Leading Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives filed new legislation that would ban federal employees from working with big tech companies to censor Americans.
The bill comes as ongoing reports show that federal law enforcement and the White House have regularly communicated with social media companies like Facebook and Twitter, pressuring the companies to remove posts and accounts for a range of issues, including questioning the COVID-19 vaccine.
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Some House Republicans are urging federal action to bar private money from bankrolling election administration after a Big Tech-aligned group that made controversial grants in 2020 is issuing another round of grants aimed at the 2024 elections.
“Private money has no place in public election infrastructure,” Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., told The Daily Signal in a statement.
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Fact-checkers and Big Tech lost another round with purported COVID-19 misinformation this week, when an American Heart Association journal published research suggesting the spike protein used in mRNA vaccines can harm some people.
The peer-reviewed study in Circulation reviewed 16 adolescents and young adults hospitalized at Massachusetts General Hospital or Boston Children’s with post-vaccination myocarditis from January 2021-February 2022. All had “markedly elevated levels of full-length spike protein” in their blood, “unbounded by antibodies.”
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Legislation that would use federal agencies to “nudge” social media platforms to reduce the spread of “harmful content” isn’t going anywhere in the waning days of the 117th Congress.
As evidenced by the ongoing release of the “Twitter Files,” however, that’s no impediment to the government — and the research universities that so heavily depend on federal funding — enlisting Big Tech to promote favored narratives and throttle competing arguments on contentious topics.
Federal agencies and U.S. universities together have funded or sponsored a dozen studies mentioning Facebook and COVID-19, according to the National Institutes of Health’s ClinicalTrials.gov database.
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Two hundred and thirty-one years ago this month, America’s founders enshrined free speech as the first protection in the ratified Bill of Rights with a declaration that the government could not infringe expression. A series of blockbuster revelations at the end of 2022 show just how imperiled those protections have become in the era of Big Tech.
From Elon Musk’s “Twitter files” to an FBI agent’s candid testimony, Americans have gotten a glimpse into a once-hidden enterprise where federal agencies pressured social media platforms – directly and through proxies – to censor content under their terms of service. The goal, it appears, was to preserve the ruling elite’s favored narratives on everything from the pandemic to election integrity.
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The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant – ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.
“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
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On Sunday, Congressman Mike Turner (R-Ohio) said that the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives will investigate recently-revealed examples of collusion between Big Tech and the FBI by pursuing any “secret files” the FBI may have kept on the matter.
The New York Post reports that Turner, the incoming Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that “it is my understanding from our contacts that we have had with the FBI that there are secret files that the FBI has of these contacts that they were having with social media and with mainstream media.”
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Bravo.
In a speech this past week, former President Donald Trump vowed that if reelected he will make a point of ending the federal government’s censorship of Americans’ free speech.
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America First Legal (AFL) released a fourth set of documents obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that reveals more evidence of alleged collusion between the nation’s public health agency and social media companies to censor free speech and silence Americans under the government’s label of “misinformation.”
Last week, AFL’s 600-page document release uncovered evidence that Twitter operated a “Partner Support Portal” for government employees and other selective “stakeholders” that would allow them to delete or flag posts viewed as “misinformation,” noted AFL, which is led by former President Donald Trump’s immigration advisor Stephen Miller.
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In the weeks leading up to the 2020 presidential election, FBI agents would hold “weekly” meetings with Big Tech company Twitter to discuss content moderation, eventually leading to the agency warning the platform of so-called “hack-and-leak operations” by foreign “state actors” shortly before the company censored the Hunter Biden laptop story on these grounds.
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n the age of cellphones and the internet, consumers often face a simple choice: convenience or privacy? Do we let Big Tech have access to our private communications and free email accounts because it’s so easy?
Once you’ve said yes — and who among us has not? — it’s not a stretch to think that Big Data already has almost all your information, so why get picky at the next juncture?
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A federal court denied former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s request Monday to avoid deposition in a lawsuit alleging coordination between Biden administration authorities and social media companies to suppress free speech.
The lawsuit first filed by Republican Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry in May accuses President Joe Biden and administration parties, including the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), of colluding with or coercing the companies to “suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content” on their platforms with “dis-information,” “mis-information” and “mal-information” labels. Psaki filed a motion last week in a bid to avoid complying with the subpoena requiring her to testify, but Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District Court of Louisiana decided Monday to reject the motion and Psaki’s alternative request to stay her deposition.
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Google agreed to a $391.5 million settlement with 40 states after an investigation found that the tech giant participated in questionable location-tracking practices, state attorneys general announced Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong called it a “historic win for consumers.”
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GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid nonprofit which is funded by a number of prominent tech companies, is publishing and distributing maps to migrants showing routes through Central America that reach the U.S., according to a copy of the map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Twitter has removed its warning label on a post from the account of Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon about his story on a whistleblower alleging ballot harvesting in Florida, following Solomon’s direct appeal to the platform’s new owner, Elon Musk.
Solomon made the post Thursday that included a link to his interview with the whistleblower. The label was put on the post Friday, and as of Monday morning, it was no longer there.
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Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would “look into” why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as “unsafe” on the social media platform.
“I will look into this. Twitter should be even-handed, favoring neither side,” Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, “Election ‘misinformation’ policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report.”
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On the day Elon Musk took over Twitter, the social media platform flagged a post by Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon aboutt Florida Gov. GOP Ron DeSantis’ administration asking for a police probe into a Democrat politician’s whistleblower complaint about voting irregularities.
Solomon argues Twitter action Thursday night unfairly flagged the post – with the note “Warning: this link may be unsafe” – and is asking Musk, who has vowed to stop the platform from unjustly censuring content, to intervene.
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Big Tech stocks dropped this week as firms across the industry posted a series of weak earnings reports, with social media giant Meta set to post a significant slowdown after markets close Wednesday.
This year, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Apple have lost $2.5 trillion in market value combined, Reuters reported Wednesday. Meta is expected to post a 5% decline in revenue compared to last year due to reduced ad traffic as users struggle with inflation and spend more time with rival TikTok, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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by Victor Davis Hanson A shared theme in all dystopian explorations of future and current totalitarian regimes – whether China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or Cuba – is government control of all media information, fueled by electronic surveillance. A skeptical public learns to say one thing publicly but quite…
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With persistent inflation and growing concerns over a recession, pundits, policymakers, and the president have expressed concern about an alleged lack of competition lurking in the dark corners of the U.S. economy. As President Biden himself said, “capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation.” From Big Tech to baby food, both sides of the aisle are on the lookout for monopoly power. But sometimes the best place to hide is in plain sight.
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Social media giant Twitter first blocked, then restored, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s tweet regarding the state health department’s guidance in which is noted a study showing an “84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination COVID-19 mRNA shots.”
“Today, we released an analysis on COVID-19 mRNA vaccines the public needs to be aware of,” Ladapo tweeted. “This analysis showed an increased risk of cardiac-related death among men 18-39. FL will not be silent on the truth.”
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In a censorship experiment gone awry, PayPal reversed course Saturday night and said it was withdrawing a new policy that would have allowed the company to fine users $2,500 if they spread “misinformation.”
The company sent a statement to the National Review saying the Acceptable Use Policy had been sent out mistakenly,
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National medical associations that have been infiltrated by radical leftists wrote to Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland this week requesting the Department of Justice (DOJ) “do more” to block the views of those who spread “disinformation” regarding transgender surgeries for minors and to “take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.”
Journalist and author Christopher Rufo posted the letter from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Children’s Hospital Association to Garland.
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On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States agreed to hear a case that challenges Big Tech companies’ broad protections against lawsuits regarding the content they host, as a result of a policy known as Section 230.
Politico reports that the case will mark the first time that the nation’s highest court will hear any challenge to Big Tech’s immunity under Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which forbids legal action against such platforms over third-party content that is hosted on their sites. The case, Gonzalez vs. Google LLC, will see the court determine if these protections go too far when it comes to such content as terrorist videos being allowed on YouTube, the video-sharing platform that is owned by Google.
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The House of Representatives passed sweeping antitrust legislation targeting Big Tech with bipartisan support following a Thursday afternoon vote.
The bill, known as the Merger Fee Filing Modernization Act, passed 242 to 184, combining a trio of antitrust bills designed to limit the impact of Big Tech firms by increasing merger application fees to fund stricter antitrust enforcement, requiring companies to disclose foreign subsidies when applying for a merger and exempting antitrust lawsuits brought by state attorneys general from processes that can result in court cases being transferred to districts more favorable to defenders. The package, passed with 39 Republican votes, was endorsed by the White House on Tuesday as part of its ongoing efforts to beef up antitrust enforcement.
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Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) plans to introduce legislation called the Free Speech Defense Act that will prohibit federal officials from collaborating with Big Tech to censor Americans’ voices and create some legal recourse for those harmed by free speech infringement.
Clyde unveiled his plans for the bill during an appearance Thursday night on the “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show.
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A U.S. district court Tuesday ordered the Justice Department (DOJ) to produce communications between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and social media companies.
Republican Attorneys General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Jeff Landry of Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the administration in May for allegedly colluding with social media companies or coercing them to suppress disfavored content on platforms using “disinformation,” “misinformation” and “malinformation” labels in violation of the First Amendment. District Judge Terry Doughty mandated as part of the case Tuesday that communications between the companies and Fauci and Jean-Pierre be provided based on Schmitt and Landry’s requests.
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Newly released communications between federal officials and social media companies reveal how the Biden administration and Big Tech coordinated to silence opposing views on a number of topics—especially COVID-19— in “a vast censorship enterprise,” the attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana alleged in a court filing Thursday.
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A fellowship hosted by Big Tech giant Google is facing heavy legal criticism due to its use of racial quotas, which critics say are unconstitutional.
Newsbusters reports that the prestigious fellowship, which offers $100,000 to students pursuing their doctorate in computer studies, requires that a certain number of students nominated for the fellowship by their university must be non-White.
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The FBI said it “routinely notifies” private companies, including social media platforms, of potential threats after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook “decreased” the distribution of the Hunter Biden laptop story right before the 2020 election because of a warning from the FBI.
The FBI’s defense comes after Zuckerberg appeared Thursday on the “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast. Host Joe Rogan asked Zuckerberg about how Facebook handled the story first broken by The New York Post involving the questionable contents on the laptop of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
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Big Tech controls more and more of the news and information we read. Although Big Tech platforms employ few, if any, journalists, most Americans read news on large tech platforms, such as Facebook News and Google News. Profits and ideology motivate Big Tech managers more than promoting a free press, so Big Tech often fails to fairly compensate the small and local news outlets whose stories appear on their platforms.
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Yelp announced Tuesday it will add a “prominent consumer notice to crisis pregnancy center listings,” in order to distinguish the pro-life centers from abortion clinics.
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New research from a former Google engineer warns TikTok has the ability to track user keystrokes in its Web browser, a claim that is alarming privacy advocates but receiving pushback from the platform’s parent company.
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Documents obtained by America First Legal (AFL) reveal “concrete evidence” of how the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) colluded with the social media giants to promote the Biden administration’s COVID-19 propaganda and censor Americans’ free speech, AFL reports.
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Claiming that Twitter was in “material breach” of its agreement to sell the microblogging platform to him, Elon Musk said in a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing that he does not intend to purchase Twitter, invoking a massive response in the tech space.
“Today’s announcement that Elon Musk is abandoning his takeover of Twitter comes as no surprise to those of us who predicted the implosion for months,” GETTER CEO Jason Miller said in a statement. “But the lasting result of the failed acquisition will be permanent, and Musk deserves credit for further exposing the incurable, rotting, politically discriminatory culture inside the Blue Bird.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Friday announced that he was canceling plans to purchase social media giant Twitter, citing the company’s failure to produce information on fake accounts.
Musk sent a letter to Twitter’s board of directors on Friday announcing he would not acquire the company. He told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Twitter has “not complied with its contractual obligation,” according to the Associated Press.
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Google has offered to break apart in a bid to avoid greater punishment for antitrust violations from federal regulators, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.
The tech giant has raised the prospect of separating a major business operation off from Google—the auctioning and placing of online advertisements—to form a separate entity also under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, people close to Google reportedly told the WSJ. It was unclear if the offer would satisfy the Department of Justice (DOJ), which declined to comment on the story, according to the WSJ.
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More than 17,000 physicians and medical scientists have joined together in a “declaration” that demands an end to the COVID-19 medical emergency and accountability for those in the “corrupt alliance” of Big Tech, media, academics, and government who, they say, committed “crimes against humanity” by profiting from ineffective and dangerous COVID vaccines while banning early treatment drugs.
The statement, released Wednesday during a press conference of the Global COVID Summit, calls for a restoration of “scientific integrity, and a move to address the corrupt alliance’s “catastrophic decisions” which, the medical professionals assert, were orchestrated “at the expense of the innocent, who are forced to suffer health damage and death caused by intentionally withholding critical and time-sensitive treatments, or as a result of coerced genetic therapy injections, which are neither safe nor effective.”
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Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition — which can be summed up as the world’s wealthiest person buying one of the most powerful social media and news platforms — underscores one of the big problems with Big Tech.
In the absence of modernized anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws, Big Tech companies in the U.S. have amassed far too much economic and political control over society, and especially over the news and publishing industries.
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One of the most popular right-wing Twitter accounts Wednesday said that it has been banned from using an online link-sharing service.
“Linktree just deleted my account citing ‘inappropriate use of this service,'” said Twitter account LibsOfTikTok. “When I try to log in it says my account is no longer accessible. Why am I suddenly being censored?”
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The search engine giant Google has rolled out a new feature that acts as an auto-suggestion for changing certain language to more politically correct terms.
According to the Daily Mail, users who type out certain words will be faced with several suggestions encouraging them to adopt language that is gender-neutral, or otherwise more politically correct. For example, “landlord” will yield suggestions such as “proprietor” or “property owner,” while “mankind” will lead to the suggestion of “humankind.” “Policeman” is now recommended to be “police officers,” while “housewife” is to be replaced with “stay-at-home spouse.”
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Here’s your first clue Twitter is not really a business with a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value – when Elon Musk made a public offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share (roughly $40 billion) the company’s management not only turned down the offer, but began to work on a poison pill defense aimed solely at Mr. Musk, who is already Twitter’s largest shareholder.
According to reporting by the New York Times, some investors and Wall Street analysts said that Mr. Musk’s offer of $54.20 a share was too low, and that he would need to go to at least $60 a share to appeal to shareholders. That would be 25 percent higher than the share price when Mr. Musk announced this month that he had acquired a 9 percent stake in Twitter.
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Legislation designed to help media organizations negotiate with major online platforms is gaining Republican support in Congress due to provisions protecting small, local and conservative publications, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
The Journalism and Competition Preservation Act (JCPA), a bill led by a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers including Democratic Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, Republican Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy, Democratic Rhode Island Rep. David Cicilline and Republican Colorado Rep. Ken Buck, seeks to help media organizations negotiate with tech platforms like Google and Facebook for compensation over the use of their content.
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Challenging COVID-19 conventional wisdom has given some scientists their first meaningful interactions with journalists — and left them wary of the fourth estate, they told Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom conference in D.C. last week.
Catherine Stein, an infectious disease epidemiologist at Ohio’s Case Western Reserve University, anonymously criticized the state’s COVID policy and personally contacted state lawmakers to share her skepticism, particularly on mask efficacy. “What blew my mind was the fear-mongering in the media,” she said.
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Monday morning on ‘The Answer with Bob Frantz,’ host Frantz spoke with United States Congressman (R-OH) Jim Jordan about Hunter Biden’s laptop, Big Tech censorship, mainstream media, Ukraine, and Joe Biden’s continuing troubles.
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While Republican Pennsylvania Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz has billed himself as a staunch opponent of big corporations, his ties to major technology and pharmaceutical corporations complicate his campaign rhetoric.
Oz, who announced his candidacy in late November, is running for the empty Senate seat left by retiring Republican Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey. The celebrity doctor has made opposition to major technology and pharmaceutical companies a hallmark of his campaign, pitching his experience working in television and exposing scams as an example of his anti-corporate positions.
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A Big Tech watchdog group is speaking out about the way Silicon Valley’s titans of industry have handled the war between Russia and Ukraine.
“Apparently these Big Tech monopolists find everyday conservative Americans more objectionable than murderous foreign dictators,” Mike Davis, Founder and President of the Internet Accountability Project (IAP) told The Tennessee Star Thursday. “They’re willing to silence and censor political voices with which they disagree while welcoming war criminals like Putin with open arms. That alone should be enough to recognize these Big Tech monopolists are not our friends.”
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Republican Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal unveiled a bipartisan bill Wednesday aimed at curbing online harms to children.
The Kids Online Safety Act is the result of several hearings and a months-long investigation led by Blackburn and Blumenthal into how use of social media platforms affects teens and young children. If enacted, the bill would require social media platforms to provide minors with options to protect their information, disable “addictive” product features and allow them to opt out of recommendation algorithms.
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Major technology companies and social media platforms have removed, suppressed or flagged the accounts of over 800 prominent individuals and organizations, including medical doctors, for COVID-19 misinformation, according to a new study from the Media Research Center (MRC).
MRC’s Free Speech America CensorTrack, an initiative that monitors acts of censorship across online platforms, identified over 41 instances between March 2020 and February 2022 in which doctors, scientists and medical organizations were censored, according to the results of a study shared with Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Amid controversy over podcaster Joe Rogan’s controversial COVID-19 episodes and some past episodes that contained racial slurs, one video streaming platform is lending Rogan their support.
“We stand with you, your guests, and you legion of fans in desire for real conversation,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski said in a letter addressed to Rogan. “So we’d like to offer you 100 million reasons to make the world a better place.”
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