pulled an ad from the Susan B. Anthony List (SBA List), a political group that elects and supports pro-life women, after "abortion activists demanded [they] take it off the air," SBA List wrote in an email to supporters. SBA List Press Secretary Nicole Stacy confirmed to LifeSiteNews that WTOP removed the ad "saying they received complaints." "It's a fact: Planned Parenthood is America's largest abortion business," a female voice says in the 31-second ad. "Nearly a...

It sounds like Nicole Kidman is keeping her eyes wide shut when it comes to the many potential problems of a Donald Trump presidency. The Oscar-winning actress, who is a dual citizen of both the United States and Australia, caused some controversy this week when she encouraged Americans to accept and support the reality-TV-host-turned-politician now that he’s been elected. “I’m always reticent to start commenting politically; I’ve never done it in terms of America or Australia. I’m issue-based,” Kidman explained in a wide-ranging interview with BBC Two about her film “Lion.” “So I just say, he’s now elected, and we...