Free Republic

HOUSTON, TX, January 2, 2024 - True the Vote (TTV) declares a decisive triumph in their legal battle against Stacy Abrams' Fair Fight, legal teams led by Marc Elias, and the Biden Department of Justice. A federal court in the Northern District of Georgia today affirmed that citizens have the right to lawfully petition their government in support of election integrity without fear of persecution or prosecution. In a resounding vindication, TTV successfully defended its actions of December 2020, aiding Georgia citizens in filing elector challenges based on data showing over 364,000 voters appeared to be ineligible to vote due...

The Supreme Court faces the challenge of trying to manage the unmanageable on Tuesday when it hears a case that could drastically change the functioning of social media platforms. The case is Gonzalez v. Google and it deals with whether tech platforms can be legally liable for content posted, even from third parties. Social media giants have created a “wild west” atmosphere over the years, where tons of crazy and potentially dangerous material circulate in the “virtual marketplace of ideas.” Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, however, provides broad protections for these platforms from legal liability for the...

Gonzalez v. Google centers on the contention that YouTube’s algorithms engendered the radicalization and recruitment of Islamic State members and affiliates, ultimately making the social media platform liable for attacks like the November 2015 Paris ones that cost the lives of 130 people including the petitioners’ daughter, Mexican-American college student Nohemi The case touches on a core legal article for the Internet, Section 230, which says that social media platforms and other interactive computer services are considered not liable for content posted by their users. “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher...

Section 230 of the Communications Act, which prevents online platforms from being liable for the content posted by their users, will be evaluated by the Supreme Court in the coming season. It’s anyone’s guess how it may be affected, but we can be sure that the regulatory landscape for tech will look rather different this time next year. We’ve discussed Section 230 many times on TechCrunch, and legal definitions and precedents can be found elsewhere, so we need not delve into the particulars for now. It suffices to say that this section of the law essentially says that as long...

On Monday, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear a case this term on social media company liability over user posts. Gonzales v. Google will determine whether social media companies can be held liable for content published on their platforms. Section 230 of 1996’s Communications Decency Act gives the companies immunity from posts made by others. What’s at issue, in this case, is when the companies use algorithms to promote posts generated by others. Are they still immune from liability for the post?The case was brought by relatives of a murder victim, US citizen Nohemi Gonzalez, who was gunned down...

The leftist Big Tech overlords may finally face a day of reckoning as the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the Section 230 law that governs how tech platforms moderate free speech. SCOTUSblog tweeted Oct. 3 that SCOTUS granted a writ of certiorari to Gonzalez v. Google, “involving the scope of tech companies' immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.” USA Today summarized that the case will have “potentially enormous consequences for social media.” It is the “court’s first test of the broad immunity social media companies have enjoyed under a provision known as Section...

President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that his administration would push to end the immunity Big Tech platforms enjoy for third-party content, an effort Republicans previously backed. "I'm calling on Congress to get rid of special immunity for social media companies and impose much stronger transparency requirements on all of them," the president said, per the New York Post. Specifically, he called for the repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, echoing similar demands from Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, amid the outcry over tech company censorship of explosive allegations against Hunter Biden....

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Thursday is introducing a bill to abolish Section 230 — the law the protects online platforms from liability — on the heels of Twitter accepting Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company and take it private. Greene’s bill would eliminate the law making online platforms not liable for content posted by third parties and replace it with a provision to require “reasonable, non-discriminatory access to online communications platforms” through a “common carrier” framework that Greene compared to airlines or package delivery services.

Former President Barack Obama in a major speech on Thursday called for more regulation of social media content, in order to diminish “disinformation.” The former president delivered a speech on the issue at Stanford University after spending months studying the subject.

Big Tech companies are censoring conservative voices and crushing small businesses. Facebook and Twitter kicked President Donald Trump (while he was the incumbent) off their platforms. Google and Apple booted the conservative social media app Parler off their app purchasing platforms. Facebook censored the New York Post’s reporting on the origins of the Coronavirus, and who can forget how Twitter suspended the New York Post for accurately reporting on Hunter Biden’s corruption. Republicans in Congress are finally starting to take this seriously. Big Tech has banned President Trump from Facebook and Twitter, but allows blood-thirsty criminals like Vladimir Putin and...

There has been a lot of digital ink spilled on Section 230 and plenty of threats to eliminate it. *snip* The CDA came about in response to other hot-button issues related to kids and sex content, primarily but not exclusively. There was also a raging dumpster file over ripped-off content, particularly on Usenet, which was an interesting issue because the ripped off content was so voluminous that it constituted 80-90% of the total. A large part of that was due to the fact that Usenet was mostly a text discussion system so to put up binary files (such as images)...

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...

I just sued Facebook. I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t. Here’s the problem: Facebook uses “independent fact-checkers” to try to reduce fake news on its site. That’s a noble goal. Unfortunately, at least one Facebook “fact-checker” is a climate-alarmist group that cleverly uses its Facebook connections to stop debate. Facebook is a private company. It has every right to cut me off. But Facebook does not have the right to just lie about me, yet that’s exactly what Facebook and its “fact-checker”...

... Hawley's legislation will seek to combat the problems reported by the Wall Street Journal by holding social media companies accountable for any harm their platforms do to children. The bill seeks to close Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that currently protects social media companies from lawsuits. ...

Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill into law Thursday barring social media companies from wrongfully censoring users "based on their political beliefs." The new legislation aims to hold Big Tech platforms accountable in an age when many large platforms increasingly use their status as private companies to silence conservative voices without consequence.

President Trump has long decried censorship by Big Tech not only of himself, but of all of us. And it isn’t just all talk. Indeed, if he were to have a personal motto, none could be better than “Acta Non Verba.” Actions, not words.We can now report that his lawyers have filed a Motion for Preliminary Injunction in the President’s lawsuit against YouTube, LLC and its CEO, Sundar Pichai. The lawsuit lists as plaintiffs President Trump and others who have been censored by YouTube. Trump-v-YouTube-Motion-for-Preliminary-InjunctionDownloadA Motion for Preliminary Injunction is a request by a Plaintiff before trial for the court...

ascism has arrived in America, that insidious and pernicious combination of privately-owned companies operating in conjunction with and at the direction of a government that has no interest in free elections, only in the means of gaining and expanding its power over every aspect of our daily lives, while making these companies rich as they help enslave us to the deep state. Jen Psaki, who lied for Hillary Clinton as State Department spokesperson and now lies for the cognitively disabled Joe Biden as White House Press Secretary, has, in a series of pronouncements, admitted the lie that tech tyrants like...

Pornhub asked a Birmingham federal judge on Wednesday to dismiss a lawsuit brought by an Alabama teen who claims she was raped and that the incident was posted to the adult website, claiming the company is immune to liability for what third parties post to the platform. MindGeek, Pornhub’s parent company, said it was entitled to so-called Section 230 immunity, which it said gives Internet companies “broad immunity from liability for content posted to its websites by third parties.”

The Texas Supreme Court ruled that Facebook could be held liable if sex traffickers use the platform to prey on children, arguing the social media website isn’t a “lawless no-man’s-land.” The ruling was made following three Houston-area lawsuits involving teenage trafficking victims who alleged that they met their abusers through Facebook’s messaging service. Prosecutors also said that Facebook was negligent by not doing more to block sex traffickers from using the site. “We do not understand Section 230 to ‘create a lawless no-man’s-land on the Internet’ in which states are powerless to impose liability on websites that knowingly or intentionally...

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) introduced legislation designed to rein in Big Tech censorship of Americans, telling such companies they’ll be getting “no more free passes.” Rubio issued a statement to the Daily Caller in which he accused tech companies and social media platforms of having “openly interfered in our elections” and “baselessly” censored important topics. The bill – dubbed the DISCOURSE Act (Disincentivizing Internet Service Censorship of Online Users and Restrictions on Speech and Expression) – would remove section 230 protections for Big Tech companies that use certain practices and hold them “accountable.”