Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) challenged Dr. Anthony Fauci this week over his handling of COVID-19 and apparent collusion with Big Tech. Following the mass release of Fauci’s emails through an open records request last week, Blackburn published a video Tuesday to offer some summarized insight on Fauci’s involvement in the COVID-19 outbreak and his email correspondence with Facebook.
“Here are the facts on Fauci that big tech doesn’t want you to know,” tweeted Blackburn.
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Facebook gave Georgia State University $75,000 to create a narrative film experience about racism.
Georgia State University’s School of Public Health received the grant from Facebook Reality Labs — the technology company’s virtual reality arm — to “create a narrative film that will be an immersive and interactive online platform for combating racial injustice.”
The initiative is meant to “increase viewers’ empathy and enhance their understanding of racism and structural inequality” through augmented and virtual reality technologies.
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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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Facebook announced it will likely scrap its highly debated policy regarding moderating the speech and content posted on its site form politicians. Previously, politicians were subject to suspension or permanent ban under a different set of rules compared to regular Facebook users.
This decision comes on the heels of former President Donald J. Trump being permanently banned from Facebook, but no decision has come regarding whether to resurrect Trump’s Facebook account. Facebook’s Oversight Board is giving Facebook time to determine if Trump will be allowed back on the platform.
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Wednesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, guest host Ben Cunningham welcomed Chief Technology Officer for the Star News Media Network Christina Botteri in studio to discuss social media platforms’ censorship and the role as platform or publisher.
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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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In the months leading up to November’s election, voting officials in major cities and counties worked with a progressive group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and its allies to create ballots, strategically target voters and develop “cure” letters in situations where mail-in ballots were in danger of being tossed out.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Roger Simon and Andy Ogles in studio to weigh in on the recent Project Veritas Facebook whistleblower and how the company is operating as a Chinese social credit score platform as vaccines as a metric.
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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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Big Tech has betrayed the American people yet again – despite hopes that Facebook would finally reverse it’s ban on Donald Trump’s account, the social media giant has re-committed to a path of dangerous partisan censorship.
On Wednesday, an oversight board established by Facebook ruled that it would not be overturning the platform’s January decision to suspend Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts.
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Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III submitted a letter this week urging Facebook to stop developing an Instagram specifically for children under 13. In addition to Tennessee, 44 other attorney generals signed onto the letter addressed to Mark Zuckerberg.
The attorneys general stated that research consistently links social media to physical, emotional, and mental health issues; that children can’t handle the challenges and responsibilities of social media, such as privacy and inappropriate content; and that Facebook fails to protect the safety and privacy of children.
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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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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has joined a coalition of 44 attorneys general in sending a letter to Facebook opposing the company’s plans to create an Instagram platform for children.
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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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A Democrat senator from Minnesota sided with Facebook, a multi-billion dollar international corporation, in its decision to ban former President Donald J. Trump from its platform for life.
“That was the right thing to do. He’s the disinformer-in-chief. He told the biggest lie of all time, which led to an insurrection by getting his followers to believe that the election was a fake,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) said on “Late Night” with Seth Meyers. “It was an outrageous moment with a number of Republicans calling him out on it at the time.”
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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s multimillion dollar investment in the 2020 presidential election process may extend into this year or beyond, at least if Fulton County is any measure.
Georgia’s largest county, which encompasses the blue-leaning city of Atlanta, received more than $6.3 million in private grants from the Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to conduct elections during the 2020 pandemic, but recently reported it did not use all the money last year.
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Republicans are hitting back at Facebook and the Big Tech giants in Silicon Valley after Facebook’s Oversight Board announced Wednesday that it will uphold its ban of Former President Donald J. Trump.
Facebook claimed in a statement that Trump post “violated Facebook’s rules prohibiting praise or support of people engaged in violence,” when he called Capitol protestors “great patriots” and and “very special” on Jan. 6.
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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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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the hosts of Newsmax’s new show Diamon and Silk Crystal Clear, Diamond and Silk to the newsmakers line to talk about Congress, the Resident President, Facebook censorship, and their new social media site Chatdit.com.
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Williamson County residents who are upset with their public school system’s new race-based curricula have created a new Facebook group to organize and alert parents countywide that the schools are allegedly teaching Critical Race Theory (CRT). The page, Moms for Liberty — Williamson County, TN, debuted earlier this month, said admin Robin Steenman.
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According to a the most recent quarterly censorship report card from the Media Research Center (MRC), most of the major Silicon Valley tech titans are failing to protect freedom of expression.
“By almost any measure, the first three months of 2021 were the worst ever for online freedom. Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Google, Facebook, YouTube and others proved to the world that the Big Tech censorship of conservatives is a reality,” the group said. “And they did so in disturbing, authoritarian ways that highlight their unchecked power over information and our political process.”
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In the latest example of Silicon Valley censorship, Facebook has banned the sharing of a story about a high-profile Black Lives Matter member purchasing expensive real estate.
“Patrisse Khan-Cullors, the leader of Black Lives Matter and a self-described Marxist, recently purchased a $1.4 million home in an exclusive Los Angeles neighborhood where the vast majority of residents are white, according to reports,” The New York Post originally reported last weekend.
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A group directly linked to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated nearly $5.6 million to the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office last year. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger spent that money on the 2020 presidential election.
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The Center for Tech and Civil Life (CTCL), a voter advocacy group funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, donated $7.4 million last year to Detroit to, among other things, “dramatically expand strategic voter education and outreach” in a blue city key to Joe Biden’s 2020 election win, according to memos obtained by Just the News under an open records request.
Detroit received three grants in 2020 from CTCL for $200,000, $3,512,000, and $3,724,450, according to the records released under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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A report released Monday details how human traffickers are using Facebook – and the Biden administration’s new open border’s policies – to generate business and smuggle illegal aliens into the United States.
Public Facebook pages called “Migrants from Various Countries in Mexico” and “Migrants in the Mexico-U.S.A. Border Awaiting Hearing,” among others, were openly being used by smugglers on the Big Tech platform to scheme with would-be illegal aliens about how to break America’s immigration laws.
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Nearly 300 Americans face a slew of charges related to the melee on Capitol Hill last January. As I’ve reported over the past few months, offenses range from assaulting a police officer to destroying government property to trespassing.
More than 70 protestors stand accused of “aiding and abetting” various crimes; even people who didn’t vandalize the Capitol or even enter the building have been charged with helping others do damage and interrupt Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results.
Nonviolent offenders languish behind bars for months, denied bail, and transported to Washington, D.C. to await delayed trials. Federal prosecutors suggest President Trump could be indicted for fueling the chaos that day. Democratic congressmen want their Republican colleagues held accountable for their alleged role, too.
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When Facebook and Instagram threatened to impose “additional limitations” on Lara Trump for posting her interview with her father-in-law, the former president, she didn’t back down.
The Fox News contributor and former producer for Inside Edition jumped ship for an alternative platform that only left beta testing in November.
Lara Trump’s podcast “The Right View” debuted on Clouthub soon after Facebook and Instagram removed her Donald Trump interview, Clouthub CEO Jeff Brain told Just the News.
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Thousands of migrants have reportedly used social media apps Facebook and WhatsApp to organize caravans and groups headed to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border.
The migrants, who largely originate from Central America, started joining Facebook and WhatsApp groups in the months after President Joe Biden defeated former President Donald Trump in the November presidential election, according to Reuters. Members of the groups reportedly warned others that they should time their border treks to ensure they arrived after Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
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Former President Trump will return to social media on his own new platform in around two or three months, Jason Miller said.
“But I do think that we’re gonna see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform,” Miller said during an interview on Fox News Channel’s program Media Buzz. “And this is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media. It’s gonna completely redefine the game and everybody is gonna be waiting and watching to see what exactly President Trump does, but it will be his own platform.”
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J.D. Vance is expected to announce his candidacy for the 2022 U.S. Senate in Ohio.
“All signs point to J.D. launching a run in the coming months,” a source told the Washington Times.
In a video sent to The Star, Vance appears to be the first high-profile candidate who will not position himself as a Trump Republican – if his views from 2016 and 2017 remain.
Employees at Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, donated at least $15.1 million to President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, according to Open Secrets.
The donations eclipsed the amount given from employees in the banking and legal sectors, according to The Wall Street Journal. The five companies were also the largest fundraising sources for Biden’s campaign.
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A Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) proposed transmission line that will service the new Facebook data center and support future economic development in Gallatin will impact as many as 165 property owners representing about 225 parcels, lowering their property values and raising their concerns for safety.
TVA notified property owners affected by the proposed transmission via letters dated in mid-January, which invited them to access a virtual open house between January 21 and February 22 for further information and the opportunity comment on the project.
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Facebook announced on Wednesday the social media platform will in the coming weeks start limiting the amount of political content viewers see on their news feeds.
The company is aware that “people don’t want political content to take over their News Feed,” Product Management Director Aastha Gupta wrote in a blog post on the site.
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Gubernatorial candidate Delegate Kirk Cox (R-Colonial Heights) announced a plan Wednesday to hold Big Tech accountable for protecting free speech. The plan expands regulation and enforcement with transparency requirements, bans on de-platforming elected officials, and $100,000-per-day fines for violating tech companies.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed the Heartland Institutes State Gov. Relations Manager Samantha Fillmore to the newsmakers line to discuss their position on Big Tech and censorship of its users.
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Facebook’s independent Oversight Board has reversed the social media platform’s decision to remove an October 2020 post pertaining to the drug hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of COVID-19.
“In October 2020, a user posted a video and accompanying text in French in a public Facebook group related to COVID-19,” the board explained on its website. “The post alleged a scandal at the Agence Nationale de Sécurité du Médicament (the French agency responsible for regulating health products), which refused to authorize hydroxychloroquine combined with azithromycin for use against COVID-19, but authorized and promoted remdesivir. The user criticized the lack of a health strategy in France and stated that “[Didier] Raoult’s cure” is being used elsewhere to save lives. The user’s post also questioned what society had to lose by allowing doctors to prescribe in an emergency a “harmless drug” when the first symptoms of COVID-19 appear.”
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles to the show to discuss his history, his letter to Governor Lee, and the break up of Big Tech through state dissolvement.
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed New York City Attorney Akiva Cohen to the newsmakers line to discuss the dynamics of Section 230 and why he feels it is not in violation of free speech on Big Tech platforms.
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A Nashville attorney received one year active suspension and three years’ probation for offering advice on how to get away with murder. Judge Holly Kirby of the Tennessee Supreme Court issued the ruling against attorney Winston Bradshaw Sitton last Friday, calling it a “cautionary tale on the ethical problems that can befall lawyers on social media.”
Sitton had posted the comment in question on a 2017 Facebook post from a woman, Lauren Houston, who was trying to leave an allegedly abusive relationship. At the time, the two had been friends on the site for about a year. The contested comments appeared on a post in which Houston asked whether it was legal to carry a firearm in her car without paying for a permit.
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For nearly two decades, Silicon Valley made net neutrality its highest policy priority. Under the banner of a “free and open” internet, Google, Facebook, and Twitter sought regulations to ensure the uninterrupted flow of information by treating every bit equally. Or so they said.
Beginning last Friday night, these firms and others executed an unprecedented digital purge of the social media and video accounts of their political rivals. After several years of accelerating suspensions and suppressions, this time YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter permanently banned a number of high-profile conservatives and deplatformed thousands of others, at least temporarily. Many of these accounts had nothing to do with last Wednesday’s heinous events at the Capitol. Yet their histories are erased.
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Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga said Monday that Hungary is considering sanctions against big tech firms over alleged “systemic abuses” of free speech, Reuters reported.
Varga plans to meet with the Hungarian Competition Authority this week to discuss possible penalties for what he says are unfair commercial practices utilized by social media firms including Facebook and Twitter, according to Reuters. In addition, the minister plans to convene a meeting with the state-sponsored Digital Freedom Committee.
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A Tennessee principal was placed on paid administrative leave after warning students about the dangers of social media censorship. Principal Barton Thorne recorded a homeroom video on Monday, reportedly sharing his thoughts via the Shelby County Schools (SCS) virtual learning platform to address several Big Tech companies’ recent decisions to censor various individuals and platforms.
In a recording of the video since deleted from YouTube, Thorne emphasized the need to allow for free speech and a “marketplace of ideas.” He condemned the Capitol Hill riot and stated that his statements had nothing to do with President Donald Trump.
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Thursday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles to discuss his recent letter to the governor calling for divestment in companies that censor.
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Virginia Senate Democrats filed a resolution on Wednesday to censure GOP gubernatorial candidate and Senator Amanda Chase (R-Chesterfield) for addressing a crowd and urging action to overturn the 2020 presidential election hours before the Capitol riots in Washington D.C.
The resolution, introduced by Sen. John Bell (D-Loudoun) and co-sponsored by nine other Senate Democrats, formally accuses Chase of “fomenting insurrection against the United States.”
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Maury County Mayor Andy Ogles is calling on the Tennessee General Assembly to dump any state-held equity and debt in the Big Tech companies over their “war on freedom of speech.”
Ogles made the announcement on his Facebook page Wednesday, available here. It is addressed to Governor Bill Lee, Lieutenant Governor Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge), House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) and the other members of the Legislature.
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Last week Silicon Valley silenced the president. In unison, the social media giants, with an assist from Amazon and Apple, also eliminated their most popular conservative competitor and announced that their own moderation policies would now extend to other companies. Meanwhile, CNN openly called for Fox News to be banned from cable, while a major talk radio network issued new speech rules to its hosts, extending tech’s moderation policies to the offline world. Beyond all this, Congress and the European Union called for powerful new regulation of online speech.
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Facebook announced on Monday that it is purging both Instagram and Facebook, two major social media platforms, of all content that includes the phrase “stop the steal.”
“We are now removing content containing the phrase ‘stop the steal’ under our Coordinating Harm policy from Facebook and Instagram,” Facebook said. “We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove Pages, groups and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence.”
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A legislative counsel member from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Friday warned that the suspension of President Donald Trump’s social media accounts wielded “unchecked power” by large tech companies, Breitbart reported.
Kate Ruane, a senior legislative counsel at the ACLU warned in a statement that the decision to suspend Trump from social media platforms could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.
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