Free Republic

Social media IS the new public square. It’s the place you go when you want to reach out and find an audience. …….Except Facebook has for all intents and purposes announced that it’s killing off pages. So much for having a conservative voice there. As James O’Keefe just revealed in his latest sting, Twitter felt comfortable banning pro-Trump accounts and one of his unwitting sources said, “Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for...

Twenty years ago, no one had heard of either Facebook or Google, neither of which existed yet. For that matter, no one knew much about social media or search engines in general. Cellphones were still simply mobile, small and expensive telephones. There was no concept of a phone as a handheld computer. Today, five companies -- Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet (Google's parent company) -- have a collective worth of more than $3 trillion. Yet such transnational companies remain mostly exempt from the sort of regulations and accountability faced by most other industries.

But all powerful or not, social media giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter--not even with all their significant might--could get Hillary Clinton elected as president, but instead blame Fake News on their abysmal failure Smearing Conservative news sites as the chief purveyors of “Fake News” is a strictly feminist creation. Calling out Conservative publications as Fake News took rise in the immediate aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s stunning, historic and impossible-to-accept loss to Donald Trump. Left in exile by the outcome of Election 2016, the Democrats moved with lightning speed to drop the Fake News smear on the doorstep of Conservative...

Facebook is tweaking what people see to make their time on it more “meaningful” in a move that could hurt publishers and news organizations that rely on it to spread their content. Facebook has said before that it will emphasize personal connections over business pages and celebrities that people follow. But the latest move represents a major shift, one intended to highlight the posts users are most likely to engage with rather than passively consume.The company says people will likely spend less time on Facebook as a result. The changes come as the company faces criticism that social media can...

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz defended his passion of hunting on Monday after critics said a photo of his dog sitting behind a row of dead geese was offensive ---SNIP--- Mr. Wentz’s response showed no signs of walking back the tweet. “Two of the main things I tweet about are Jesus and hunting,” he wrote. “That’s what I’m passionate about and that won’t ever change!”

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...

Two Iranian anti-government protesters have been killed, after three straight days of demonstrations against economic unrest and the Islamic regime. According to Fox News, these deaths come after the Iranian government warned its citizens that anybody who participated in an "illegal" gathering “must be responsible for their behavior and pay the price." "On Saturday evening, there was an illegal protest in Dorud and a number of people took to the streets responding to calls from hostile groups, leading to clashes,” said Habibollah Khojastehpour, the deputy governor of the western Lorestan province, according to Sky News. “Unfortunately in these clashes two citizens...

When summing up the year now fading, the catchall phrases that generalize a common view don't work. It was neither the best of times nor the worst of times. In our fragmented politics, the center does not hold, and moving out to the edges of the frame doesn't hold us together. There's lots of e pluribus and not much unum. In her new book, "Braving the Wilderness," togetherness guru Brene Brown accurately describes paradoxes that afflict what she calls "common enemy intimacy." We hold on to ideological bunkers with echo chambers in which we can share a common bias flavored...

<p>On December 5, 23-year-old Canadian adult film star August Ames (born Mercedes Grabowski) hanged herself in a public park after a day of being viciously attacked on Twitter. While Ames had battled depression and did not mention the online bullying in her suicide note, it likely played a role: Ames’s final tweet, hours before her death, said “fuck y’all.”</p>

I would bet this has been posted before, but i could'nt find it in search. Epic DJT trolling manifests in DemonRat legislation. I had not seen this before today. h/t /r/The_Donald "This bill amends provisions governing presidential records to: (1) revise the definition of "documentary material" to include social media; (2) revise the definition of "presidential records" to include any personal and official social media account; and (3) define "social media" as any form of electronic communication (such as a website for social networking and microblogging) through which users create an online community to share information, ideas, personal messages, and...

HONG KONG — China does not allow its people to gain access to Facebook, a powerful tool for disseminating information and influencing opinion. As if to demonstrate the platform’s effectiveness, outside its borders China uses it to spread state-produced propaganda around the world, including the United States. So much do China’s government and companies value Facebook that the country is Facebook’s biggest advertising market in Asia, even as it is the only major country in the region that blocks the social network.

After the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had warned that China was trying to recruit German informants for intelligence services via social media networks, Beijing denied these accusations on Monday. They are “baseless accusations” for which there is no evidence, said Lu Kang, a Chinese state department spokesman, adding that the relevant organizations and the German government should act “more responsibly.” The BfV had previously warned that Chinese intelligence were trying to infiltrate parliaments, ministries and authorities with informants, particularly via the professional social media network LinkedIn. […] The BfV added that the aim of Chinese...

Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media. Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven...

Facebook announced they are making a portal that will allow users to find out if they liked pages or followed Instagram accounts made by the Internet Research Agency, the Russian internet company that was outed as a troll farm after the 2016 election. The portal will provide a database of those potential pages and accounts that would have been liked or followed between January 2015 and August 2017, before and after the 2016 election. “This is part of our ongoing effort to protect our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to undermine our democracy,”...

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is not shy when expressing his opinions of President Trump. The entrepreneur, who now sits on Microsoft's board of directors and is a partner at venture capital firm Greylock, campaigned publicly for Hillary Clinton and in March said that Trump was even worse than he feared. In an interview with CNBC's Julia Boorstin at the Disruptor 50 event in San Francisco on Wednesday night, Hoffman had perhaps his harshest words yet about the president, calling him "worse than useless" and saying that he'd "take someone randomly picked from a phone book" over him as president. He...

RUSH: You know, I got to thinking about it. I say so much, the amount of content disseminated every hour on this program, it’s even tough for me to remember it all. You know, I’ll say something on X day, and two weeks later, a story will happen, and I will remember I predicted it, and I wonder how many of you in the audience remember. I’ll never know. I’ll never know. I assume many of you do because I assume you listen very closely and very carefully, but at the same time I realize that it’s impossible to remember...

News Nanny: The Race to Censor Internet News If we don’t fight now, conservatives will vanish from the internet. November 10, 2017 Daniel Greenfield Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism. How can you tell that internet censorship is really taking off? Easy. It’s becoming a business model. Steven Brill is raising $6 million to launch News Guard. This new service will rate news sites on their trustworthiness from green to red. Forget politically unbiased algorithms. The ratings will be conducted by "qualified,...

Porn, spam and hate among the top reasons cited for blocking Facebook and Twitter users Canadian government departments have quietly blocked nearly 22,000 Facebook and Twitter users, with Global Affairs Canada accounting for nearly 20,000 of the blocked accounts, CBC News has learned. Moreover, nearly 1,500 posts — a combination of official messages and comments from readers — have been deleted from various government social media accounts since January 2016. However, there could be even more blocked accounts and deleted posts. In answer to questions tabled by Opposition MPs in the House of Commons, several departments said they don't keep...

For years Americans' right to privacy, as granted by the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, has come under threat as the country's surveillance systems have grown. After intelligence leaks by former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, however, the NSA's domestic dragnet is finally getting the attention that many people feel it deserves.

WASHINGTON ― You may have seen this photo of President Donald Trump’s motorcade winding down a wooded road last week as a woman on a bicycle appeared to give it the bird. The picture, snapped by a White House photographer traveling with the president as he left his golf course in Sterling, Va., went viral almost immediately. News outlets picked up the story when it appeared in a White House pool report. Late-night talk show hosts told jokes about the encounter and people on social media began hailing the unidentified woman as a “she-ro,” using the hashtag #Her2020. The bicyclist’s...