As conflict over Pentagon wokeness intensifies between uniformed and civilian adversaries, dissenters within the military have taken to social media aiming to win hearts and minds for the anti-woke faction.
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There are few, if any, political issues that now generate the breadth and intensity of bipartisan backlash as does the rise of Big Tech.
During Donald Trump’s presidency, the major parties largely diverged on their specific grievances against the woke Silicon Valley monopolists who serve as gatekeepers for America’s 21st-century public square. Republicans, by and large, focused on censorship of conservative online speech. Democrats, by contrast, tended to focus on economic concentration; the five American corporations with the largest market caps, for example, are tech behemoths Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google Alphabet, and Facebook. This divergence has stymied efforts to rein in the Big Tech oligarchy on issues such as Section 230, the 1990s-era provision permitting platforms to engage in publisher-like content-moderation decisions without being legally treated as publishers.
Conservatives still have myriad concerns with Big Tech’s noxious brew of speech suppressions, shadow bans, and unaccountable deplatformings. Those concerns are both legitimate and justified by Big Tech’s ever-expanding list of misdeeds. But there is an emerging sea change in the way conservatives conceptualize the relationship between Big Tech’s unfettered content-moderation leeway and the sheer economic clout wielded by the relevant corporate actors.
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Conservative political commentator and attorney Rogan O’Handley is suing former California Secretary of State and now U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, current Calif. SoS Shirley Weber, Twitter, Team Biden campaign consultants SKDK, and others, for coordinating to deplatform him from Twitter after he tweeted his concerns about the 2020 election.
The Center for American Liberty in conjunction with the Dhillon Law Group, Inc. filed the federal civil rights lawsuit on Thursday in the United States District Court in Central California.
O’Handley spent years developing a verified Twitter account with 440,000 followers only to find his account permanently suspended at the direction of the Secretary of State’s office, according to a press release from Center for American Liberty.
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Google announced that it will remove its global lead for diversity strategy and research, Kamau Bobb, after a 2007 blog post in which he’d made antisemitic comments surfaced, Fox News reported. Bobb will be reassigned to a STEM research role.
The reassignment comes after revelations that Bobb had previously authored a blog post that contained antisemitic statements.
In a 2007 blog post by Bobb titled “If I Were a Jew,” he wrote that Jewish people had an “insensitivity” to suffering and stated “If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defense of myself.” The post has since been removed, but is recorded here.
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On Wednesday, a Utah school board member was arrested on charges of using social media to solicit child pornography from students, the Daily Caller reports.
The suspect is 29-year-old Joel-Lehi Organista, who had recently been elected to the Salt Lake City School Board after having previously taught at Horizonte High School. He faces eight felony counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. The authorities were led to him by a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which alleged that Organista had child pornography downloaded onto his Dropbox account. A subsequent search of his computer confirmed this, and Organista was arrested.
Following his arrest, he “admitted to having downloaded, viewed, and kept the images and videos containing child pornography.” One of his chief tactics was to use the social media app SnapChat to message children between the ages of 12 and 17, asking them for nude photos and other inappropriate material. He first started sending such messages and downloading such content in January, shortly after he became the youngest board member in the board’s history upon his election in January.
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Facebook announced Friday that former President Trump will continue to be suspended from the platform for at least two years, through Jan. 7, 2023.
“We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” said Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, according to Politico.
“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols,” Clegg said.
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After months of aggressively censoring what it called “COVID-19 misinformation,” Facebook recently announced that it would no longer block user posts claiming that the coronavirus was “man-made” or “manufactured.” That’s because those posts, which typically referenced the work of scientists who supported the idea of a possible coronavirus “lab leak” from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now appear to have been credible.
This entire episode should be extremely embarrassing for Facebook, a company so confident it has cornered the market on “truth” that it has made it their prerogative to “fact-check” individual user posts, banning anything that fails to comport with Silicon Valley’s extreme left-wing view of reality. Last year, Facebook banned an ad from the American Principles Project PAC claiming Joe Biden and the Democrats would destroy girls’ sports by supporting policies that allowed boys who identify as transgender to compete against girls.
Facebook said the ad was “missing context,” and so our PAC wasn’t allowed to communicate with voters. On Joe Biden’s first day as president, he signed an executive order specifically allowing these boys to compete in girls’ sports.
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An upcoming docuseries hopes to burst the woke bubble billowing across Western culture.
“The Woke Reformation,” first teased on “The Rubin Report” May 14, tracks the rise of a woke culture that has infiltrated everything from academia to global corporations like Coke, Starbucks and Nike.
Dave Rubin, a self-described “classical liberal,” broke the news about the docuseries via his “Rubin Report” YouTube show and podcast.
“Woke Reformation” director Travis Brown also teamed with Rubin to share details about the project via Locals.com, Rubin’s social media platform. The author of 2020’s “Don’t Burn This Book” created the cyber network to allow artists to speak their minds without fear of cancellation.
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Facebook’s “fact-checkers” cannot agree on the legality of university COVID vaccine mandates.
Disagreement about the legality of the COVID vaccines is understandable — The College Fix explored this topic several weeks ago in our own article, but the problem is that a Facebook fact-check on an article can lead to reduced distribution.
And enough strikes against a page can lead to a permanent ban. The College Fix has seen this firsthand, after Facebook overlords punished us for sharing the comments of an epidemiologist who made a prediction about what would happen if lockdowns were lifted.
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Aformer federal judge who serves on Facebook’s oversight board on Sunday slammed the social media giant for “arbitrary” and “inconsistent” enforcement of its rules in the aftermath of a permanent ban on Donald Trump’s account.
“We gave them a certain amount of time to get their house in order,” Michael McConnell told Fox News Sunday. “They needed some time because their rules are a shambles. They are not transparent. They are unclear. They are internally inconsistent.”
McConnell said the board made a series of recommendations “about how to make their rules clearer and more consistent.”
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Many Republicans in Congress have reignited their calls to break up the big tech companies after Facebook announced last week they would maintain the suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account.
A new poll released by Rasmussen Friday found that 59% of likely voters “believe operators of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are politically biased in the decisions they make” with only 26% disagreeing. The rest are unsure.
The poll results went on to say that “a majority of voters now favor ending legal protections for social media companies.” The reported public opinion against the tech giants comes the same week Facebook announced they would keep Trump suspended from their platform, citing his alleged role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
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The pro-life news website LifeSiteNews has been removed from Facebook accusing the group of violating policies regarding COVID-19.
According to reports Facebook permanently blacklisted the LifeSite’s page over “false information about COVID-19” and “vaccine discouraging information.”
Via LifeSite News:
In a quick series of notices and emails to LifeSiteNews’ marketing department, Facebook delivered the shocking news, accusing LifeSite of publishing “false information about COVID-19 that could contribute to physical harm.”
Facebook also said that they deplatform Facebook pages that publish “vaccine discouraging information on the platform.”
Facebook cited an article posted on April 10, 2021, headlined “COVID vaccines can be deadly for some.”
“Much like when LifeSite was removed from YouTube, this comes with little surprise,” noted LifeSiteNews Marketing Director Rebekah Roberts. “We have known this day was coming for months now.”
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You wouldn’t think any possible controversy could append itself to that day, except that we are living in preternaturally contentious times. Two days ago, Rep. Cori Bush, a freshman Democrat from St. Louis, was testifying about racial disparities in health care, focusing specifically on childbirth. While describing her own medical experiences, Bush used the unwieldy phrase “birthing people” instead of “mothers.” Apparently, this was an awkward attempt to use inclusive language.
Predictably, this rhetorical gambit earned her a fair amount of ridicule on social media. I’m sure Rep. Bush has many virtues, but neither self-awareness nor self-deprecating humor are at the top of that list. Just as predictably, Bush lashed out at those who mocked her wording for their “racism and transphobia.” She also accused her critics of trivializing an important subject, which was a more substantive rejoinder. Bush was discussing racial disparities in America’s medical system, which is no laughing matter, and invoking her own harrowing experiences in hospital delivery rooms to do it.
Yet breezily trying to replace the word “mothers” as a sign of wokeness a few days before Mother’s Day wasn’t likely to go down well. It was Cori Bush’s own peculiar choice of words that distracted listeners from her story.
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Facebook’s oversight board upheld the company’s decision to ban former President Donald Trump Wednesday morning.
“The Board found that, in maintaining an unfounded narrative of electoral fraud and persistent calls to action, Mr. Trump created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible,” the board said in a statement.
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Former President Trump has launched a new platform to communicate with the public, adding a page on donaldjtrump.com that looks something like a social media feed.
The page headlined “From The Desk of Donald J. Trump,” includes statements from Trump as well as a video at the very top of the feed apparently advertising the new communications outlet.
The posts have buttons for people to share to Twitter and Facebook. “This is just a one-way communication,” a source informed Fox News. “This system allows Trump to communicate with his followers.”
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Twitter’s stock fell 15 percent last week apparently because they’re not getting sufficient numbers of new users to please the market. People are not as intrigued as they used to be with an allegedly open social media platform that’s not really open, in fact is something of a dictatorship.
I know you’re not supposed to kick someone when they’re down. But when that someone has been acting in the most unAmerican, peremptory ways for years, as if the Bill of Rights never existed, censoring people without explanation—even a former president—blocking free discussion of medical science, for Heaven’s sake, and treating conservatives and libertarians pretty much the way Ferdinand and Isabella treated the Jews before they finally kicked them out of Spain, it’s time to take action.
And, when that “down” is the first chink in the armor of Big Tech that has dominated discourse in this country and around the world to a degree never thought possible, it is all the more urgent to let that foot fly and jump up and down on top a little as well if necessary.
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Michael Rectenwald got himself chased out of New York University when the self-identified communist copped to tweeting against trigger warnings, safe spaces and bias reporting under the pseudonym “Deplorable NYU Prof.”
The professor left two years ago with a golden parachute — the result of a legal settlement with the private university that included a retirement package.
He’s not content anymore with just writing polemical books and fiction in retirement. Now Rectenwald is scouting for academics to join an educational startup, American Scholars, that is launching this summer.
Government documents from Florida show that social media giant Twitter failed to properly file to do business in the state, incurring a fine for transacting business there without the official permission of state officials.
The documents, available on the website of the Florida Department of State’s Division of Corporations, show that in March the department received from Twitter an “application by foreign corporation for authorization to transact business in Florida.”
The application reveals that Twitter “first transacted business in Florida” in June 2015, apparently well before it registered to do business there. A letter sent back to Twitter by the department indicates that the social media company failed to properly register with the state, potentially for many years.
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Twitter is refusing to address whether a tweet by Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James violated the platform’s terms of service.
James tweeted, then deleted, a picture Wednesday of Ohio police officer Nicholas Reardon who shot 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant as she attempted to stab another girl, body cam footage showed.
“YOU’RE NEXT,” James tweeted to his millions of followers with the hashtag #ACCOUNTABILITY. He has since deleted the tweet.
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The U.S. Postal Service’s law enforcement division is running a covert operation tracking and collecting Americans’ social media posts, Yahoo News reported.
The postal service’s Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored social media accounts for “inflammatory” posts and protest plans, according to an internal document obtained by Yahoo News. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) investigated Parler and Telegram accounts that referenced protests that were supposed to occur on March 20 for the so-called International Day of Protests, the document showed.
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The Minneapolis Star-Tribune is being blasted online for releasing biographical information of all twelve jurors plus two alternates in the Derek Chauvin trial in the killing of George Floyd.
Without naming the jurors, reporters Paul Walsh and Hannah Sayle on Tuesday published enough details about their lives, internet sleuths and local snoops may be able to figure out who they are.
Walsh is a general assignment reporter at the Star-Tribune, and Sayle is a digital features editor. Online critics are accusing the paper of trying to intimidate the jurors into reaching a guilty verdict.
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The media, academy and Big Tech are suppressing facts about the harms caused by COVID-19 lockdown policies, especially for younger generations, Gov. Ron DeSantis and public health experts said in a “roundtable discussion” on the novel coronavirus Monday.
These powerful American institutions are also misleading their audiences about the public health results from Florida’s open approach, which contrasted sharply with most states, they said.
The potential Republican presidential candidate hammered Google and its YouTube platform in particular for removing his earlier COVID-19 roundtable with the same doctors, branding it “misinformation.” Even some Florida news stations had their coverage removed.
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Social media companies have policed coronavirus-related content based on information from top health organizations, even as those organizations have contradicted themselves.
Facebook and Google instituted policies early in the pandemic restricting user content shared on their platforms to information that doesn’t contradict World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) findings. However, the organizations have contradicted, backtracked or retracted their own findings throughout the pandemic.
Facebook’s policy states that the site “will debunk common myths that have been identified by the World Health Organization.” Shortly after coronavirus was declared a pandemic, Facebook announced its “Coronavirus Information Center,” which curates updates from “organizations such as the World Health Organization.”
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Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the Democratic chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Thursday called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to investigate financing for Parler, including whether the social media site has any ties to Russia.
Part of Maloney’s rationale for investigating Parler’s links to Russia is that the social media site’s CEO, John Matze, founded the company shortly after traveling to Russia with his wife, who is Russian.
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In the weeks since the November presidential election, numerous liberals, leftists, and other opponents of President Donald Trump have called for a purge of him and his supporters from public life.
Just days ahead of the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20, those purges have begun in earnest.
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President Donald Trump has finally had his Twitter account banned permanently, which had more than 80 million followers.
He got his posting privileges suspended from Facebook yesterday. The account itself may not be too far behind.
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The Mainstream Media Are to blame for the D.C. rioting. Through four years they relentlessly pursued a single-minded goal: to take down the fairly-and-squarely democratically elected presidency of Donald Trump. Towards that end, they escalated non-stories into major “news” and elevated non-entities into major public figures. As they did in 2014 with the tragic crash of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, they contorted serious news into theater and abandoned their duties to investigate honestly and report dispassionately, fairly, and responsibly.
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Tens of thousands of posts containing news stories from The Star News Network’s Facebook pages were temporarily deleted Wednesday.
“Hi, we are currently experiencing an issue with Facebook and because of that the sharing is stopped and your Facebook accounts are paused,” a third party software used by The Star News Network to schedule and post stories to social media said by email.
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As a “socially distanced” Thanksgiving nears, and as the worst year of modern American history begins drawing to a close, our readers can be excused for thinking there are very unwelcome developments and needed adjustments extant in our culture and society.
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Are you tired of Big Tech deciding what posts you see on social media? Do you feel anxious posting your political opinions online? Do you wish you could exercise your right to free speech without worrying about political correctness or being “cancelled”?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, Parler may be the best thing to happen to you in 2020! It’s been a year, we all need some good news, so please read on.
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Facebook seems to be presenting a “Catch-22” for conservatives who are fed up with censorship: In order to leave Facebook yet let contacts know how to find them, they must risk Facebook’s censorship to let those contacts know.
Project Veritas has often documented Facebook’s bias against conservatives and its deletions of their posts.
Some who say they are tired of that bias are trying microblogging/social networking site Parler. They say they see Parler as a free-speech alternative to Twitter. Forbes in June ran an interview with Parler founder John Matze and how the site has grown to be a conservative presence in only two years.
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After a series of mishaps involving muted senators, virtual cross-talk, and “connectivity issues” befuddling one of the world’s most tech-savvy men, the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and Google appeared before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday for what has now become a performative ritual: senators of both parties yell about different aspects of social media, the tech giants respond with bland, vague, noncommittal statements. And nothing substantive happens.
This is exactly where the Senate Commerce Committee found itself on Wednesday, when Big Tech was confronted with a host of critics and without any defenders—but ultimately very little in the way of committed follow-up from legislators.
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Officials at the U.S. embassy in Kiev ordered the monitoring of 13 prominent Americans’ social media accounts during the early days of the Ukraine scandal in spring 2019 and later were informed their activities potentially violated the Privacy Act, according to State Department memos made public on Tuesday.
The memos, released under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the conservative watchdog Judicial Watch, show those targeted for monitoring included President Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr., the president’s personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Lou Dobbs. This reporter was one of the 13 individuals on the list targeted.
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Twitter says the hack that compromised the accounts of some of its most high-profile users targeted 130 people. The hackers were able to reset the passwords of 45 of those accounts.
The San Francisco-based company said in a blog post Saturday that for up to eight of these accounts the attackers also downloaded the account’s information through the “Your Twitter Data” tool. None of the eight were verified accounts, Twitter said, adding that it is contacting the owners of the affected accounts.
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Reddit, one of the top internet sites in the world, on Monday banned a major pro-President Donald Trump group that had about 800,000 members, citing “hate speech.”
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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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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 Nick Givas Political commentator and former secret service agent Dan Bongino accused Democrats of manipulating social media and paying protesters to create the illusion they’re in the majority. “Listen, the left has gotten really good at this,” Bongino said on “Fox & Friends” Monday. "The left…gives the impression that they…
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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 Kyle Perisic Facebook is rating its users on a scale from zero to one to predict if they’re “trustworthy” – a system similar to one China is using on its citizens. The numbers are not meant to be absolute, however, the social media giant will not tell its…
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by Kyle Perisic Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey began his tour with media networks to explain Twitter’s speech policies after the backlash he faced from not banning Alex Jones like other tech giants. Dorsey is planning on speaking with Lester Holt on NBC’s “Nightly News” later in August and Brian…
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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 Peter Hasson Kathleen McKinley, a conservative blogger and political commentator for a local Fox station in Houston, was surprised Friday to find an email from Twitter announcing her account had been suspended. Twitter listed two tweets that it claimed violated rules against “hateful conduct,” emails that McKinley shared with…
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by Kyle Perisic Facebook removed a page Tuesday that posted incitements to violence and implied death threats after a Republican lawmaker called the company out. During a hearing Tuesday with representatives from Facebook, Twitter and Google, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida asked Facebook’s Head of Global Policy Management Monika…
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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 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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