Free Republic

As Israel has continued its bombardment of the Gaza Strip, its restrictions on journalists' access to the region have drawn scrutiny. New data released Thursday suggests Israel's tactics are fueling an "information war" with perverse incentives for hate-mongers and conspiracy theorists. The Committee to Protect Journalists' preliminary estimate counts 95 journalists and media workers who have been killed in Gaza since Hamas' Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and the vast majority of those journalists are Palestinian. At the same time, Israel's decision to prevent international journalists from entering has enraged activists and the Foreign Press Association. The Israeli Supreme Court...

The photo of Judd Blevins was unmistakable. In it, Blevins, bearded and heavyset, held a tiki torch on the University of Virginia campus, on the eve of Unite the Right, a 2017 coming-together of the nation’s neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Connie Vickers had found the photo online along with others showing Blevins marching alongside an angry mob — a crowd of men recorded throughout the night spitting and shouting “Jews will not replace us!” Vickers had it enlarged at a local print and copy shop. On a January night in 2023, she and Nancy Presnall, best friends, retirees and...

Disinformation poses an unprecedented threat to democracy in the United States in 2024, according to researchers, technologists and political scientists. As the presidential election approaches, experts warn that a convergence of events at home and abroad, on traditional and social media — and amid an environment of rising authoritarianism, deep distrust, and political and social unrest — makes the dangers from propaganda, falsehoods and conspiracy theories more dire than ever. The U.S. presidential election comes during a historic year, with billions of people voting in other elections in more than 50 countries, including in Europe, India, Mexico and South Africa....

A handful of influential but unreliable accounts, some of which have been promoted by Elon Musk, are dominating the flow of news on X around the Israel-Hamas war and easily outpacing established mainstream news outlets, according to research published Friday by the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.Researchers analyzed viral posts about the conflict during a three-day period starting from the beginning of the attack against Israel on Oct. 7. They concluded that the most popular posts about the crisis revealed how news on the platform is “faster, more disorienting, and potentially more shaped by Musk himself.”The new...

The Maine man accused of killing at least 18 people and injuring 13 others in the nation’s deadliest mass shooting so far this year was reportedly known to be a “gun fanatic” who neighbors knew to stay away from in the Lewiston community. The suspected shooter, Robert Card, a 40-year-old U.S. Army Reservist and petroleum specialist is being sought in a tense manhunt in connection with the Wednesday night massacres spread across a bowling alley and bar, according to authorities. (ED NOTE: HE’S DEAD, JIM) Local resident Liam Kent, who grew up near the Card family, claimed in an interview...

For more than two months, Revolver has worked to expose the true nature of the 2020 presidential election. Powerful forces in the national media, academia, intelligence services, and the courts are fighting to prevent America from holding an ordinary vote on November 3. Instead, they plan to pull off an Eastern Europe-style “color revolution,” where institutional forces are used to bring about the intended outcome regardless of what the law says or what the public wants, while giving the whole process a gloss of democratic legitimacy.Harassment, censorship, and intimidation of Trump supporters by any means necessary is a key element of...

Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and an NBC News reporter had a tense interview published Monday that widely centered around his conspiratorial views on vaccines, with the reporter calling their encounter "unsettling." Described by NBC News' Brandy Zadrozny as "one of the world's foremost conspiracy theorists," Kennedy was pushed on why he was running as a Democrat given his appeal to some corners of the political right, why he touts the unfounded theory of childhood vaccinations being linked to autism and the longshot nature of his 2024 challenge to President Biden for the Democratic nomination.

The social media posts started in May: photos and videos of smiling people, mostly women, drinking Mason jars of black liquid, slathering black paste on their faces and feet, or dipping babies and dogs in tubs of the black water. They tagged the posts #BOO and linked to a website that sold a product called Black Oxygen Organics. Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed...

Should we be shocked that a so-called journalist is criticizing a legal process used by people to understand what their own governments are doing? Absolutely not.Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter at NBC News, is displeased with how American citizens have mobilized against critical race theory. Many are using open-records laws to obtain evidence of what public entities are doing with their tax dollars.To Zadrozny, people who seek to hold government accountable via the Freedom of Information Act—passed by Democrat President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966—are participating in an “onerous” process. Well, is she in favor of governments keeping public information...

In semi-private, encrypted chats, neo-Nazis and other far-right extremists planned rallies in dozens of cities Sunday to promote their racist movements and spread their ideologies to larger audiences. Hyped by organizers as events that would make “the whole world tremble,” the rallies ran into a major problem: Hardly anyone showed up. The “White Lives Matter” rallies, the first major real-world organizing efforts by white supremacists since 2018, were planned on the encrypted app Telegram after many aligned groups were alleged to have taken part in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S Capitol.

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden's laptop, a fake "intelligence" document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden's son and business in China. The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake "intelligence firm" called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents. The author of the document, a self-identified Swiss security analyst named Martin Aspen, is a fabricated identity, according to analysis by disinformation researchers, who also...

.Despite the document's questionable authorship and anonymous sourcing, its claims that Hunter Biden has a problematic connection to the Communist Party of China have been used by people who oppose the Chinese government, as well as by far-right influencers, to baselessly accuse candidate Joe Biden of being beholden to the Chinese government...

On Wednesday night, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson did a segment going after the work of NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny, saying, “Her job is personally seeking out and identifying information about anonymous Trump supporters online.” He brought on Darren Beattie from Revolver News, who accused Zadrozny of “doing everything she can to unearth anonymous Trump supporters basically so she can ruin their lives.” “Why would NBC News be doing something like this?” Carlson asked. Beattie said journalists like her are trying to “crush the rebellion of the American people against their corrupt ruling class associated with the victory of Donald...