Free Republic

The European Union has moved this week to punish the social media company X and Elon Musk for allegedly “deceiving users” through certain company practices. On Thursday, X, which was formerly known as Twitter, was fined €120 million ($140 million) by the European Union for violating one of the international organization’s laws regulating technology companies. The move makes the social media platform the first company to be fined under the jurisdiction of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). “Deceiving users with blue checkmarks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the EU. The DSA...

The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act Vice President JD Vance took to X to slam the EU for its actions, which he described as “garbage” The EU has slapped Elon Musk with a $140 million fine for refusing to censor content on his social-media platform X, in contravention of the bloc’s controversial Digital Services Act (DSA).The hefty fine, announced by Bloomberg, is the first to be issued under the 2023 law, with EU lawmakers promising...

SummaryA new book by Paul Holden, building on reporting by Matt Taibbi, Paul Thacker and others, documents that the “Stop Funding Fake News” (SFFN) campaign — which led to widespread advertiser boycotts and deplatforming of outlets including ZeroHedge, The Federalist, Breitbart, The Canary and others during 2019–2021 — was not a grassroots activist effort as publicly claimed, but a centrally directed political operation run out of the same South London office as Labour Together, the think tank that backed Keir Starmer’s leadership bid.Key findings:SFFN was conceived and resourced by Morgan McSweeney (now Starmer’s chief of staff and formerly sole director...

The American left doesn’t look at the United Kingdom and see a cautionary tale, it sees a template to follow.It’s easy to look at a collapsing civil society in a foreign country and comfort ourselves that, despite all our problems, we’re not as bad off as those people. Americans are especially apt to do this with our cousins in Great Britain, whose country is now in a state of precipitous and probably irreversible decline, and whose political leadership is openly hostile to the native population. But it’s a mistake to comfort ourselves this way, partly because the corruption of a...

LMFAO! There is now an attempt to get corporate media outlets to BOYCOTT President Trump's press conferences and availabilities - "until you clean up your act!" Take Jim Acosta's advice and DO IT! 🤣 Press credentials can be swapped for New Media!

Politics will not succeed in rehabilitating the narrative of man-made, CO2-based climate change to suppress, once again, both the dialogue with the AfD and the critical debate on the Green Deal. The Federal Republic is on an economic crash course. A return to a market economy seems impossible as long as an oversized party cartel rigidly defends the course of the green transformation. The relaxation of the moral contact ban with the AfD by the Association of Family Businesses could now expose the ideological devastation of this path. Marie-Christine Ostermann has been president of the business association Die Familienunternehmer since...

The EU is working at full speed to complete its online surveillance-and-informant network. By the end of the year, all EU member states are required to present so-called “Trusted Flaggers” -- institutions tasked with identifying “problematic” content -- to Brussels for accreditation. Politicians from Germany’s Christian Democratic Union appear especially eager. Hendrik Wüst, CDU politician and Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia, is a child of the current zeitgeist. As the leader of Germany’s most populous state, he views it as his mission not merely to preach the dominant ideology of the CO2-neutral society, but to enforce it rigorously. Together with...

The US State Department will focus on “natural rights” like freedom of speech in its next human rights report, a senior State Department official said Thursday, as the Trump administration targets traditional European allies for alleged freedom of speech restrictions. The move further institutionalizes changes seen in the latest report released in August, which covered the 2024 calendar year. That report alleged “significant human rights issues” in allied countries including the United Kingdom, France and Germany over “serious restrictions on freedom of expression.” The State Department instructed all embassies and consulates in a diplomatic cable Thursday to begin preparing the...

The West is systematically destroying freedom of speech in a startlingly rapid and blunt manner. Increasingly, the authorities are unashamed of their actions in doing so. The revolution, as Stephen Coughlin has predicted, is going from covert to Overt. This first story is about a theatre in the UK cancelling a documentary about the destruction of freedom of speech in the UK. No irony seems to be felt by the theatre. SPIKE: Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled You would think that banning a documentary about free speech would be a bad look for a cultural institution. But that’s precisely...

Suppose you’re a controversial left-wing speaker. Who do you think would be more likely to let you voice your opinions on campus: a slightly conservative man or a democratic socialist woman? Now suppose you’re a controversial right-wing speaker. Who do you think would be more likely to let you voice your opinions on campus: a slightly liberal man or a somewhat conservative woman? It may seem obvious that, regardless of gender, someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views. But recent data gathered by FIRE suggests that’s not always the case. Amazingly, it turns out that...

Digital censorship has been underway in the E.U. for nearly a decade, but last week Brussels took it to a new level. The European Commission unveiled the latest weapon in its arsenal — the European Democracy Shield and accompanying E.U. Strategy for Civil Society — billed as a plan to “protect democracy,” a descriptor that usually means anything but that. The Shield is justified largely as a response to Russia’s information operations and, increasingly, to China’s Gray-Zone warfare. One of its premises is that member-states cannot handle the threats on their own. E.U. leaders say the initiative is designed to...

Ireland’s media regulator began an investigation into social media platform X on Wednesday over concerns it is not giving users a chance to appeal content moderation decisions and that its internal complaint-handling systems are not easy to access. The probe, the first opened by the regulator in its role supervising the compliance of platforms established in Ireland with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, will assess Elon Musk-owned X’s compliance with parts of the law. […] The investigation arose from concerns held by the Irish regulator’s supervision team, as well as information provided by a non-governmental organization, HateAid, and a...

Former U.S. president and censorship proponent Barack Obama’s fingerprints are all over an emerging story that reveals that the left’s quest for global censorship has moved forward unabated by the election of Donald Trump in 2024. According to investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger, the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, on Sept. 24, “hosted a secret dinner between its leaders and top censorship officials from Europe, UK, Brazil, California and Australia.” see post https://x.com/walterkirn/status/1983334224024481920? Shellenberger points to the continued pressure governments around the world are placing on the major tech platforms to conform to a “unified” set of censorship standards. While the altruistic...

Among political conservatives, there is no hotter potato at the moment than the civil liability protections afforded by Section 230 to online operators. Unless Republicans learn to love it again and reject the censorship lawfare complex favored by Democrats, they risk dooming our tech leaders and everyone who uses their products to the sharks circling our legal system.The twenty-six words tucked into the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shielded publishers from liability so they could host and moderate content and still allow a wide range of speech without fear of lawsuits. Since then, Section 230 has evolved to be one...

Geneva (AFP) – UN chief Antonio Guterres on Wednesday called for a fightback against climate disinformation ahead of next month's COP30 summit after US President Donald Trump branded climate change the "greatest con job ever". Guterres issued a robust defence of "clear-eyed" climate science and data, without which, he said, the world would never have understood the emergence of the "dangerous and existential threat of climate change". "We must fight mis- and disinformation, online harassment, and greenwashing," Guterres said at the UN's World Meteorological Organization (WMO) weather and climate agency. "Scientists and researchers should never fear telling the truth." The...

For generations, Americans believed the First Amendment was untouchable — the cornerstone of our Republic. But today, freedom is under attack. Behind closed doors, government agencies, Big Tech, universities, and NGOs built a powerful system to control what citizens can say, hear, and believe. This is not speculation. It is a documented reality. “God Complex: The Rise of America’s Censorship Machine” is a Big Picture Originals documentary that reveals how this system came to be, how it operates, and why every American who values freedom must pay attention. Because when speech is silenced, the truth disappears — and with it,...

The United Kingdom has slapped 4Chan with a £20,000 (around $26,000) fine in a bid to clamp down on platforms that are hindering Online Safety Act (OSA) investigations. UK telecoms regulator Ofcom says the fine was issued after the controversial social media site ignored “legally-binding information requests” related to global revenue and its illegal harms risk assessment. Starting from tomorrow, 4Chan additionally faces a daily penalty of £100 (around $133) for either 60 days or until 4Chan complies with the information requests, up to a maximum of £6,000 (around $8,000). “Today sends a clear message that any service which flagrantly...

Whether by design or by quiet submission to a rapidly-evolving digital landscape, the world’s largest social media companies have allowed their platforms to become factories of division, dehumanization and, increasingly, real-world violence. What began as tools for connection have become engines of rage. It’s no accident. It’s business. At the heart of this transformation lies the engagement algorithm: a seemingly neutral mechanism that curates what billions of people see, like, share and believe. Algorithms are not neutral. They are engineered with a single purpose — to keep us on the platform, clicking, commenting and scrolling. In the race to capture...

Those Americans who insist that ‘it can’t happen here’ need to understand that it already is happening here. In an era where truth is increasingly subordinated to comfort, my colleague and a close friend, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff (an intrepid Austrian counter-jihad activist and human rights and free speech advocate), stands as a beacon of unyielding courage. Sabaditsch-Wolff has endured personal persecution for daring to voice historical facts that challenge prevailing sensitivities. Her October 2025 speech in Dallas, Texas, delivered amid global tensions over censorship and cultural shifts, serves as a stark warning: Free speech is not merely a right, but the...

‘It is time to return to a world where we can say what we wish without fear of being censored, or deplatformed, or shot dead’. The following remarks were submitted as written testimony at a hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee titled, “Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech Into Silencing Americans” on Oct. 8, 2025.Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to testify on behalf of First Amendment speech and press rights and against authoritarian censorship designed to shut down the free speech rights of American citizens....