On Wednesday morning, the Star published my commentary on free speech. Little did I know when I wrote it or the editors when they published it, the whole concept of free speech online was about to blow up in an incredibly spectacular way.
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In the wake of allegations of big tech companies suppressing political speech and news stories on their platforms, Republican senators and congressmen introduced legislation to amend Section 230, part of a federal code that regulates third-party content on the internet.
Federal Communication Communications (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai also weighed in on Thursday after senators announced they were subpoenaing Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey.
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Thursday morning on The John Fredericks Show, host Fredricks welcomed Liberty University’s School of Business Dean Dave Brat to the show to weigh in on the double standard of Big Tech and the realistic possibility that America could turn socialist.
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A mayoral candidate in Texas was arrested October 8 and charged with 84 counts of mail application ballot fraud; Zul Mohamed, running for mayor of Carrollton, forged nearly one hundred voter registration applications. “At the time of arrest, Mohamed was in the process of stuffing envelopes with additional mail ballot applications for neighboring Dallas County,” law enforcement officials reported. He also was charged with 25 counts of “unlawful possession of an official mail in ballot” and faces up to 20 years in prison.
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Yelp announced Thursday that it is launching a consumer alert to inform users if a business has been “accused of racist behavior,” The Daily Caller reports.
The crowdsourced web and mobile-based review service will allow reviewers to identify and warn others of what they believe is racist behavior at businesses.
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Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have abused their monopoly power and must undergo significant restructuring, according to a House report released Tuesday.
Lawmakers who wrote the report said the four tech companies had grown into monopolies akin to “oil barons and railroad tycoons” and suggested an overhaul to U.S. antitrust laws, according to The New York Times. The lengthy report, spearheaded by Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and David Cicilline, is the result of a 15-month House Judiciary Committee investigation into the companies collectively known as Big Tech.
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A new Wired report shows overwhelming support from Silicon Valley employees for Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. The magazine states that almost 95 percent of donations from employees at Silicon Valley tech giants such as Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Oracle went to the Democratic presidential nominee, Breitbart reports.
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Big Tech’s censorship has nothing to do with accuracy or fairness.
If there is any doubt Big Tech oligarchs are colluding with Team Biden to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, none other than two-time losing presidential candidate Hillary Clinton gave the game away this week.
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More than half of American voters strongly or somewhat support breaking up Silicon Valley tech giants to promote competition, according to a poll published Thursday.
Only 26% of voters oppose or strongly oppose splitting up the country’s largest tech companies, while 19% of those surveyed didn’t offer a view, a poll from progressive think tank Data for Progress showed. The poll, which surveyed 1,200 likely voters in September, comes as the House lawmakers conclude their nearly yearlong probe into the industry’s supposed anticompetitive behavior.
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Ahead of the U.S. presidential election Google said that it will now remove any autocomplete predictions that seem to endorse or oppose a candidate or a political party and claims about voting or the electoral process, according to a CNN report.
Google executives outlined these changes at an online press event Thursday, as well as in a blog post. Google’s autocomplete feature offers recommendations for queries once a user begins typing.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Thursday his decision to gave a no-strings-attached $10 million donation to an anti-racist group headed by an activist who once promoted the idea of amending the U.S. Constitution to prohibit racism.
The tech billionaire gave the money to Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, a project launched by scholar Ibram X. Kendi, who expressed support in 2019 for a constitutional amendment that he claims would “fix the original sin of racism.” Dorsey said in a tweet Thursday that he is grateful for Kendi’s work.
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Facebook announced Wednesday that it will take further action against pages, groups, and Instagram accounts associated with anarchist groups and other groups “tied to violence.”
The social media website said it will expand their “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy” to censor groups who reportedly pose a “significant risk” to public safety, such as QAnon, the company said in a statement. Facebook is also taking action against “offline anarchist groups that support violent acts amidst protests,” the statement said.
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Apple is the first U.S. company to boast a market value of $2 trillion, just two years after it became the first to reach $1 trillion.
Apple shares have gained nearly 60% this year as the company overcame the shutdown of factories in China that produce the iPhone and the closure of its retail sales amid the coronavirus pandemic.
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When it comes to social media influencers, many might recognize Michelle Obama, Leonardo DiCaprio, Roger Federer, and Billy Joel. But what about the superstar Islamist clerics — Mohamad Al Arefe, A’id Al Qarnee, Salman Al Odah, and Othman Al Khamis — whose track records range from incitement of jihad, country-entry bans, and displays of bigotry?
Not only do members of the latter group attract more Twitter followers, but their Twitter fan bases are so large that if they were to unite and form a country, it would become the world’s 27th most populous.
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Twitter partially suspended President Donald Trump’s campaign Twitter account on Wednesday for posting a tweet containing a video of Trump suggesting children are “almost immune” to coronavirus.
The post contains an interview Trump gave to Fox News Wednesday morning in which the president made the claim relating to children and the ongoing pandemic, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Facebook removed a post Wednesday that contained the same video, marking the first time the social media platform has nixed a Trump post over coronavirus misinformation.
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President Donald Trump said he will take action as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok, a popular Chinese-owned video app that has been a source of national security and censorship concerns.
Trump said he could use emergency economic powers or an executive order to enforce action on TikTok.
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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the only tech executive at Wednesday’s antitrust hearing who unequivocally said China is stealing technology from American companies.
“I think it’s well documented that the Chinese government steals technology from American companies,” the 36-year-old Silicon Valley executive said after Rep. Greg Steube asked him if China is stealing from U.S. technology companies. The Florida Republican posed the same question to CEOs Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sundar Pichai of Google.
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Silicon Valley’s pre-election censorship of conservatives is rapidly increasing, with anything that questions the imposition of a new level of COVID-19 lockdown misery and economic devastation a top target.
The latest example of this pre-election censorship occurred yesterday, when Facebook, Twitter and Google removed a press conference video by frontline doctors featuring U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) and organized by Tea Party Patriots.
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As the 2020 election draws nearer, search engine and tech giant Google is being exposed as engaging in election interference by artificially altering search results to negatively impact right-wing sites, as reported by Breitbart.
Breitbart reports that its own visibility on Google search results has been reduced by as much as 99.7 percent of its previous performance since the 2016 election. In contrast to its performance in April of 2016, when it was among the top ten search results for 355 key search terms, it now ranks in the top ten of only one such search term in the month of July of this year.
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They command corporations with gold-plated brands, millions or even billions of customers, and a combined value greater than the entire German economy. One of them is the world’s richest individual; another is the fourth-ranked billionaire. Their industry has transformed society, linked people around the globe, mined and commercialized users’ personal data, and infuriated critics on both the left and right over speech.
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Attorney General Bill Barr lambasted Apple Thursday, suggesting the iPhone maker’s business ties in China reveal a double standard in how tech companies treat U.S. officials versus the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s goal is to “raid” the United States and bilk American businesses, Barr said during a speech in Michigan. He also suggested there could be serious repercussions for Silicon Valley companies that give deference to China over the U.S.
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On June 19, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld 9-0 the right to freedom of speech, including “hate speech.” As Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court: “The proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express the thought that we hate.” Justice Anthony Kennedy added in a concurring opinion: “A law that can be directed against speech found offensive to some portion of the public can be turned against minority and dissenting views to the detriment of all.”
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A shocking new undercover video from Project Veritas exposes the rampant anti-conservative bias of Facebook’s content moderators, the employees who are responsible for deciding what posts are censored.
Zach McElroy, a former Facebook employee who worked as a content moderator in Tampa, Florida, told Project Veritas that he’s willing to testify before Congress about Facebook’s bias against Trump supporters and conservative causes.
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by Peter Hasson and Chris White Department of Justice investigators who are conducting an antitrust probe targeting Google do not appear to be scrutinizing claims that the tech giant manipulates its search function, leaks about the probe and a source familiar with it indicate. Google critics argue that Google…
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Facebook has removed ads for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign because they featured an upside-down red triangle.
The tech giant said the ads were removed because the symbol was once used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, but Trump’s campaign has noted that the symbol is widely used by Antifa, which is why it was included in the ad.
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Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley announced Wednesday that he is introducing a bill aimed at fighting bad-acting tech companies hours after Google threatened a conservative publication with demonetization.
The Limiting Section 230 Immunity to Good Samaritans Act, cosponsored by Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida, Mike Braun of Indiana and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, would prevent big tech companies from receiving Section 230 immunities unless the companies updated their terms of service, promised to operate in good faith and promised to pay a $5,000 fine if they violated their promise.
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Amazon, Twitter, and other major tech companies are facing intense criticism on antitrust issues and censorship claims in the months since government officials reportedly began asking for help from Silicon Valley on ways to tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
The president and lawmakers have turned their sights on Twitter and Amazon, respectively, while Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and other attorneys general are reportedly ratcheting up their antitrust investigation targeting Google’s business model. The White House asked them in March to fight coronavirus disinformation while also assisting the government in its virus response.
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Instagram reportedly believes a children’s book written by U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and her daughter, about the history of the 19th Amendment, may “influence the outcome of an election,” so the tech giant has banned advertising for it.
The Federalist reported on the book’s ban.
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President Trump’s long-hoped-for Executive Order on social media censorship is a good first step in dismantling the Left’s dangerous influence over these 21st-century communications vehicles. (You can read the draft that was available online when this article was posted through this link to The National Pulse, edited by Raheem Kassam.)
We particularly agree with this part of the EO’s statement of principles, “In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand-pick the speech that Americans may access and convey online. This practice is fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic. When large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power.”
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Twitter censored the White House’s official Twitter account after it shared and quoted a President Donald Trump tweet Friday that the company’s moderators hit for “glorifying violence.”
The account shared a tweet Trump composed early Friday morning in which he called people rioting and looting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, “THUGS” and suggested that he will send in the military, adding that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Twitter hid Trump’s tweet under a banner noting that the post violates company rules against glorifying violence.
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey took sole responsibility Wednesday night after his company applied a fact-check on a tweet from President Donald Trump suggesting California’s mail-in ballot move is “fraudulent.”
Trump’s tweet Tuesday suggesting mail-in ballot votes are fraudulent could mislead people into believing they don’t have to register to get a ballot, Dorsey wrote on Twitter. He also asked people to lay off his employees.
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The Twitter official overseeing the tech company’s efforts to combat misinformation is a left-wing partisan who in the past has derided President Donald Trump as a “wretched orange man” and said he donated to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site security, is the man in charge of the platform’s fight against election-related misinformation. Some of Roth’s past political comments from 2016 and 2017 began making the rounds in conservative circles Tuesday after Twitter fact-checked a Trump tweet predicting that universal mail-in voting would result in widespread fraud.
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Twitter has declined to take action against Chinese officials who spread coronavirus misinformation even after the company fact-checked President Donald Trump for suggesting California’s mail-in ballots are fraudulent.
A tweet from Chinese politician Lijian Zhao in March suggesting that the U.S. inserted coronavirus into China has not been removed or fact-checked. Twitter has previously said that Zhao’s tweets do not violate the company’s rules, but Twitter updated its policies on May 11, effectively making tweets from world leaders subject to misinformation labels.
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YouTube’s enforcement algorithm is automatically removing any comments that contain one of two Chinese-language phrases that are critical of the ruling Chinese Communist Party.
Any comment posted to YouTube, which is owned by Google, that contains the phrase “共匪,” which stands for “communist bandit,” or “五毛,” which translates to “wumao” and stands for “50-cent party,” is deleted within seconds without notification to the user, The Verge reported Tuesday.
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The History Channel premiered a three-part miniseries about Ulysses S. Grant Monday. Produced by the arch-leftist and globalist Leonardo Di Caprio, with commentary by left-wing reparations activist Ta-Nehisi Coates, the show is based on Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography. This is the same Chernow who excoriated President Trump at the 2019 White House Correspondents’ Dinner and says Alexander Hamilton would have supported Trump’s impeachment.
But I am not interested in revisiting the endless spurious assertions we’re sure to hear from the people who produced what is sure to be another tired, this-is-who-we-are jeremiad pushing progressive liberalism.
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President Donald Trump is considering forming a commission to review anti-conservative bias on social media platforms, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the idea.
A potential White House-created commission would examine allegations of online bias and censorship, according to the report. The administration will also encourage the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Election Commission to conduct similar reviews, the sources told the WSJ.
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Facebook is working to set up an AI meme police.
The social media behemoth said it is creating a contest with a $100,000 prize to encourage developers to create artificial intelligence that can “identify multimodal hate speech.”
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by George Rasley Just in case you bought the establishment media’s narrative that the attempted assassination of House Republican Whip Rep. Steve Scalise and the rest of the Republican baseball team was the one-off work of a nut, our friends at Far Left Watch have a chilling report to…
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California is one step away from going down the unconstitutional road of government-mandated censorship of Internet speech. The California Senate and State Assembly recently passed S.B. 1424, the “Internet: social media: advisory group” act. This fake news advisory act is now on the desk of Governor Jerry Brown for his signature. According…
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by Peter Hasson and Joe Simonson – Twitter’s recent algorithm change suppressed, or “shadow-banned,” prominent conservatives, including Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, a new report found. – Gaetz is considering filing a Federal Election Commission (FEC) complaint against Twitter, he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. – Gaetz said…
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by Kyle Perisic A Democratic congresswoman said on Tuesday that conservatives and Republicans’ concerns over bias on the Facebook, Google, and Twitter platforms are unjustified. Here’s proof she’s wrong. Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California said at a hearing addressing political discrimination against conservatives and Republicans on Facebook, Google,…
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by Eric Lieberman Cybersecurity and privacy experts are currently in the process of trying to rival Facebook by starting their own social media platform. With a fundraising page set to launch Tuesday, the “open source” social network called Openbook is aimed at “helping make the world a better place,” a similar overarching objective to that of Facebook.…
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by George Rasley Conservatives who have suffered discrimination from tech billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook will derive a little bit of pleasure from recent disclosures the company made in a small courtroom in Redwood City, California. According to reporting in the UK’s Guardian, Facebook has long had the same public response when questioned about its disruption of…
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by Jeffery Rendall Strolling towards the capitol on one of our recent trips to Williamsburg, Virginia, a thought struck me as we neared the reconstructed building; so much went on inside those walls but the people in the street had nary a clue about what was happening at the…
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Microsoft on Monday said it will buy software development platform GitHub, in a deal worth $7.5 billion which will blend two opposite corporate cultures. The tech giant, based in Washington state, is a heavyweight in terms of software whose source codes are not openly available or modifiable, exactly the counter…
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by Eric Lieberman Google was set to rent out its D.C. headquarters to a progressive group running a fundraiser for top Senate Democrats, but canceled it Friday just days before. The group “Run For Something” cultivates up-and-coming Democrats for all levels of government. Its event, “Party For Something,” was…
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by Eric Lieberman A professor was recently unable to promote a podcast on Facebook that delved into Russians’ perspective of President Donald Trump because it was deemed to fall under the tech company’s new rules against political advertising. Sean Guillory, a scholar with a doctoral degree from UCLA, is…
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by Kyle Perisic Facebook is facing a class-action lawsuit following revelations it collects text messages and phone calls via its smartphone apps on Android devices. The social network giant’s actions “presents several wrongs, including a consumer bait-and-switch, an invasion of privacy, wrongful monitoring of minors and potential attacks on…
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