The whole-of-government approach to limit the spread of purported misinformation, disinformation and “malinformation,” from the White House to federal agencies and their private partners in Big Tech, think tanks and speech-policing organizations, is turning inside out.
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Four Democrats in the U.S. House sent a letter to Big Tech executives on Friday demanding increased censorship and scrutiny on their platforms after Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, arguing they must censor posts to protect users from potential scams and “misinformation” about federal agencies.
Representatives Deborah Ross (D-NC-02), Kathy Castor (D-FL-14), Nikema Williams (D-GA-05), and Wiley Nickel (D-NC-13) urged tech executives to “do substantially more” to combat social media “misinformation” that purportedly began in the wake of Hurricane Helene, in a letter first reported by Axios.
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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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Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
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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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Meta Platforms CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Monday that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” his team for months in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, including content from ordinary Americans.
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Since 1998 — the last year Congress passed a major law to reform the tech industry and protect children in the virtual space — a lot has changed.
In the last 26 years, more than 100 million Americans were born during the internet’s profound transformation from dial-up to near constant connectivity, especially with the emergence of the biggest social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and more.
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Apple has filed a motion to dismiss a case from the United States Department of Justice claiming that it monopolizes the smartphone market using anticompetitive practices making it harder to switch to another phone. Antitrust experts say this case, if won by the DOJ, could set dangerous precedent by granting the government power to more easily define companies as monopolies and practices as monopolistic, and determine what companies must do or cannot do to avoid the label.
The United States Department of Justice and 16 Attorneys General — including California and the District of Columbia — filed a lawsuit in March alleging Apple illegally monopolizes the smartphone market, such as green boxes with “social stigma” for non-Apple text messages and Apple smartwatch incompatibility with other operating systems.
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Former President Donald Trump blasted Facebook and Google Tuesday after Facebook admitted it had censored photos of Trump’s assassination attempt, images widely seen as a major moment and rallying point for the Trump campaign.
Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, began posting online this week that Google searches for Trump’s assassination, including the photo, were not being autocompleted like other searches. They also posted screenshots saying that searches for Trump turned up news for Trump’s opponent, Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
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Tech giant Meta announced Friday it will be lifting former President Donald Trump’s “heightened suspension penalties” on Facebook and Instagram as the 2024 elections grow closer.
President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, released an updated statement on the company’s site, announcing the change to the protocols from January 2023, specifically for Trump’s restrictions, in order for users to “hear from political candidates.” The company stated the previous restrictions on Trump had been placed in “response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances” following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
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I think that it was the great Miranda Devine, she of the “laptop from hell” fame, who first called the world’s attention to the latest wrinkle in the long-running “Get Trump” extravaganza in New York. Anyway, I first heard about it from her post on X Friday. “If this is legit,” she wrote, commenting on a letter purportedly from Acting Justice Juan Merchan to Donald Trump’s Counsel and the Manhattan DA’s office, “it should wipe out Trump’s conviction.”
Eh, what?
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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.
Maricopa County and the Arizona secretary of state’s office worked together with third parties to censor social media content that they believed was misinformation regarding the 2020 election audit of Maricopa County and election information posted by elected officials, according to public records obtained from both Maricopa County and the Arizona secretary of state by The Gavel Project.
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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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Lawmakers and consumer advocates are calling for a federal investigation into online Chinese retailers Temu and Shein.
The companies have spent billions of dollars in online American advertising with social media companies such as Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, and Google. The probe is warranted, critics say, because of anti-competitive practices skirting U.S. trade and public safety regulations; alleged use of slave laborers to make products sold at cut-rate prices; and advertising targeting children, low-income families and older Americans.
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The preliminary staff report is the result of a months-long investigation into the alleged coercion, where President Joe Biden’s White House reportedly pushed social media platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube, to censor books, videos, and posts.
Emails released Wednesday show Facebook officials chafed at the Biden White House pressure campaign to censor reports that the COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak in China.
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Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.
Among the group’s findings are Facebook censuring 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and House candidates on their platform. For example, the company removed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account. The company also “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020, according to the MRC’s analysis.
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More than 30 school districts in East Tennessee have joined a lawsuit first filed by Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSS) against social media companies, claiming that those companies are harming children.
According to WBIR, Knox, Anderson, Blount, Claiborne, Fentress, Grainger, Greene, Hamblen, Lenoir City, Loudon, Maryville, Oak Ridge, Oneida, and Sevier counties have joined the suit, which names eta, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Google, YouTube and WhatsApp as defendants.
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Federal officials privately scold reporters and attempt to shape or even stop their coverage on a regular basis, without getting sued for First Amendment violations.
How close is that to White House aides privately and repeatedly badgering their counterparts at social media companies and President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people,” for insufficient censorship of disfavored narratives on COVID-19?
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Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has joined a coalition of 26 other state attorneys general in sending a letter to Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, demanding that Instagram stop monetizing child exploitation content.
Citing reporting from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, the coalition of attorneys general expressed concern over news that Instagram has “actively promoted” to “likely pedophiles” content created by “adults seeking to profit from exploiting their own children.”
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Founder and CEO of Your American Flag Store James Staake recounted his censorship battle with Facebook, Shopify, and PayPal, revealing how the tech giants targeted his patriotic business the day after January 6, 2021.
Staake’s business, which started as a side job involving him building wooden American flag pieces featuring patriotic artwork created by his wife, grew from a small local operation in 2018 to a full-time gig once the products were available to purchase online.
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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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The State of Ohio has been sued by a company representing multiple social media platforms in order to block the Social Media Parental Notification Act from taking effect.
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The Social Media Parental Notification Act, signed into law by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine earlier this year, is set to take effect next month in the Buckeye State.
The bill was passed as part of DeWine’s 2023-24 executive budget presented to the Ohio General Assembly.
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Facebook has reportedly experienced nearly a 200 percent increase in antisemitic posts since the October 7 terrorist attacks by Hamas against Israel, and a U.S. Senator recently wrote to the social media platform’s parent company, Meta, about reports it is censoring pro-Israel content.
Antisemitism monitoring technology company Cyberwell recently warned of a dramatic increase in antisemitic posts and posts that call for violence against Jewish people across all social media websites, claiming social media companies were unprepared to confront “national security issues” posed by the Hamas attacks.
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Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a Georgia resident and former Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) executive at Facebook, admitted on Tuesday to defrauding the company of more than $4 million from 2017 until 2021.
Federal prosecutors say Furlow-Smiles “abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive” to steal “millions of dollars” from Facebook while “ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission.”
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New Mexico is suing Facebook and Instagram for creating “prime locations” for sexual predators to share child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking content.
NM Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil suit filed against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, alleging that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram than on pornography site PornHub and the adult content platform OnlyFans.
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Alphabet-owned YouTube is censoring The Babylon Bee after the publication shared the leaked partial manifesto of Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who shot and killed six people at The Covenant School in Nashville in March.
“Normally we’re flagged for misinformation, incitement, or hateful conduct. This is our first ‘violent criminal organizations’ policy violation,” said Seth Dillon, CEO of The Babylon Bee, Wednesday on X, formerly Twitter.
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Silicon Valley’s largest companies censored conservative podcaster Steven Crowder’s online show and The Covenant School Killer’s partial manifesto, which Crowder published on Monday.
The popular pundit received a message from Alphabet-owned YouTube saying that Monday’s episode was removed because it violated a policy related to criminal organizations.
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Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) said on Friday that a whistleblower formerly employed by Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, provided “irrefutable evidence” the social media giant knowingly serves harmful content to children on its platforms.
Blackburn released a bipartisan statement with Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Friday after speaking with whistleblower Arturo Bejar, a former employee and consultant for Meta, which was then Facebook. He alleged the company willfully ignored data proving children are regularly served to content that glorifies drug use and eating disorders, and are subjected to sexual harassment and bullying on the company’s platforms.
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Tennessee’s Attorney General is leading a bipartisan coalition of 42 states in suing Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, alleging that Instagram causes mental health harms to its young users.
“Meta has known for years that Instagram causes psychological harm to young users,” said General Skrmetti in a Tuesday press release. “Rather than take steps to reduce or disclose the harm, Meta leaned further in to its profit-maximizing approach that hurts kids. Targeting kids with a harmful product and lying about its safety violates the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act. Meta knows every last design decision that made Instagram addictive to kids and that means it knows exactly how to fix the problem. We’re suing to make the company fix the problem.”
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Over the past few months, China has escalated its efforts to exert control over American technology companies by implementing new requirements, bans and restrictions.
The Chinese government is clamping down on American technology companies by throttling their already limited access to the country’s massive economy, according to new requirements, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The country has also challenged American technology dominance by developing rivals to the latest smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as announcing export limits to key metals in July.
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Meta’s Oversight Board ruled Wednesday that Facebook and Instagram showed “patterns of censorship” by removing posts about abortion that the social media platforms claimed constituted death threats.
The board had been weighing a series of posts that were initially taken down by Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, for potential death threats against both pro-abortion and pro-life advocates before being reinstated after appeals from the users. The board took up the case in June and announced this week that Facebook had erred by removing the posts, according to the ruling.
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Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’
The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.
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Newly released emails reveal that Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs, while serving as secretary of state overseeing elections, had her staff pressure social media companies to censor posts by her Republican opponents under the guise of “misinformation.” Her targets included the Arizona Republican Party and former conservative powerhouse legislator Kelly Townsend.
The AZGOP responded in a tweet, “EXPOSED: @GovernorHobbs has relentlessly censored major entities, including the Arizona Republican Party. Shocked? We’re not. It’s time for transparency and accountability. This goes beyond politics—it’s a matter of principle.”
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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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On Thursday, newly-released files show that the Biden Administration actively pressured the social media giant Facebook to censor meme posts that made fun of the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as posts by then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
As reported by the New York Post, the files released by the House Judiciary Committee show that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, sent an email in April of 2021 to Facebook’s president for global affairs Nick Clegg. Clegg then sent an email to colleagues saying that Slavitt “was outraged — not too strong a word to describe his reaction — that [Facebook] did not remove this post.”
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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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Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody on Monday called on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before the Statewide Council on Human Trafficking to account for how Meta is being used to facilitate human trafficking and sex exploitation.
Moody did so while announcing what she described as the “stunning” and “disturbing” findings of a statewide investigation that found that Meta platforms are being used more than any other social media platforms by human traffickers to commit crimes.
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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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A man from Georgia who sued Facebook for denying him access to his personal account has won, according to Fox 5 Atlanta.
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A Virginia hair salon fired a Christian stylist over a Facebook post criticizing the streaming movie service Disney+.
“My Facebook is my page,” Sidney York, the fired stylist, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “I understand it’s a touchy subject and people may be offended over it, but it had nothing to do with my job.”
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Pennsylvania state Senator Doug Mastriano’s Thursday announcement he won’t seek the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Casey next year vastly boosts potential GOP hopeful Dave McCormick’s prospects.
“I know this will be disappointing for some,” Mastriano said of his decision in a Facebook Live broadcast. “At this moment, the way things are, I am not running for the U.S. Senate seat that is going to be vacated by Casey. We need to beat him.”
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According to multiple Thursday reports, the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System (CMCSs) is filing a lawsuit against several Silicon Valley titans of industry, claiming that social media is having a debilitating effect on its students.
The Frantz Law Group of California, working with the Tennessee law firm Lewis Thomason, filed the lawsuit the week of May 8, according to ClarksvilleNow.com. The defendants in the suit include Facebook, Google, Instagram, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, WhatsApp and YouTube.
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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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Chairwoman of the nonprofit group Greater Georgia and former Georgia U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler recently joined Governor Brian Kemp as he signed Senate Bill 222, also known as the “Zuckerbucks” ban, into law.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced on Wednesday that a preliminary injunction was issued against Michael Peppel and his sham charity, Ohio Clean Water Fund, who stole thousands of dollars after pretending to raise money for East Palestine residents in the wake of the disastrous February 3rd train derailment.
Yost claimed in his initial lawsuit and request for a temporary restraining order that Peppel, a resident of Leetonia, and other individuals had pocketed at least $131,000 of the approximately $141,000 collected from more than 3,000 donors to allegedly help the community of East Palestine.
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Google announced on Wednesday the addition of two new data centers in central Ohio.
According to the firm, one of the centers will be constructed in Lancaster and the other on South High Street in South Columbus, bringing Google’s total investment to date in the state to over $2 billion. According to Google, it has generated nearly $13 billion in economic activity for businesses and nonprofits.
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Initially, many of us welcomed the advent of companies like Facebook and Twitter. They helped us reach out to people we hadn’t spoken to in years and served as a way to get our news every day. But, as time went on, Big Tech has become a menace to the American people. For years, they have been stealing peoples’ data and selling users’ information online.
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A Pennsylvania legislator is asking her colleagues cosponsor a measure to police “unwelcome” speech on social-media platforms.
In a memorandum describing her emerging bill, state Representative Darisha Parker (D-Philadelphia) wrote that her policy “would require social media network companies to establish and maintain effective and transparent complaint procedures for reporting hate speech content.” She further stated the legislation would “mak[e] it clear that hate speech is unwelcome on social media in Pennsylvania.”
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