In the sultry days of summer 2020 as Donald Trump contemplated a second term, his aides engaged in a quiet conversation with members of the emerging digital media about an audacious idea.
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As Elon Musk ramps up his $1 million-a-day support for Donald Trump, what appears to be a record of progressive harassment of his many companies may explain how the world’s richest man went all-in for Republicans.
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The recent arrest of Telegram CEO, Pavel Durov, has been in the news. Anti-Russian westerners cheered these events on, even though Durov had fled Russia years ago in order to pursue his techno-libertarian dreams in peace. Adding to the intrigue, the arrest may have included an element of treachery, as some reports say he was invited to visit France by French President Emmanuel Macron, only to be arrested on the tarmac. Mon Dieu!
The ostensible basis for Durov’s arrest is criminal responsibility for various unsavory things that have happened on his Telegram platform. This kind of vicarious liability for hosting websites, particularly those involving user communications and forums, is not entirely new, but it is controversial and always applied very selectively.
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Two campaign staffers for Vice President Kamala Harris were previously involved in efforts to censor Americans for spreading purported “disinformation” about COVID-19 while working in the Biden-Harris White House.
Then-administration officials Rob Flaherty and Aisha Shah are named as having been involved in the government’s efforts to censor Americans in legal filings related to the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, which alleged that the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor content related to the pandemic and other hot-button topics. On the Harris campaign team, Flaherty is now a deputy campaign manager and Shah is the director of digital partnerships, according to their respective LinkedIn profiles.
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The influential advertising coalition known as the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) announced their dissolution on Thursday after facing multiple lawsuits from social media companies accusing the group of censoring conservatives, Business Insider reported.
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In the arsenal of the censorship-industrial complex, few weapons have been more effective than advertiser boycotts. Long before online censorship reached its peak in 2020 and 2021, advocates of online censorship had identified online advertisers as the most important source of pressure on social media companies to restrict free speech. When direct appeals to social media platforms fail, pro-censorship campaigners use the threat of advertiser boycotts to produce the desired result.
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Billionaire businessman Elon Musk announced Thursday morning he would file a lawsuit against the “perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket.”
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The Arizona secretary of state’s office and Maricopa County worked together to censor information about the state’s 2020 election audit of the county and reported elected officials’ posts to social media companies.
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Hard to Kill is a Steven Seagal action thriller from 1990 that garnered scornful reviews, though I loved it as a then-teenager. But that phrase, “hard to kill,” also aptly describes the “Very Fine People” hoax surrounding Charlottesville and the lingering myth that President Trump praised bigots there.
In recent days, liberal social media rabble-rouser actor Michael Rapaport stated on the Patrick Bet-David podcast that “the Charlottesville, that I ranted about, I was wrong… that there’s good people on both sides, and when you see the full quote, that wasn’t what he [Trump] said.” Rapaport has been a prolific Trump hater, producing vitriolic online rants that frequently go viral, earning him nearly 700,000 followers on X/Twitter.
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Big Tech is back at the Supreme Court.
Appealing from a big loss they suffered at the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, social media platforms are challenging Texas’ social media law that prohibits those companies from engaging in viewpoint discrimination when curating their platforms.
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In January 2023, two months after his appointment as special counsel, Jack Smith applied for a search warrant to obtain all of the data associated with Donald Trump’s long-dormant Twitter account. Smith sought not just public posts but direct messages, drafted and deleted posts, and the identity of any individual with access to the account. Smith also asked for “all users [Trump’s account] has followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked, and all users who have followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked” Trump’s account.
The application was stunning in scope with no justification as to why the government needed such a limitless trove of information—particularly one that clearly ran afoul of Trump’s right to assert executive privilege. So, Smith neatly settled that matter by additionally asking for a nondisclosure order that prevented Twitter from notifying Trump about the search warrant for 180 days.
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Life is hard if you do not learn from your mistakes. With Covid, political leaders and public health authorities engaged in a series of missteps, miscalculations, and manias that amounted to an extreme overreaction to the disease.
First, statistical models overstated the risk of the disease by an order of magnitude. Then, even after these miscalculations became apparent, other extreme measures like lockdowns, mandatory masking, coercive vaccine mandates, and a million other indignities ensued. In the end, almost everyone got Covid, almost everyone survived, and, while the economic countermeasures increased our national debt by 30%, the economy soon recovered too.
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Elon Musk said Monday that the Anti-Defamation League pushed X, social media platform formally known as Twitter, to shut down the popular Libs of TikTok account.
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Elon Musk purchased Twitter vowing to make it friendlier to free speech, and repeatedly aired its dirty laundry through the release of the Twitter Files that chronicled past censorship efforts. But months later with the 2024 election on the horizon, the company now known as X is in the market for applicants for some disinformation-fighting jobs.
And that has some free-speech advocates alarmed.
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Elon Musk says that his fight with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be live-streamed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that Musk owns.
“Zuck v Musk fight will be live-streamed on 𝕏. All proceeds will go to charity for veterans,” Musk wrote on X early Sunday morning.
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Louisiana federal Judge Terry A. Doughty shocked Americans with his July 4th restraining order against Biden’s digital team which was supposed to be fighting “disinformation” but was in reality just banning views online it didn’t like.
Doughty’s opinion is a jaw dropping expose of how White House staff bullied Facebook, Twitter and other platforms to remove content about election fraud, COVID concerns and other matters of public interest in blatant violation of the First Amendment. Governmental actors cannot demand that others do what they cannot under the Constitution, just as you can’t have proxies break the law for you. Yet that’s exactly what Biden officials did and that’s exactly what Judge Doughty stopped.
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Heading into Iowa for a big weekend after rising in the polls, Ohio businessman and GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy will join Elon Musk and investor David Sacks live Friday afternoon on x.com.
The conversation on the social network platform formerly known as Twitter is set for 4:30 p.m. Central Time, hours before Ramaswamy joins much of the rest of the packed field of Republican presidential candidates at the Republican Party of Iowa’s Lincoln Dinner fundraiser in Des Moines.
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The Supreme Court could hear a case questioning a California agency’s coordination with Twitter to censor election-related “misinformation.”
O’Handley v. Weber, which concerns the California Secretary of State’s Office of Election Cybersecurity’s work with Twitter to monitor “false or misleading” election information, was appealed to the Supreme Court on June 8. The case raises questions similar to those posed in the free speech lawsuit Missouri v. Biden, now being appealed in the Fifth Circuit: Can the government lawfully induce private actors to censor protected speech?
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival Threads has plummeted in popularity for a second consecutive week, according to market intelligence company Sensor Tower, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The so-called “Twitter Killer” has experienced a substantial fall in engagement, down to 13 million daily active users, which is a 70% drop from July 7, according to Sensor Tower estimates, the WSJ reported. Meanwhile, billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Twitter steadily maintains around 200 million active daily users, who spend an average of 30 minutes on the platform.
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The House Judiciary Committee on Monday sent a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg asking questions about possible censorship occurring on Threads, Meta’s latest social media platform.
“Given that Meta has censored First Amendment-protected speech as a result of government agencies’ requests and demands in the past, the Committee is concerned about potential First Amendment violations that have occurred or will occur on the Threads platform,” Committee chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, wrote in the letter.
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Social media platform Twitter warned rival Meta that intended to protect its intellectual property rights following the latter’s debut of a Threads, a Twitter competitor that is linked to Meta’s other platforms.
Twitter has raised concerns that Meta may have improperly used its intellectual property and issued the firm a cease-and-desist letter on Thursday.
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From the South Lawn of the White House to the pulsing heartbeats of North America’s bustling metropolises, Democrats are stepping into the 2024 electoral fray armed with a transgender-dominated platform that makes the riots of 2020 look like a block party.
This time, the spotlight is focused on the very future of the country: our children.
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Media Matters for America published a study recently concluding that Facebook does not censor conservatives, but experts told the DCNF the study is not credible because it did not properly measure the suppression of right-leaning pages.
Right-leaning Facebook pages typically got more total interactions than politically nonaligned and left-leaning pages on Facebook, according to the study. However, experts say this does not mean that there was no censorship of right-leaning Facebook pages, as the only example of suppression the Media Matters study cites is Donald Trump’s Facebook ban.
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Former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson on Thursday released the second episode of his newest production, “Tucker on Twitter.” The episode, titled, “Cling to your taboos!” is a 12-minute long video podcast where Carlson addresses the connection between pedophilia and the growing acceptance of white supremacy without defining it.
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Former Fox News primetime host Tucker Carlson premiered his newest production on Tuesday. Dubbed “Tucker on Twitter,” the ten-minute video podcast featured an all-new segment from Carlson discussing media censorship and bias. The video was labeled as “episode one.”
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The head of Twitter’s engineering operations has resigned after the platform’s hosting of Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis’ glitch-plagued 2024 presidential campaign launch.
“After almost four incredible years at Twitter, I decided to leave the nest yesterday,” Twitter’s Foad Dabiri tweeted. “The combination of the fantastic community, the impact it has, and its limitless potential sets Twitter apart.”
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A glitchy start to the Ron DeSantis campaign, Tim Scott fires back at “The View,” Vivek Ramaswamy takes on Target, and Nikki Haley gets a CNN Town Hall.
There’s no rest for the weary on the expanded presidential campaign trail.
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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s Twitter campaign rollout got off to a rough start Wednesday when the livestream crashed, prompting Trump to respond with a video meme contrasting it with his campaign announcement in November.
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On Tuesday, the social media platform Twitter made several major changes to its “hateful conduct policy,” determining that users are now allowed to refer to so-called “transgender” people by their actual genders and their original, gender-appropriate names.
The Daily Caller reports that the original policy, first enacted in 2018, forbade users from engaging in “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” The new guidelines have removed this sentence altogether from the “Slurs and Tropes” section.
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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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Twitter assigned the label of “US state-affiliated media” on its social media platform to taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR). “Seems accurate,” said Twitter CEO Elon Musk Wednesday morning as he posted his company’s policy on that classification category.
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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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SOMERS, Connecticut – Stanford University School of Medicine Professor Jay Bhattacharya, M.D. said in an interview with The Star News Network Friday that Americans “should be asking” whether diagnostic code data now being utilized to identify patients who were either never vaccinated or not fully vaccinated against COVID-19 will be used “illegitimately.”
Bhattacharya responded to a question about the recent implementation in the United States of new International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) diagnostic codes that requires doctors at clinics and hospitals to ask patients about their COVID mRNA vaccination status.
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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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They sure don’t make tyrants like they used to.
Tyrants once rose to power the old-fashioned way: defeating the opposition on the battlefield or at the faux ballot box. Despite their atrocities, these despots at least had some swagger—perhaps a way with the ladies, a good sense of humor, strong persuasive abilities, commanding verbal skills, pride in their appearance.
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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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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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In the 14th installment of the Twitter Files, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed how Democrats chose to falsely accuse their opposition of being “Russian bots” even though Twitter directly disagreed with this assessment.
As reported by Fox News, shortly after then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes released his famous memo detailing the efforts that were undertaken to spy on the Trump campaign by intelligence agencies, high-profile Democrats began spreading the lie that Nunes’ information was being promoted by “Russian bots” on Twitter.
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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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December has been a whirlwind month in the Twitterverse. A new academic study argued that hate speech was surging on the platform, while new company owner Elon Musk countered that such tweets were being quietly hidden, so they didn’t count. High-profile journalists were abruptly suspended and restored with little explanation, with condemnations from the EU and UN. All the while, the so-called “Twitter Files” allowed an unprecedented inside look at the messy and controversial world of platform moderation. What can we learn from all of this about the how the social platforms at the heart of our digital democracies are run?
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Twitter users voted for owner and CEO Elon Musk to step down from his leadership role by a 15-point margin in a Sunday poll.
“Should I step down as head of Twitter? I will abide by the results of this poll,” Musk asked in a Sunday afternoon tweet. The query came after Twitter implemented several recent changes in its policies, specifically instituting a policy prohibiting the sharing of real-time public information that resulted in the suspensions of several journalists.
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The FBI paid Twitter millions as a reimbursement for the time the company spent processing the FBI’s requests, according to internal documents published by author Michael Shellenberger Monday, in the most recent installment of Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing “Twitter Files.”
In an email with the subject line “Run the business – we made money!” an employee, whose name was redacted, reports to then-Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker, that the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million dollars between October 2019 and February 2021, Shellenberger reported. Baker, a former FBI agent, was the agency’s general counsel during Operation Crossfire Hurricane, and approved the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page via improper use of the Steele dossier, according to a report by the Justice Department’s inspector general.
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Twitter CEO Elon Musk changed the social media platform’s rules on live location tracking after what he described as a “crazy stalker” followed a car carrying his child and “climbed” onto the vehicle.
In making the change, Musk also said Wednesday that “legal action is being taken” against Jack Sweeney, the man behind the account using publicly available data to track the location of the Tesla CEO’s private jet, following the attack on his 2-year-old child, X Æ A-Xii Musk.
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America’s increasingly powerful Spanish-language media outlets have largely ignored coverage of critical free speech issues, such as Twitter’s censorship of the New York Post ‘s investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop, and in instead they have focused on stories that negatively expose Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, according to an analysis of ADN America.
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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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The fourth entry in the ongoing “Twitter Files” series of explosive revelations dropped on Saturday night, with part four in the series focusing on the removal of Donald Trump from the popular social media platform in early 2021.
The latest thread, published by writer Michael Shellenberger, details the process that “Twitter executives” took as they were “build[ing] the case for a permanent ban” against the former Republican president.
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Twitter’s former Head of Trust and Safety, Yoel Roth, had weekly meetings with the FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) at least as far back as 2020, when former President Donald Trump was still in office, internal communications between Twitter staff obtained by journalist Matt Taibbi Friday reveal.
Yoel participated in one such weekly meeting shortly after the company’s moderation team was thrown into a crisis following its decision to suppress an October 2020 New York Post story concerning a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, according to Taibbi. Roth appeared to explicitly ask the government officials in the meeting to “share anything useful” concerning the laptop story, but they apparently declined to do so.
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Twitter was a huge lie, but it was fun. Maybe it’s like television. Elon Musk is having a blast unveiling the conservative-hiding, progressive-promoting plot that was rising up in the complex engineering behind the little blue bird, which leads me to believe that the lovable little critter was actually a big monster. That liberals are outraged by the revelations only proves one thing: cancellation is their erotic dream and their nightmare is freedom. They already enjoyed the former too much. Now, it’s time for the latter.
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The third release of internal Twitter documents on Friday evening detailed the momentous decision to remove former President Donald Trump from the platform after the Jan. 6 riot, making clear that executives understood it was an unprecedented moment in the history of speech.
Alternative journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday released the third set of internal documents as part of an Elon Musk-sanctioned effort to expose the platform’s prior censorship practices.
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Former New York Times editor Bari Weiss on Thursday released internal documents on Twitter’s censorship efforts and detailed the creation of blacklists and use of shadow ban technique to throttle “disfavored” tweets.
Last week, Musk released information on the company’s censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story via alternative journalist Matt Taibbi. Thursday’s dump came through a team of reporters Weiss led and to whom Musk granted broad access to the company’s files to investigate on condition they first publish their findings on Twitter.
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