Tag: Facebook

Pennsylvania Lawmaker Proposes Forcing Social Media to Police ‘Unwelcome’ Speech

Bradley Vasoli

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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Hundreds of Former Federal Surveillance Officials Have Moved to Jobs in Big Tech

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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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Analysis: The RESTRICT Act Could Be Used to Shut Down Any App That Challenges the ‘Reported Result’ of an Election

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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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Arizona Considers Bill to Fine Social Media Firms $250,00 Per Day for Banning Candidates

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Social media platforms that choose to suspend or ban candidates for office would face tens of thousands – or hundreds of thousands – of dollars a day in fines under legislation working its way through the Legislature.

The House Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved Senate Bill 1106 along party lines. The bill defines how a social media suspends, bans or reduces the exposure of an account. This is also referred to as “shadowbanning.”

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Congress Takes First Shot at Federal Censorship: A Moratorium on DOJ Payments to Social Media

Just the News

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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Ohio Proposal Aims to Require Verified Parental Consent Before Kids Can Use Social Media

Hannah Poling

A new proposal spearheaded by Ohio Lt. Gov. Jon Husted would require certain online companies to obtain verified parental consent before permitting kids ages 16 and under to use their platforms.

The executive budget for 2023–24 that Governor Mike DeWine submitted last week to the Ohio General Assembly includes the Social Media Parental Notification Act.

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Meta to Reinstate Trump’s Facebook, Instagram Accounts

Just the News

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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Democratic Congressman: ‘No One Can Defend Having Classified Documents’ at Penn Biden Center

Bradley Vasoli

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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CDC Regularly Called the Shots on Facebook’s COVID-19 Censorship Decisions, Docs Show

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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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New Bill Would Ban Feds from Working with Big Tech to Censor Americans

The Center Square

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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Social Media Use in Children Linked to Significant Brain Changes

Susan Berry, PhD
Person on phone with Twitter open

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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Regulator Fines Tech Giant Millions for Showing Targeted Ads Based on User Activity

Admin

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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Feds Use Facebook to Study COVID Vaccine, Testing, and Mask Messaging

Just the News
healthcare worker giving vaccination

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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More Evidence Reveals CDC Colluded with Social Media Giants to Silence COVID ‘Misinformation’

Susan Berry, PhD

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 ‘Unequal’ Moderation Policy Protects Elites on Facebook and Instagram: Report

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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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Commentary: The Legacy Media Is Ossified by Their Corruption and Blinded by Their Progressive Agenda

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CNN logo outside of Atlanta, Ga., headquarters

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 Facebook – are corrupt. They have adopted in their news coverage a utilitarian view that noble progressive ends justify almost any unethical means to obtain them. The media is unapologetically fused with the Democratic Party, the bicoastal liberal elite, and the progressive agenda. The result is that the public cannot trust that the news it hears or reads is either accurate or true. The news as presented by these outlets has been carefully filtered to suppress narratives deemed inconvenient or antithetical to the political objectives of these entities, while inflating themes deemed useful. This bias now accompanies increasing (and increasingly obvious) journalistic incompetence. Lax standards reflect weaponized journalism schools and woke ideology that short prior basic requisites of writing and ethical protocols of quoting and sourcing. In sum, a corrupt media that is ignorant, arrogant, and ideological explains why few now trust what it delivers. Suppression Once a story is…

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FBI Met with Twitter ‘Weekly’ Ahead of 2020, Warned of ‘Hack-and-Leak’ Operations

Admin

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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H&R Block, Other Tax Prep Services Sending ‘Sensitive Financial Information’ to Facebook: Report

Just the News

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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Documents Show AG Ellison Spoke at Conference Partially Funded by Companies He’s Investigating

The Center Square

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison claims to be the “People’s Lawyer.” But documents say he spoke at a lavish Hawaii retreat in June 2021 partially funded by companies he’s investigating, including Meta and Google.

A 2021 retreat agenda of the Attorney General Alliance says Ellison participated in a lunch conversation at the Grand Wailea hotel with New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas about managing high-profile criminal matters.

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Facebook Allegedly Gives The FBI Users’ Info Without Their Consent

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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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Government Officials Have a Special Portal to Flag Facebook Posts for Censorship

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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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Facebook ‘Whistleblower’ Teams Up with Ex-Feds, Left-Wing Billionaire to Police Social Media

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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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Arizona AG Brnovich Discusses Settlement with Google over Deceptively Obtaining Users’ Location Data for Profit

Rachel Alexander

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has sued numerous big players throughout his two terms, including the Biden administration, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, Arizona State University, and the City of Tucson. Perhaps the biggest entity he sued was Google in 2020, for “deceiving consumers” by tracking their location on smartphones without their knowledge and then selling the information. After over two years of litigation, the tech giant capitulated, settling for $85 million, more than the country of Australia snagged in a similar settlement with Google, $60 million. 

The first attorney general in the country to sue Google over the practice, Brnovich told The Arizona Sun Times that what prompted him in part to file the complaint was the shocking extent of how much personal information was obtained. “Google knew more about where you were going and who you hung out with, more than your travel agent or spouse,” he said. He found out about the practice after a news article revealed that Google was tracking users through its app preloaded on Android smartphones even after they’d disabled their “Location History” setting. Google was told to stop and did not.

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Report: Facebook Spies on Private Messages of Users Skeptical of 2020 Election Results

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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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Arizona Reps Blast FBI for Directing Facebook to Censor Hunter Biden Laptop Story

Peter D'Abrosca

After Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that he worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to censor the now-infamous Hunter Biden laptop story in the lead-up to the 2020 election, Arizona’s elected officials are speaking out.

“The FBI’s collusion with Big Tech unquestionably constitutes election interference. Every single American should be appalled,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ-08) told The Arizona Sun Times Friday. “This is yet another example of the politicization and weaponization of bad actors in the FBI to protect Democrats’ political allies and go after their political opponents. If House Republicans win back the majority, we will hold these bad actors in the FBI accountable to the fullest extent of the law.”

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Corporate Media Shifts Blame to Facebook After Mom Allegedly Performs Late-Term Abortion on Teen, Hides the Body

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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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Ohio Takes Lead in Class Action Lawsuit Against Facebook

The Center Square

The Ohio Employees Retirement System will lead the effort in a class action lawsuit that seeks to recover millions of dollars from Facebook and force the company to reform its internal practices.

A federal judge in the U.S. District Court of Northern California on Wednesday chose Ohio to be lead plaintiff in the securities case Attorney General Dave Yost originally filed in November 2021, according to a release from Yost.

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Biden Climate Czar Urges Big Tech to Censor Energy Debate

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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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Commentary: Team Zuckerberg Masks the Heavily Pro-Democrat Tilt of 2020 Election ‘Zuck Bucks,’ Study Finds

RealClearWire

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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Conservative Investors Launch Campaign to Take On America’s ‘Wokest’ Corporations

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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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Commentary: Americans Are Sounding the Alarm over Big Tech Monopolies

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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 Stay Quiet on Abortion After Disney’s Disastrous Tangle with DeSantis

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Ron DeSantis

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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Connecticut School Nurse Suspended over Facebook Comments Claiming District Hides Children’s Gender Issues from Parents

Susan Berry, PhD

A Connecticut school nurse was suspended Monday over Facebook comments on a personal account, called “inappropriate” by the district superintendent, that warned parents school staff is hiding children’s supposed expressed gender identity issues from their parents.

Kathleen Cataford, 77, was suspended by Hartford Public Schools (HPS) after posting comments to her personal Facebook account, reportedly containing information about the number of pre-teen children who are claiming to have gender identity issues, including an 11-year-old “on puberty blockers,” and other children “identifying as non-binary.”

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Congressman Demands Internal Records from Facebook and Twitter over Suppression of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

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Hunter Biden

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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Russia Moves to Declare Facebook Parent Company an ‘Extremist Organization,’ Ban Instagram

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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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Internet Accountability Project Accuses Big Tech of Siding with Russia

Peter D'Abrosca

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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Puskaric to Ask Pennsylvania Agencies to Ditch Social Media Platforms That Censor

Bradley Vasoli

Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Puskaric (R-Jefferson Hills) indicated Wednesday he will urge state agencies to ditch social-media platforms he says engage in censorship.

In a memorandum asking fellow representatives to cosponsor his upcoming resolution, the Pittsburgh-area legislator argued that especially large information-technology companies violate the state and federal constitutions when they make politicized publishing decisions. He insisted government institutions and officials should respond by cancelling their accounts on such sites and signing onto more permissive online venues instead.

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Lawsuit Alleges Michigan Secretary of State Allowed Facebook to Sway 2020 Election

Peter D'Abrosca

A conservative group in Michigan is duking it out in court with Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) claiming that the elected official allowed money from Silicon Valley titan Facebook to have a partisan impact on the state’s 2020 elections. 

“This is what happened in 2020,” co-founder of the Michigan Conservative Coalition Marian Sheridan said in a press release.  “Zuck Bucks, which is private money, was used by elected officials through public entities to promote voting, but only promoted among selected potential voter groups.  Not to all citizens.  Every voter should have received the benefit of a fair portion of the funds unfairly used by elected officials.  They cannot selectively promote anything.”

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