Free Republic

Facebook is changing its company name to "Meta." Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement last week after several weeks of terrible press and political attacks against the company. Zuckerberg wants the company's focus to be on what he calls the "metaverse," an online virtual reality world that connects to actual reality. On October 4, 2021, Facebook went dark. So too did its other outlets, WhatsApp and Instagram. A friend texted me, "I cannot remember the last time I pooped without reading memes on Instagram." The outage came as Congress began hearings on Facebook, complete with a whistleblower, Frances Haugen. Congress wants...

Big Tech has a big appetite for power – and it fully intends to devour American democracy. The recent reporting by The New York Post proves once again that political bias has always been and will always be the driving force behind Big Tech’s actions -- which is precisely why the American people should be wary of any tech giant’s campaign to influence the legislative process in Washington. For years, social media giants such as Facebook have insisted that their censorship policies stem from good intentions, and that their public advocacy efforts are strictly nonpartisan. “At Facebook, we took our...

The last election was unacceptable. And before the next one, more Republican leaders must wake up to the mess that was created in 2020 and refuse to accept another sloppy round.MADISON, Wis. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reaffirmed his state’s commitment to election integrity on Tuesday, especially keeping tech giants and their partisan CEOs from corrupting local elections. Given what we know now about how Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020, other states would do well to follow DeSantis’s lead — and Wisconsin is a good case study in...

Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, recently excoriated several Republican legislators for drawing attention to the undue influence of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in American politics. These legislators, appropriately upset, referred to his hundreds of millions of dollars in donations as “Zuckerbucks.” Let’s be clear: “Zuckerbucks” is nothing more than a pointed diss. But Greenblatt claimed that it was not just criticism of an individual (who happens to be a Jew, and a rather secular one at that), but rather a bigoted broadside against the Jewish people. “The term ‘Zuckerbucks’ is a revival of the anti-Semitic...

Democrats often like to talk about getting corporate money out of politics. Several candidates have even made it part of their campaign platform. Why then, is there such an uproar from the Left regarding state-level election integrity efforts that ban outsider money in local election administration? In a confusing shift, progressives cheer as corporations criticize or leave states like Georgia for cracking down on attempts to manipulate voters. Honestly, of all the headaches, disruptions, and inquiries after Election Day (more like Election Week 2020), the discovery of the Facebook CEO’s funding of local elections is one of the most alarming....

“He who pays the piper calls the tune.” It’s a hard, fast rule in the world of politics, which is precisely why we must always be vigilant against the corrupting influence of private money in our public electoral process.There was a great deal of consternation expressed throughout 2020 about funding nationwide elections in the midst of a deadly pandemic. Fortunately, our public institutions were up to the test. Unfortunately, we also experienced the reality of large-scale private election funding for the first time — and in the process discovered the reason we had never allowed it before.Wealthy individuals and corporations,...

Over these past few weeks, Apple has experienced something it isn't used to: bad PR in the wake of essentially banning popular social media app Parler from its phones without publicly providing any truthful explanationWar is brewing in Silicon Valley. A long-simmering fight between Apple and Facebook — two of the architects of Big Tech — spilled into the avenue this past week, with commercial and legal threats hitting the pages of both tech publications and broader media.To read the Cult of Mac journalists who dominate Big Tech reporting, you’d think America had flipped the calendar back 10 years to...

As the American right continues to sort through its identity crisis, four years after the earth-shattering election of a heterodox Republican Party presidential standard-bearer, battle lines are hardening on the issue of Big Tech's hectoring censorship and its monopolistic corporate misbehavior. The increasing brazenness with which the various Big Tech behemoths distort their search algorithms to hide conservative viewpoints, undermine conservatives through "shadow banning" and weaponize the sanctimonious and self-serving "fact-checking" cottage industry to suppress conservative voices has long been clear to those of us who, to use the parlance of the day, are "very online." The 2017 dismissal of...

Here it is, the progressives’ tax policy: “Let’s just take their money." And that is the deep thought that was put into the Make Billionaires Pay Act which was proposed in Congress last week. As Rob Emanuel famously said: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.” Senators Sanders, Markey and Gillibrand introduced the Make Billionaires Pay Act. Of course, it is supported by the regular cast of characters: Omar, etc.The bill is very straight forward: (1) Calculate the...

The debate about whether social media companies should have protection from liability misses a larger question about their role in American society. There’s nothing like a row between Twitter and President Trump to turn everyone into an expert on 47 U.S. Code § 230, a heretofore obscure section of federal law that deals with liability protections for companies like Twitter.Go on social media right now and you’re bound to find friends, neighbors, and colleagues opining on federal statutes and citing old Supreme Court cases to bolster their arguments that we have to do this or that right now to save the...

House members summoned Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Washington, D.C., and grilled him -- harshly -- about his plan to create a new currency, Libra. “Why should we trust you?!” asked Congressman Mike Doyle. I liked it when Zuckerberg said, “I actually don’t know if Libra’s going to work, but I believe that it’s important to try new things.” He was right. That’s very important. The Libra would make it easier to transfer money anywhere in the world. It also promises stability. Its value would be based on a basket of currencies from different countries, which would protect Libra owners from...

In the not too distant past, most adults realized that not everything one saw on the internet or on social media was to be taken as true. Today, however, what used to be a sarcastic phrase – “I saw it on the internet so it must be true” – is taken quite literally, regardless of the online source for such information; especially if it confirms our existing opinions and beliefs. This reflects a deep-seated cultural problem far beyond the ken of the Congress to solve; yet, of course, they try. And, as is par for the congressional course, they are...

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to know that Facebook strives for diversity in its workforce -- and not just on the basis of race or gender. The CEO says he works hard to recruit people who attended a state school, are rooted to their local communities and come from traditional backgrounds. "We certainly do," Zuckerberg said of his 40,000 mostly U.S.-based employees in an interview with the New York Post. "There's a woman who runs our commerce product and is deeply religious," he said. "The person who runs policies of the company is quite a prominent Republican. So we have people...