Free Republic

Free speech is on trial at the Supreme Court, but Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson is no fan of the First Amendment. The Constitution, you see, limits the government. But leftists want unlimited government — which is why they hate the Constitution. During Monday’s oral arguments for Murthy v. Missouri, formerly known as Biden v. Missouri, Jackson claimed to oppose any ruling in favor of Americans’ constitutional right to free speech if it limited the government’s ability to censor that speech via Big Tech. “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways...

Police have two persons of interest in connection with the shooting death of a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn that was apparently revenge for an Instagram live beating that the young boy was not involved in, according to police sources. Troy Gill was just a few blocks from his home in Crown Heights near Brooklyn Avenue and St. Marks Avenue around 10 p.m. on Feb. 29 when he was shot four times by rival gang members and left for dead, cops said. The boy had been to a Nets game earlier that night and desperately called his mother as he fled...

Six eighth-grade students in Southwick, Massachusetts have been criminally charged for their involvement in an alleged “hateful and racist” Snapchat group chat. According to Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni, the group chat in question featured appalling language and behavior, including a mock slave auction and derogatory remarks aimed at people of color. The existence of the group chat and the comments made were first reported to school authorities at Southwick Regional School. Upon learning about the group chat, Gulluni notified the Massachusetts State Police Detective Unit to launch an investigation. Subsequently, he authorized the Detective Unit and the Chief of...

A conservative social media influencer is facing federal charges for allegedly breaching the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and helping pass a stolen table out a broken window, according to court records made public Monday. Isabella Maria DeLuca, who boasts more than 333,000 followers on X, was arrested last Friday in California, more than three years after the chaos at the Capitol. The 24-year-old Long Island native and former congressional intern was one of several rioters who allegedly passed a table from a US Senate terrace room to others outside the building that was then used against law enforcement,...

This morning the Supreme Court held oral argument in the case that is now styled Murthy v. Missouri. C-SPAN has posted audio of the oral argument here. The case arises from the government’s “encouragement” of censorship by the social media platforms, as documented in the Twitter Files. We have followed the case as it has wended its way through the district court to the Fifth Circuit and then to the Supreme Court. We (I) have been pulling for the plaintiffs. The Supreme Court has already entered an order staying the narrowed preliminary injunction that had been fashioned by the Fifth...

the appeals panel agreed that several federal offices and agencies, including the White House .. violated the First Amendment by coercing the platforms’ content moderation decisions. ... A federal appeals court ... finding that several agencies likely violated the First Amendment. ... The original case was brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, who alleged that federal officials unduly pressured social media firms to limit speech on their platforms, as they communicated concerns about posts related to the Covid pandemic or elections. ... The decision had an immediate impact. Following the district court’s order in July, the State...

Former MSNBC bomb thrower Keith Olbermann is taking heat for posting to social media his apparent hope that Donald Trump would be assassinated. The shrill, extreme leftist jumped to his X account on Saturday and replied to a Joe Biden campaign post which featured a video of a segment of a speech Trump recently made in Dayton, Ohio. The “Biden-Harris HQ” post of the video was captioned: “Trump says he has been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated.”

A unanimous Supreme Court ruled Friday that public officials can sometimes be sued for blocking their critics on social media, an issue that first arose for the high court in a case involving then-President Donald Trump. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the court, said that officials who use personal accounts to make official statements may not be free to delete comments about those statements or block critics altogether. On the other hand, Barrett wrote, "State officials have private lives and their own constitutional rights." The court ruled in two cases involving lawsuits filed by people who were blocked after...

WASHINGTON, March 15 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court, addressing free speech rights in the digital age, decided on Friday that government officials can sometimes be sued under the Constitution's First Amendment for blocking critics on social media. In unanimous decisions in two cases from California and Michigan, the justices set a new standard for determining if public officials acted in a governmental capacity when blocking critics on social media - a test to be applied in lawsuits accusing them of violating the First Amendment. First Amendment protections for free speech generally constrain government actors, not private individuals. Under the...

China has responded to the new U.S. House bill passed against TikTok, and it doesn't look like it's going to make the U.S.-Sino relationship any better. While the measure still has to wind its way through the Senate, it would essentially ban the platform for all Americans unless TikTok's operations were divested from Chinese parent firm ByteDance (BDNCE). The formal name of the bill, titled the "Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act," also likely riled Beijing, which was quick to lay out its position and accuse Washington of "resorting to acts of bullying."Quote: "Though the U.S. has never...

The House voted on Wednesday to pass a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok, a major challenge to one of the world’s most popular social media apps. The bill would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform — used by roughly 170 million Americans — is spun off from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. It’s not yet clear what the future of the bill will be in the Senate. Lawmakers supportive of the bill have argued TikTok poses a national security threat because the Chinese government could use its intelligence laws against...

The House on Wednesday passed legislation that would ban TikTok if they do not sell the company from its Chinese parent company. The House voted 352-61-1 H.R. 7521, Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. The bill featured 15 Republicans against the bill, 50 Democrats against it, showing that there is strong bipartisan interest in curbing TikTok’s apparent national security threat.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) cited her previous ban on Twitter, the platform now known as X, in opposing legislation that could ban TikTok on Wednesday. “I rise today as the only member of Congress that has ever been banned by social media,” Greene said on the House floor, as the lower chamber prepared to vote on the bill. “Twitter banned me, banned my personal account on which I was campaigning for Congress, raising money and using my free speech to inform the voters in my district they can vote for me,” she continued. “This was not by a company...

Here’s what’s actually going on with the TikTok fight right now. Deep State toadies are taking advantage of anti-China sentiment to transfer TikTok’s surveillance apparatus from China’s evil surveillance state to the U.S. government’s evil surveillance state. TikTok isn’t going to be banned, because neither the CCP-run Chinese government nor the CCP-owned U.S. government wants to lose such a valuable tool for spying on Americans and poisoning the minds of their children. Instead, the corrupt U.S. intelligence bureaucracy wants control of TikTok, which is why it included the divestment mandate. Only a handful of U.S. companies are capable of buying...

@RepThomasMassie The so-called TikTok ban is a trojan horse. The President will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps. The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the “foreign adversary.”

The free speech video platform Rumble has offered to buy TikTok, as legislation moves through Congress that would see the popular social media platform banned in the US if parent company ByteDance does not divest from TikTok In the event that ByteDance divests its ownership in TikTok, Rumble is ready to join a consortium with other parties seeking to acquire and operate TikTok inside the United States. Specifically, we are ready to serve as a cloud technology partner," a letter from Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew states.

The United States government has been pouring millions of tax dollars into developing AI-powered tools to censor and blacklist dissent voices. This month, the House Judiciary’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government Committee revealed that the U.S. government is funding AI censorship technology via the National Science Foundation (NSF) to censor political debate on social media platforms.

I began studying in Leningrad, in the waning days of the Soviet Union, beginning in the fall of 1989. I was 19 years old, more interested in girls than politics, and thought of life behind the Iron Curtain as more novelty than terror. There was little visible suffering or hardship. * * * * Not until much later, after I’d heard years of stories from Russians who’d lived through harder times, did I start to understand the brutal system whose end I got to witness. Parents of friends talked about going on vacations and trying to guess who was the...

Within the last 15 minutes, my FB account logged me out. I figured I had just received my latest ban, but it doesn't seem to be the case. My girlfriend texted me and asked if I had been kicked out, as she had too. Most the people I know and work with have also been kicked out, and Instagram is not working, either. Is it a hack? Or some underpaid IT guy just forgot a certificate somewhere?

America is an outlier: New polling by the Pew Research Center indicates that the U.S. is a global outlier when it comes to majority attitudes toward social media. "People in emerging economies are particularly likely to say social media has advanced their democracy," reports Pew. "Assessments are especially positive in Nigeria and Mexico, where nearly eight-in-ten (77% each) say social media has had a positive effect on democracy." In other places, like Poland, "86% of adults under 40 say social media has benefited democracy in their country, compared with 56% of those ages 40 and older." Younger people tend to...