Free Republic

Google's right to be forgotten system is woefully inadequate and censoring things it shouldn't. We decided to make a number of right to be forgotten claims to see what would happen. One request was to remove search listings for an automated online profile page that contained someone's name and Twitter handle. There are loads of websites that collate information about people and spew out automated profiles – 192.com and Peekyou.com being two examples. These websites might be annoying, but should they ever be censored from search results if all they are doing is collating publicly available information? None of the information...

Google has removed over 70,000 Internet links, amid accusations it is trying to promote critical reactions to a EU court ruling by targeting major media outlets. The US firm on Thursday (3 July) said it was getting around 1,000 “right to be forgotten” requests a day. The EU court in Luxembourg in May ruled the search giant should delete links on searches done on the basis of a person’s name if found “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant.” …

The European Union's new law giving people a "right to be forgotten," which requires Google to remove links to information about them, is having exactly the effect its critics predicted: It is censoring the internet, giving new tools that help the rich and powerful (and ordinary folk) hide negative information about them, and letting criminals make their histories disappear. Exhibit A: Google was required to delete a link to this BBC article about Stan O'Neal, the former CEO of Merrill Lynch. O'Neal led the bank in the mid-2000s, a period when it became dangerously over-exposed to the looming mortgage crisis....

Sparked by fears that “many dedicated incumbents could be run out of office by well-financed campaigns by dangerously anti-government factions,” Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) and 42 Democratic co-sponsors have drafted a Constitutional Amendment that aims to curb free speech. “Right now as long as a person has enough money to afford it he can take out an ad, publish a broadside, or fund a TV spot against a sitting member of the Government,” Udall pointed out. “The men and women who have devoted their lives to serving the citizens of this great republic don’t deserve this kind of treatment.” Under...

Radio presenter Michael Smith dumped after comments about the Prophet Mohammed,” ABC News Australia, June 29, 2014 Sydney talkback radio host Michael Smith has been told he will no longer be filling in on 2GB after making controversial comments about the Prophet Mohammed. The former 2UE presenter made the comments on Thursday during his regular guest spot with 2GB host Ben Fordham. Smith was discussing the recent controversy over a talk the Festival of Dangerous Ideas had booked – and later cancelled – with a Muslim activist, titled Honour Killings Are Morally Justified. He compared the festival’s invitation to Uthman...

Beginning in September, Google plans to block firearm, ammunition, and gun accessory ads. According to Google Support's "Dangerous Products or Services" page, the company "[wants] to keep people safe both online and offline, so [they] won't allow the promotion of some products or services that cause damage, harm, or injury." Included in the dangerous products for which ads will be blocked are "Guns & Parts." This covers "functional devices that appear to discharge a projectile at high velocity, whether for sport, self-defense, or combat."

After NBC refused to air an ad for new movie “Obvious Child” because it included the word “abortion,” the network is facing heat from Planned Parenthood and Lena Dunham. The “Girls” star tweeted, “NBC refuses to air the trailer for Obvious Child because it mentions abortion and that’s not okay. #StoptheStigma.”

....From California to Virginia and states in between, more than a dozen Mormons interviewed in the past week said they had recently been informed by their bishops that they faced excommunication or risked losing permission to enter a temple because of comments they had made online about their faith, the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.SNIP "When it goes so far as creating organized groups, staging public events to further a cause, and creating literature for members to share in their local congregations," Otterson said, "the church has to protect the integrity of its doctrine as well as...

A high school student in Connecticut is accusing administrators of political censorship after the school restricted access to conservative news outlets and websites while allowing students to visit liberal sites. Andrew Lampart, a student at Nonnewaug High School in Woodbury, Connecticut, was assigned an in-class debate on gun-control during his "Law & You" course. While preparing for the debate during study hall Lampart logged onto the school provided Internet and found out that students were forbidden from visiting The National Association for Gun Rights website or the news outlet TheBlaze.com. "I used my study hall to research gun control facts...

he Supreme Court delivered a major victory on Monday to an anti-abortion group that sought to challenge an Ohio law that bans campaign statements deemed to be false. The justices, in a unanimous decision, ruled that the Susan B. Anthony List can go ahead with a lawsuit challenging the law as a violation of free-speech rights.

Policy decisions and politically driven censorship of the American national security establishment have helped strengthen Al Qaeda's successor and hastened the collapse of the nation of Iraq. ​The current administration and the President represented Operation Iraqi Freedom as the "wrong war," as opposed to the "good war" that was Afghanistan. The Vice President even called the end of our involvement in Iraq one of the great achievements of Obama's tenure. With the jihadi group ISIS now in control of parts of the country that together equal the size of Syria, taking over former US bases, and moving toward the capital...

Robert Reilly is one of the more respected men in Washington, DC. As a very young man, he was a special adviser to President Reagan. He is a longtime music critic, specializing in teaching the emergence of amazing new orchestral music. He was a spokesman behind the green line during the Iraq war, reporting directly to Paul Bremer, head of the occupational authority. He led the Voice of America. Reilly's new book cannot get a hearing; there is a media blackout, a stonewall even among the conservative press who, according to a high-ranking think tank scholar at the Hudson Institute,...

- FrontPage Magazine - http://www.frontpagemag.com - ‘Islamophobia’ Thought Crimes at BerkeleyPosted By Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene On June 4, 2014 @ 12:39 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments [To order David Horowitz and Robert Spencer's pamphlet Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, click here.]What’s an “Islamophobia”-promoting academic to do when there simply aren’t enough hate crimes to sustain the mythical narrative that Muslim-Americans are persecuted for their religion? The Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project (IRDP) at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Race & Gender came up with a brilliant idea for this spring’s Fifth Annual...

Did you ever want to see AC/DC, The B-52′s, Pink Floyd, Donna Summer, The Village People, and Julio Iglesias in the same place? Well then, you can either read my dream journal or check out this list of Western music banned on Soviet radio stations. The list was titled “The approximate list of foreign musical groups and artists whose repertoires contain ideologically harmful compositions” (catchy title) and was distributed to Communist Party officials in January of 1985. We like how they call it an “approximate list”. Everything in the USSR was so slapdash.

Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) is pushing legislation (S-2219) that would empower the federal government to monitor all media to ferret out “hate speech.” “There is a large reservoir of bigotry in our population,” Markey said. “If we are to stamp it out we need to know who is spreading these vile thoughts. While we can’t listen in on everybody at this point we can access all communications passing over the Internet and airwaves.” The Senator denied his Bill is an invasion of privacy. “The Internet and the airwaves are in the public domain,” Markey asserted. “In effect, this means that...

NEW YORK – Justin Bieber is apologizing after a years-old video surfaced showing the then-teenager telling a racist joke with the N-word. In a statement Sunday to The Associated Press, Bieber said when he was a kid he didn't realize how certain words could hurt. He says he learned from his mistakes and apologized for them, and now is apologizing again because they have become public.

SunNews' Brian Lilley follows up with Josh Tickell, filmmaker. The ultimate highlight is at 03:49 as it is revealed directly from the horses mouth: "The truth is that about 30% of the films in Hollywood are funded through the Middle East"video link via VladTepesBlog

Google is starting to accept requests from Europeans who want to erase unflattering information from the results produced by the world’s dominant search engine. The demands can be submitted on a Web page that Google opened late Thursday in response to a landmark ruling issued two weeks ago by Europe’s highest court. The decision gives Europeans the means to polish their online reputations by petitioning Google and other search engines to remove potentially damaging links to newspaper articles and other websites with embarrassing information about their past activities. […] It’s unclear when the whitewashing will begin. So far, Google has...

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg used his commencement address at Harvard University on Thursday to bash a U.S. academic culture that he described as increasingly intolerant of ideas from outside a narrow liberal spectrum. Citing the campus protests that caused luminaries including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde to back out of planned speeches, Bloomberg criticized students and faculty for being hostile to ideas that clashed with their own ideologies. Standing amid the centuries-old stone buildings of Harvard Yard, he compared the atmosphere in U.S. academia to that which prevailed during Senator...

In the early days of the internet, there was much talk of how the web would connect us all, thereby furthering knowledge and fostering community. Yet for all its advocates’ and early adopters’ optimism about its potential to enable us to organise, think and influence one another, freed from institutional supervision or what the newcomers frequently described as “mainstream media bias”, one thing has remained consistently problematic: comments posted under articles or blogs (or “below the line” in internet-speak). ~snip~ One of the great questions for the future of the net is: to what extent this extraordinary freedom will be...