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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Massive government-funded media outlets and other information powerbrokers are keeping Americans in the dark about the prevalence of illegal voting by non-citizens.
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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.
Musk’s transformation from a politically unengaged tech billionaire to mega-donor and avid campaigner has earned him the ire of Democrats who have derided “disinformation” on his X platform and suggest he is violating the law in his support for Trump.
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Republican legislators are calling on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz to condemn a comment Attorney General Keith Ellison posted to social media on Monday that seemingly endorsed a court ruling in Brazil to block its citizens from accessing the X social media platform.
Ellison posted “Obrigado, Brasil!” from one of this two X social media accounts, just hours after the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil upheld a measure which bans Brazilians from using X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.
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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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Vice President Kamala Harris called lawmakers in the Tennessee General Assembly “extremists” for voting to pass a bill that would arm teachers who are licensed, receive annual training, and are approved by police and school officials.
“Arming teachers is not the solution,” Harris said in an X post on Wednesday. “We know what actually works: universal background checks, red flag laws, safe storage, and an assault weapons ban.”
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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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Tennessee U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn addressed the CEOs of five social media companies during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis” on Wednesday.
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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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The CEO of the video streaming platform Rumble said Monday afternoon on X, formerly Twitter, that his site is down and facing an “unprecedented” attack that he suspects to be politically motivated.
“I can confirm that this attack has been unprecedented and has been happening since this weekend,” Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovsky said in response to another X user. “I also suspect it is political, coming from activists and/or organizations who want to censor our creators, and related to J6 videos being posted on Rumble.”
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State bars have become notorious for bringing charges against conservative attorneys like Donald Trump’s former attorney and constitutional legal scholar John Eastman, but last week a California disciplinary court judge dismissed such politically motivated charges. California Bar Disciplinary Court Judge Dennis G. Saab ruled on October 3 that attorney Marla Anne Brown did not engage in professional misconduct by tweeting that looters should be shot, since it was protected free speech in her personal capacity.
“The highest priority of the State Bar of California is public protection,” said Brown’s attorney Jesse D. Franklin-Murdock. “The State Bar Court lived up to that promise by reaffirming that Ms. Brown has the same First Amendment rights that all lawyers have.”
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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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With just 24 hours to go before the first Republican presidential primary debate of the 2024 campaign, Ohio entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy spent Tuesday evening as he has spent almost every waking hour since launching his bid for the White House in February: Campaigning.
Ramaswamy held a high-energy rally at downtown Milwaukee’s beer garden, just feet away from the Fiserv Forum, home of the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks and site of Wednesday evening’s debate.
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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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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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Congress and First Amendment supporters have condemned the Twitter Files recently after it came out that government agencies colluded with social media companies to censor information on controversial topics that went against the government’s position. A federal judge in July barred the federal government from communicating with social media companies after two Republican attorneys general sued, but now some Democratic attorneys general, including Arizona’s Kris Mayes, are joining the lawsuit in support of the government.
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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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State Sen. Wendy Rogers (R-Flagstaff) came under criticism for retweeting a video clip that contained a few blurred-out photos of Hunter Biden engaging in sexual acts. The video accompanied a tweet stating that there are 459 crimes related to the Biden family.
However, the tweet didn’t appear to violate Arizona’s revenge porn law, because Rogers lacked intent since she didn’t realize the clip contained the photos. She deleted the tweet as soon as she was told the photos were in there. In April 2021, Fox News showed a clip containing a blurred-out photo of Hunter engaging in a sex act with two women. There has been no report of a lawsuit or prosecution.
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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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Kari Lake’s appeal of the trial court judge’s ruling against her after two trials is pending at the Arizona Court of Appeals, and her attorney Bryan Blehm has taken to Twitter to continue providing updates as more information comes in about Maricopa County’s election problems. Blehm represented the Cyber Ninjas in cases related to its audit of Arizona’s problematic 2020 presidential election. He previously served as pro tem judge for Maricopa County.
On Wednesday, Blehm tweeted, “Did Maricopa County intentionally misrepresent user 134-speed clicker when they argued to the Court that he was reassigned from level-1 signature verification?” He included a tweet from We the People AZ Alliance (WPAA), which has been helping the Lake team investigate the 2022 the election. “One of many lies told by County Attorney Liddy during the @KariLakeWarRoom @KariLake trial,” WPAA said. “Rey exercises great Kamala word salad.”
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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.
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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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Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed former Fox News contributor and author of Race Pimping, Mr. Kevin Jackson to the newsmaker line to discuss why he got hired and fired at Fox News.
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The president of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia recently issued an apology and walked back his apparent affirmation of tweets expressing conservative views.
“I regret my lack of understanding of how ‘liking’ a tweet is an implied endorsement,” President Mark Tykocinski, who is also a molecular immunologist and medical doctor, told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
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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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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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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 altered National Public Radio’s (NPR) descriptive label Saturday to “government-funded media” after it initially labeled the radio news outlet “state-sponsored media.”
The social media site now calls NPR “government-funded media,” a designation also applied to the BBC. The original label was similar to that applied to Russia Today’s account by the social media site.
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Twitter has 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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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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Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom caught the attention of Tennessee Governor Bill Lee on Twitter over the weekend after criticizing legislation recently signed into law in the Volunteer State.
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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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