Free Republic

Author and journalist Michael Shellenberger has said that “U.S. and U.K. military contractors” have used “sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics… against the American people” in sworn testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives. In a hearing of the Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH) on suppression of free speech by the government, Shellenberger presented the information he received from a whistleblower about the origins of the so-called “Censorship Industrial complex.” Shellenberger, one of the “Twitter Files” authors, coined the phrase “Censorship Industrial Complex” to describe the network of government and private entities...

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Here is a disturbing story. It demonstrates intrigue, corruption and disdain for American principles at the highest level. Perhaps the saddest thing about this story is that you probably won’t be surprised. Especially if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years. The story is this: Twitter and other social media platforms have been cozy with the Department of Homeland Security ... But you knew that. And maybe Elon Musk did in his purchase of Twitter last week. ... Job one for Musk was to not only fire CEO Parag Agrawal but also Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and...

The Twitter Files show how the FBI deputized Twitter to conduct illegal censorship of American citizens and undermine the First Amendment. ... Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October and the subsequent reporting on the “Twitter Files” by journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and a handful of others beginning in early December is one of the most important news stories of our time. The “Twitter Files” story encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the “Twitter Files” reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to...

There were a lot of dramatic moments at the House Oversight Committee hearing on Wednesday. Among the most informative was when Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) nailed former head of Twitter Trust and Safety Yoel Roth for Twitter’s contact with the Biden team to suppress tweets. He showed the email contact even as Roth was professing not to remember, yet showing that Roth knew enough to know what random URLs were referencing. One of the other big concerns among many conservatives over the past few years was being “shadow banned” — where you are still being allowed to tweet but your...

The Twitter Files reveal that one of the most common news sources of the Trump era was a scam, making ordinary American political conversations look like Russian spywork ... Ambitious media frauds Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair crippled the reputations of the New Republic and New York Times, respectively, by slipping years of invented news stories into their pages. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we can welcome a new member to their infamous club: Hamilton 68. If one goes by volume alone, this oft-cited neoliberal think-tank that spawned hundreds of fraudulent headlines and TV news segments may go down as...

We naturally think of our Founding Fathers as the heirs of the early settlers – those courageous men and women whose grandparents and great grandparents had come from England, Scotland, or Holland, fleeing religious persecution as Christians of a different denomination than the ruling class, or seeking freedom and opportunity in a new land. And many certainly were. But some of our Founding Fathers – some of the greatest heroes, in fact – were foreigners who heard about our cause and felt it in their hearts. New arrivals, from Europe or the Caribbean, who heard of the American independence movement...

Former Twitter boss Jack Dorsey once testified under oath in 2018 that his company never shadowbanned or censored conservative users. The claims have blown up amid a series of disclosures by the company — now under new management by billionaire and free-speech advocate Elon Musk, who bought it in October — showing a systemic effort to silence prominent conservative voices on the platform. Dorsey appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on September 2018 to discuss “Transparency and Accountability” at the company. While there he came in for a grilling from GOP lawmakers.

VIDEO I had originally intended to put together a compilation of liberal reactions to Senator Kirsten Sinema ditching the Democrats. However, I changed gears when I began doing a YouTube search for such videos. What came up on the search results filtered for the past day was an OCEAN of nothing but liberal outlets with a couple of obligatory Fox News videos tossed in there in order to give YouTube the lame excuse that their search results are not biased because of the inclusion of Fox News. I hope the new Congress will look into the scandal of YouTube presenting...

Ian Miles Cheong on Twitter: "So here’s a question for @elonmusk and @bariweiss: were any political candidates — either in the US or elsewhere — subject to shadowbanning while they were running for office or seeking re-election?" / Twitter Elon Musk on Twitter: "@stillgray @bariweiss Yes" / Twitter https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601059434330890241 Related:Who is Vijaya Gadde, the Twitter exec involved in censoring Post’s Hunter Biden laptop bombshell?

Twitter CEO Elon Musk posted a poll on the platform on Friday to ask users if they believe former President Trump’s account should be restored. Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection following tweets he made that the company determined to be in violation of its policy against glorifying or inciting violence. But Musk, who completed his acquisition of the company last month, has indicated a hesitancy to continue Trump’s suspension and a general opposition to lifetime bans. Musk commented on the poll, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” a Latin phrase meaning “the voice...

Last week the corrupt media’s penchant for spinning all things conservative caused a near-fatal case of whiplash. The left began by chastising conservatives for supposedly building “its own echo chamber,” but by the next day, when news broke that Devin Nunes was resigning from Congress to serve as the CEO of Donald Trump’s new media company, the complained-of conservative ecosystem merely represented grift. Both narratives are false, however, which is precisely why leftists peddled them so hard. Axios launched the “echo chamber” accusation with its article titled, “Right wing builds its own echo chamber.” “Conservatives are aggressively building their own...

The only way remaining to truly protect freedom of expression and, in turn, our democracy, is by building free and open internet.In a meeting of a House antitrust subcomittee last week, members took turns lamenting the market supremacy of Big Tech — and making pledges to curtail it. Bipartisan consensus on this is refreshing, and it is in fact the charge of government to ensure free markets by breaking up monopolies.Americans, however, should not put their trust in princes. While these hearings make for good campaign ads, Congress has a bad track record of helping Americans, and American innovators can...

I don’t normally write in first person. It’s not a matter of being pretentious or anything, but the monks trained me well: in high school English, with our trusted copies of Warriner’s Guide to English Grammar and Composition perpetually at hand, we were reminded that the first person is to be avoided at all costs. Write like the dispassionate observer, out of the action, unless you’re penning a film noir or a personal letter. But when you find yourself in jail, and you need to write about the experience, well, there’s no substitute for the first person. If you need...

Instead of being a vital technology empowering average people to learn and act for themselves, the internet now mostly succeeds in making users feel small, paranoid, and helpless. Some people might take issue with Facebook’s decision to remove posts attempting to organize protests against shelter-in-place orders, Twitter’s stance against presumed misinformation, and major news outlets acting as mouthpieces for the Chinese government. But by now, most people hardly blink at these heavy-handed moves to control public speech. They are told that dissent is either misinformation or hate speech, and, in the midst of a pandemic, such freedoms are positively dangerous.This...

It was tech giant Twitter that let the phrase "Die Trump" trend overseas. It was Twitter from which Disney walked away because of its "nastiness extraordinary." It is Twitter that has been accused countless times of shadowbanning or otherwise suppressing the speech of conservatives. (snip) But things may be changing as a result of a judge's decision to allow a $250 million lawsuit brought by Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., against Twitter to go forward. The Federalist reported the case soon could be a "nightmare" for the company. Judge John Marshall, who was assigned the case in Virginia, is considering a...

Facebook has continually denied that it participates in the practice of shadow banning — a method of blocking a users’ posts or comments from everyone except the user who made the post or comment. But a newly granted patent shows that Facebook not only does practice shadow banning, but wants to protect — by patent — the method it uses for doing so. Despite the fact that Facebook executives denied the practice in congressional testimony in April, the company was awarded a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) earlier this month for an automated system that would...

VIDEO This video reveals how YouTube is shadow banning vidos it wants to suppress by not allowing them to show up in their search engine. As you will see, even when the search is filtered according to UPLOAD DATE, an objective criteria, YouTube will often refuse to allow many videos to appear in the search. I provide the very specific example of a video I uploaded on July 11 about Hunter Biden yet when you do a search according to upload date, it DOES NOT APPEAR. Next week, the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, chaired by Senator Ted Cruz, is...

March 20, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes is taking Twitter to court for the social media giant’s alleged discrimination against himself and other prominent conservatives through shadow-banning and other means. Last summer, Nunes was one of several Republican lawmakers and GOP leaders whose Twitter accounts had disappeared from the drop-down menu that normally populates when typing in a name, without comparable figures such as Democratic National Committee Chair Tom Perez or any of the 78-member Progressive Caucus being affected. Twitter soon corrected the problem and denied it engaged in shadow-banning (the practice of restricting a user’s visibility...

So that's Big Tech, advancing little minds and big lies--and inviting big destruction With perhaps the most significant midterm election in decades nigh, big tech’s censorship of conservatives has kicked into high gear. And while Facebook’s recent purge of right-leaning pages is obvious and has made news, perhaps just as destructive is the stealth censorship. A good example may be the report of WordPress’ “statistics shadowbanning” of Whatfinger News. Whatfinger is an increasingly popular news aggregator that is run by military veterans; it’s like a non-establishment version of Drudge, only more comprehensive, more conservative, and more interesting.