TikTok hasn’t exactly got Facebook dancing in the streets.
The Chinese-owned social media app is rapidly eating away at Facebook’s user base, especially among the under-30s crowd, which seems to think that Facebook is for the over-the-hill crowd.
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Over 200 former employees of federal surveillance agencies have since joined the corporate ranks of Big Tech companies in recent years, thus increasing the likelihood of systematic censorship of conservative accounts by such platforms.
According to the Daily Caller, the four social media companies Google, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have recruited 248 former employees from the FBI, CIA, Department of Justice (DOJ), and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as proven by searches of the professional job listing and networking platform LinkedIn. The bulk of these hires were made between 2017 and 2022, with some of the former federal employees moving on to top executive positions within the social media companies.
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The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act (RESTRICT Act), S.686, contains language that could be used to shut down any website or app with more than 1 million users that challenges the “reported result of a Federal election” — threatening websites and apps that allow free speech on their platforms including Truth Social and Rumble, not just TikTok, the supposed reason for the legislation.
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Meta on Friday launched a paid verification service for Facebook and Instagram that offers a profile badge and identity monitoring services in exchange for subscription fee.
While the company will not charge fees to existing verified accounts, others seeking verification must pay $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 per month on mobile device, according to The Hill.
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Former President Donald Trump made his first post on Facebook Friday since being banned in 2021 following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building. “I’M BACK!,” the former President posted, including a video clip from his 2016 election-night victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
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Stunned by a growing body of evidence showing federal pressure to silence Americans’ voices online, House Republicans have unleashed their first legislation to slow government requests to Big Tech to censor content.
The ELON Act, introduced this month by Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and backed by nine other cosponsors, would impose a one-year moratorium on taxpayer payments from the Justice Department to social media firms as well as require an audit on how much money changed hands since the start of 2015 between DOJ and Big Tech firms.
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Social media giant Meta announced Wednesday that it would reinstate former President Donald Trump’s accounts on both Facebook and Instagram. The former president was suspended from both platforms in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2022, Capitol Riot. Other social media platforms such as Twitter acted likewise, prompting Trump to create Truth Social, a digital platform similar to Twitter that practiced looser content moderation than its competitors.
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A Democratic California congressman this week weighed in on President Joe Biden’s classified-document scandal, characterizing the president’s housing of restricted records in his University of Pennsylvania office and his Delaware home as indefensible. A member of the House Oversight and Armed Services committees, U.S. Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) told Fox News that Biden warrants scrutiny for keeping numerous records he obtained during his earlier service as a U.S. senator and later as vice president. Khanna noted that the law requires classified federal documents to be kept in “sensitive compartmented information facilities” (SCIFs). While presidents can sometimes temporarily designate rooms within their personal properties as SCIFs, Biden has never suggested any spaces in his home or office were deemed to be such areas.
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Facebook routinely took direction from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regarding COVID-19 moderation and fact-checking policies throughout 2021, according to documents published Thursday by Reason. Facebook regularly reached out to CDC staff throughout the year, requesting guidance on the accuracy of claims about both COVID-19 vaccines and the disease itself, in addition to guidance on whether the claims might “cause harm,” according to Reason. The social media titan would regularly make decisions based on this communication, notably reversing its monthslong prohibition on users claiming that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese laboratory on May 26, 2021, after a conversation with CDC staff the week prior informed the company that, while “extremely unlikely,” the virus having a man made origin was “theoretically possible.”
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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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A new study from the University of North Carolina shows children and teens who frequently check social media may become more sensitive in the long term to “social feedback” in the form of “likes” and “dislikes” at a time when the brain is experiencing significant developmental changes.
In the study, published at the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics, researchers Maria Maza, et al, investigated whether the frequency with which middle-school age children check their Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat social media accounts is associated with long-term changes in brain development as they mature further into adolescence.
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An Irish data privacy regulator has issued fines totaling €390 million — roughly $410 million — against Facebook and Instagram parent Meta over practices related to its monitoring of users’ behavior on its services in order to create targeted ads, according to a Wednesday press release by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC).
Meta had previously argued to the commission that it had the right to tailor ads to users based on their online activity because the Terms of Service that users agreed to to use the service amounted to a contract, and that gathering this personalized data was a core part of that contract, according to the DPC. Although the DPC originally agreed with this argument, it reversed its position after other European regulators challenged this view during a standard peer review process, finding that Meta was “not entitled” to consider the Terms of Service agreement as sufficient legal basis for its actions.
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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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The liberal voting activist group that dumped $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money on local election offices during the 2020 presidential election is back again with another $80 million to give over the next five years.
And Wisconsin once again will be front and center in the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s “generosity.”
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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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Meta’s Oversight Board criticized the social media giant for unfairly favoring certain elite users of Facebook and Instagram, granting them amnesty from certain rules, and failing to publicly disclose the program’s extent.
Meta’s “cross-check” program is supposed to minimize the number of posts Facebook and Instagram incorrectly take down, by having a human review posts by certain “powerful” users when they are found to be violating the rules, according to the Oversight Board. The Board found that, in practice, cross-check protected these accounts, allowing their content to remain up even when it was in violation of the sites’ rules and helping favored accounts receive reduced punishments for infractions, all the while repeatedly failing to detail to the public and the Board which accounts and posts were subject to this policy.
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by Victor Davis Hanson The current “media” – loosely defined as the old major newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, the network news channels, MSNBC and CNN, PBS and NPR, the online news aggregators like Google, Apple, and Yahoo, and the social media giants like the old Twitter and…
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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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Major tax preparation services have reportedly been sending sensitive personal financial information to Facebook as part of a potential advertising scheme, according to a report released Tuesday.
Companies such as H&R Block, TaxAct, and TaxSlayer have allegedly been sending Facebook “not only information like names and email addresses but often even more detailed information, including data on users’ income, filing status, refund amounts, and dependents’ college scholarship amounts,” a report from the Verge said on Tuesday.
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Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, on Wednesday laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, amid lowered revenue.
The company, which had more than 87,000 employees in September, grew dramatically at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Despite plenty of negative media attention this year on the now-dissolved Disinformation Governance Board, government collusion with social media platforms is ramping up.
This collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and companies such as Twitter and Facebook to police the speech of Americans requires a legislative remedy.
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The FBI allegedly accepts private user information with “a partisan focus” from Facebook without users’ permission, avoiding the normal legal process the bureau would require to seek such information on its own, a new report from House Judiciary Committee Republicans claims.
The alleged information transfer between Facebook and the FBI is part of a program likely named “OperationBronze Griffin,” according to a report released Friday. Facebook allegedly gives the bureau data “tending only to concern users from one side of the political spectrum,” according to whistleblower intelligence.
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The Department of Homeland Security has left open a special feature that allows government officials to flag Facebook posts for misinformation after scrapping a controversial advisory board tasked with developing guidelines for social media censorship, the Intercept reported Monday.
DHS announced plans for a Disinformation Governance Board to “develop guidelines, standards, guardrails to ensure that the work that has been ongoing for nearly 10 years does not infringe on people’s free speech rights, rights of privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in May, according to The Hill. While DHS shuttered the initiative after an onslaught of bipartisan opposition decrying the potential censorship, the Intercept found through an analysis of public and leaked documents that government efforts to police tech companies goes on.
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Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen is heading a new initiative, featuring a slew of former intelligence officials and bankrolled by a left-wing billionaire, that aims to influence how social media companies moderate speech and content.
Haugen will co-chair the Council for Responsible Social Media, according to a Wednesday press release from Issue One, a non-profit sponsoring the initiative. The council’s members includes Leon Panetta, former CIA Director and secretary of Defense under Barack Obama, Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency under Donald Trump, and Bush administration CIA Director Porter Goss; members also include the Biden administration’s former Director for Legislative Affairs at the National Security Council Nicole Tisdale and Obama administration Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
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One of the biggest social media platforms in the world has allegedly been spying on the private messages and personal data of users who believe that voter fraud took place in the 2020 election, and has subsequently been handing this information over to the FBI.
According to the New York Post, the alleged surveillance operation by Facebook and its coordination with the government was confirmed by several anonymous sources in the Department of Justice (DOJ). The sources allege that employees at Facebook have been red-flagging any suspicious private messages over the last 19 months, sending the information directly to the FBI’s domestic terrorism operational unit in Washington, D.C. These actions have been carried out without the use of an official subpoena.
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In the cartoon below, you will see the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) encourage a young female protagonist to report her “Uncle Steve” to Facebook for posting “disinformation”.
DHS’s rationale? “Uncle Steve” posted that “Covid-19 is no worse than the flu”:
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News outlets inaccurately suggested a 17-year-old girl was being prosecuted for obtaining an illegal late-term abortion in recent headlines about a Nebraska case.
Numerous outlets covering the story emphasized Facebook’s role in the prosecution of this abortion-related case and highlighted concerns about tech companies protecting people’s data in light of new abortion restrictions going into effect. Headlines generally didn’t acknowledge the baby’s late gestational age, the concealment of the corpse or the suspicious autopsy that led the the warrant for their Facebook messages.
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President Joe Biden’s top adviser on environmental issues called on technology companies to censor debates on environmental issues and energy policy during a Thursday event.
“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, a former EPA Administrator, said during a virtual event, according to Axios. “We need the tech companies to really jump in.”
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The $332 million that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan provided to a progressive group to help run the 2020 elections was distributed on a highly partisan basis that favored Democrats, according to a new analysis by election data experts.
While these “Zuckerbucks” or “Zuck bucks” were touted as a resource meant to help all jurisdictions administer the election during the COVID crisis, tax records filed by the progressive Center for Tech and Civic Life show that the group “awarded all larger grants – on both an absolute and per capita basis to deeply Democratic urban areas,” particularly in swing states, according to the new report. Its authors are William Doyle, research director at the right-leaning Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute, and Alex Oliver, chief data scientist at Evolving Strategies, a nonpartisan research group.
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A group of conservative investors plan to take on four of the “wokest” corporations at upcoming shareholder meetings over allegedly discriminatory policies in an effort to defend shareholders, according to a press release.
The Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a Boardroom Initiative (BI) coalition member, will make proposals at Walmart, Twitter, Facebook and Comcast shareholder meetings held over the next two weeks to hire outside firms to investigate whether or not the companies are placing merit behind “equity” considerations, according to the release.
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Incoming Twitter owner Elon Musk said Tuesday he would reverse the social media platform’s ban on former President Donald Trump.
The decision to ban Trump, said Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur, was “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.”
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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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Corporations previously outspoken about hot-button social issues have stayed quiet on the likely overturning of Roe v. Wade after a dramatic fight between Disney and Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis over the company’s political activism.
Following the leak of a draft opinion indicating the Supreme Court is likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, Democrats are trying to ram through a bill legalizing third trimester abortions; however, corporations are largely staying out of the fray, following Disney’s disastrous battle with Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that ended with the company losing its special tax privileges.
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On Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) demanded that Big Tech companies Facebook and Twitter preserve all internal documents related to the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
According to the Washington Free Beacon, Issa’s office sent letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Facebook communications director Andy Stone, and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The letters all ordered the companies to “immediately initiate document preservation for all materials relating to questions, inquiry, conversation, strategy, and response to the media reporting of the Hunter Biden laptop and/or its contents that first appeared in the New York Post on October 14, 2020.” The companies were additionally instructed to notify employees, consultants, and subcontractors who may have access to the relevant information.
Issa’s requests are in reference to an apparently coordinated campaign by Big Tech companies and the mainstream media to suppress the bombshell story about Hunter Biden’s laptop. First reported on by the New York Post, the story broke less than one month before the 2020 election in which Hunter’s father, Joe Biden, was running against incumbent President Donald Trump. The laptop in question, retrieved from a repair shop in Delaware, contained numerous damning documents, photos, and videos depicting Hunter’s foreign business dealings through his father’s political connections, as well as Hunter’s personal habits involving drugs, alcohol, and prostitution.
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Russian prosecutors asked a court to classify Facebook parent company Meta as “extremist” Friday, escalating tensions between Russia and the tech giant after Facebook was blocked in the country.
The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office asked a court to declare the tech giant an “extremist organization,” saying the company engaged in spreading “propaganda” and incited violence against the Russian people, Interfax reported. The move would effectively criminalize all of Meta’s operations in Russia, according to Reuters.
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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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A corporate director at Facebook is out of the company after the release of what appeared to be footage of him being caught in an underage sex sting operation.
Jeren Miles, formerly a manager of global community development at Facebook parent company Meta, departed the company after video of the apparent bust was posted to the YouTube channel of the amateur group PCI Predator Catchers Indianapolis.
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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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The Left has a word for misinformation that turns out to be true. They call it, “misinformation.” Over and over again, the tech giants, cheered on by power-drunk government officials, have censored and deplatformed people who have contradicted the official narrative regarding COVID and heavy-handed public health measures that restrict freedom with dubious health benefits.
Tellingly, the demands to censor Joe Rogan rarely identify the supposed “misinformation” he peddled. Even more tellingly, the censors totally fail to acknowledge that Rogan-promoted “conspiracy theories” have a better track record than many of the articles of faith his critics promoted.
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Facebook parent company Meta is on pace to lose roughly $200 billion in market value as shares plummeted early Thursday.
The company’s shares dropped as much as 23% in pre-market trading which, if the losses hold, would lose Meta roughly $200 billion in market value.
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Sen. Amy Klobuchar appeared on Fox News’ Special Report Thursday night, primarily to promote an antitrust bill aimed at reforming laws that govern Big Tech and increasing competition.
A bipartisan U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee voted 16-6 Thursday to advance the legislation — The American Innovation and Choice Online Act — as bipartisan lawmakers seek to curtail the power and influence of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and others.
In short, the bill would prevent companies from “unfairly preferencing their own products and services” on their platforms while prohibiting “specific forms of conduct that are harmful to small businesses, entrepreneurs, and consumers.”
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Roy Austin, vice president of civil rights for Facebook parent company Meta, pledged to crack down on “misinformation” and alleged discriminatory conduct propagated by the social media platform.
“We’re living in a time and a society where there are people who propagate obvious falsehoods,” Austin said in an interview with Axios. “My position is, when those falsehoods injure historically and systemically marginalized communities, that they don’t belong.”
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Amazon and Facebook parent company Meta spent more money in 2021 lobbying lawmakers and officials than any year before, according to lobbying disclosure filings.
Amazon spent $20.3 million on lobbying while Meta spent $20.1 million in 2021, according to a review of lobbying disclosure filings by MarketWatch. The figures are record totals for both tech companies, who spent $18.9 million and $19.7 million on lobbying in 2020, respectively.
Google’s lobbying spend for 2021 clocked in at $11.5 million, while Microsoft spent $10.3 million and Apple spent $6.5 million, according to MarketWatch’s review.
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Facebook and Google CEOs Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai signed off on a deal between the two companies to rig the digital advertising market, a recently unredacted lawsuit alleges.
The existence of the deal, dubbed Jedi Blue, was first revealed in a complaint filed by Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in December 2020 which alleged that Google unlawfully abused its dominance in the digital ads market. The complaint alleged that Google struck a deal with Facebook in 2018 to give the social company secret advantages in its ad exchanges, known as Open Bidding auctions, to the detriment of competitors.
An unredacted version of the complaint filed Friday alleges that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally signed off on the deal. The complaint alleges Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg brokered the deal with top Google executive Philipp Schindler and pushed Zuckerberg to approve.
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Democratic California Rep. Ro Khanna criticized Twitter and Facebook for censoring the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden, saying the story should not have been blocked.
“I thought it was a mistake for Twitter to take down some of this stuff about Hunter Biden, or Facebook to do that,” Khanna said during an interview with Joe Lonsdale on the American Optimist podcast while promoting his book “Dignity in a Digital Age: Making Tech Work for All of Us.”
The New York Post published a story in October 2020 detailing a meeting between Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden and a top executive at Ukrainian gas company Burisma in 2015, relying on data recovered from a laptop reportedly belonging to Hunter. Shortly after the story was published, Twitter blocked users from sharing the link and suspended accounts that attempted to tweet it out.
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Facebook parent company Meta will require its in-person workers to receive a booster shot in addition to a COVID-19 vaccine, the company announced Monday.
By March 28, Meta employees must have received the booster to use the in-person offices of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meta is reportedly delaying the reopening of its offices until late March due to the requirement.
“We’re focused on making sure our employees continue to have choices about where they work given the current COVID-19 landscape,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of human resources, said in a statement, CNBC reported. “We understand that the continued uncertainty makes this a difficult time to make decisions about where to work, so we’re giving more time to choose what works best for them.”
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Former President Donald Trump, who is building his own social media solution, on Monday night called Twitter and Facebook a “disgrace to our Nation” for their continued censorship of conservative voices and implored Americans to abandon their platforms.
Trump’s statement was released after a tumultuous 24-hour period in which freshman Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was banned permanently from Twitter and given a 24-hour timeout on Facebook for information she posted on COVID-19.
“Twitter is a disgrace to democracy. They shouldn’t be allowed to do business in this Country,” the former president said. “Marjorie Taylor Greene has a huge constituency of honest, patriotic, hard-working people. They don’t deserve what’s happened to them on places like low-life Twitter and Facebook.
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Facebook permanently suspended the ads account of Heroes of Liberty, a conservative children’s book publisher, claiming the company’s ads violated the tech giant’s policies against “Low Quality or Disruptive Content.”
“We began investing in Facebook four months before we launched our first book,” Bethany Mandel, Heroes of Liberty editor and board member, told Fox Business. “We invested most of our marketing budget on the platform, and now our budget (the money we’ve already spent), as well as our assets and data are gone. Marketing-wise we are back in square one, financially it’s even more challenging.”
Facebook initially banned Heroes of Liberty’s Facebook Ads account on Dec. 23, according to Mandel, claiming the account “didn’t comply with our policy on Low Quality or Disruptive Content.”
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Facebook suspended the account of Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for 24 hours on Monday, one day after Twitter permanently suspended her account over repeated violations of COVID-19 misinformation policies.
Greene posted on Telegram that Facebook blocked her from posting or commenting for 24 hours for not abiding by the company’s “Community Standards” on Monday.
“This is because you previously posted something that didn’t follow our Community Standards,” Facebook’s temporary restriction announcement said, according to Greene.
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A majority of Americans don’t trust major social media platforms, including TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, to keep their data safe, according to a new poll.
Over 70% of American internet users say they don’t trust Facebook to responsibly manage their personal information or data related to their internet activity, according to the results of The Washington Post/Schar School poll released Wednesday. Similarly, 63% say they don’t trust TikTok to handle their data and 60% say they don’t trust Instagram.
Amazon and Apple were deemed the most trustworthy major tech companies, with just 40% of Americans saying they distrust the tech giants, according to the poll results.
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