Moms Inadvertently Expose Daughters to Predators on Instagram in Quest for Money and Fame, Investigation Reveals

Instagram User

Mothers are inadvertently exposing their young daughters to male predators on Instagram in a quest to garner money and fame, an investigation published by The New York Times on Thursday found.

The accounts, numbering in the thousands, reveal how social media platforms are altering the definition of childhood and the increasing commodification of young girls, the NYT found. In some cases, mothers managing the accounts actively sell photographs, previously worn outfits and chat sessions with their underage daughters.

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RussiaGate Hoax Paved Way for Security State’s Domestic Censorship During 2020 Election, Internet Free Speech Expert Says

Mike Benz

According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.

Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.

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Report: CBS News Seized Files, Computers and Records of Fired Journalist Catherine Herridge

Catherine Herridge

CBS News has reportedly “seized the files, computers and records” of fired investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, including information on privileged sources.

“The network grabbed Herridge’s notes and files and informed her that it would decide what, if anything, would be turned over to her,” George Washington University law Professor Jonathan Turley reported at the Hill on Thursday. “The files likely contain confidential material from both her stints at Fox and CBS.”

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Revealed: U.S. Military Working to Censor ‘Right-Wing Populist Groups’

Military Cyber Warfare

According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.

“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”

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DOJ Announces ‘Disruption’ of Hacking Group That Targeted Fulton County, Georgia

Merrick Garland

The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday announced the “disruption” of a Russia-based hacking and ransomware group that targeted Fulton County last month as the result of a joint operation that involved both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and “international law enforcement partners in London” to seize the group’s infrastructure.

In its press release, the DOJ announced “the disruption of the LockBit ransomware group, one of the most active ransomware groups in the world,” which came as the result of “seizing numerous public-facing websites used by LockBit to connect to the organization’s infrastructure and seizing control of servers used by LockBit administrators.”

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University Hospital: Trans-Women’s Breast ‘Milk’ Just as Good as Biological Women’s

Baby with Parents

A UK university hospital system has claimed that milk produced by trans-women “is as good for babies” as biological women’s breast milk.

The Telegraph reports a University of Sussex Hospitals NHS Trust’s (USHT) “letter to campaigners” noted that “after a combination of drugs,” trans-women’s milk is “comparable to that produced following the birth of a baby.”

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The Soros Empire Expands Its Reach into Media with Latest Radio Acquisition

Radio Studio

Earlier this month, the investment firm founded by George Soros acquired over $400 million worth of debt owed by the nation’s second-largest radio network in a ploy to gain a stake in the media conglomerate, the latest in a series of media-related moves made by organizations tied to Soros.

Soros Fund Management has acquired over $400 million worth of debt owed by Audacy, the nation’s second-largest network of radio stations, bankruptcy filings show. Soros and entities linked to him have previously poured money into local news operations, funded the acquisition of newspapers, purchased other radio stations and bankrolled pro-Democrat news websites.

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NewsGuard Attacks Tucker Carlson over Putin Interview

Vladimir Putin Tucker Carlson

NewsGuard, the far-left self-appointed arbiter of internet truth, released a blog post criticizing Tucker Carlson for his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Chief among NewsGuard’s gripes with the interview is that Carlson did not do enough push back on claims Putin made, including that the “Poles forced [Adolf Hitler], they overplayed their hand, and they forced Hitler to start the Second World War by attacking Poland.”

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Katie Hobbs Used State Resources for Censorship ‘Volunteers’ Who Monitored Twitter for ‘Misinformation’ in 2022 Arizona Elections: Email

Gov. Katie Hobbs

An email surfaced by the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) on Tuesday revealed Governor Katie Hobbs used government resources to facilitate a volunteer force that flagged “misinformation” ahead of the 2022 election, including on Election Day.

The legal organization explained that it revealed the email through an Arizona Public Records Law request to the Arizona Secretary of State which requested communications between Hobbs’ office and social media platforms Twitter, Facebook and Instagram between January 7, 2019 and January 1, 2023.

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Joe Biden Mocked Mercilessly for Mumbling, Bumbling ‘Shrinkflation’ Video Released on Super Bowl Sunday

President Joe Biden was mocked by conservatives on Sunday for a video he released ahead of the Super Bowl which derided “shrinkflation,” when manufacturers lower the size or quantity of items included for a given price without informing the consumer as a result of inflation, with pundits uniformly reminding the embattled president that his inflationary policies preceded the shrinkflation.

In the video, posted to the official government account for Biden on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, the president appears to be sitting in the White House movie theater while various shots reveal he is surrounded by packages of junk food. Looking into the camera, Biden remarked, “if you’re like me you like to be surrounded by a snack or two while watching the big game.”

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Bill Ackman on Washington Post Hit Piece: ‘The Public Has Been Again Misled’

Bill Ackman, the highly successful hedge fund manager and Harvard graduate whose criticism of Claudine Gay’s history of plagiarism led to her resignation as President of Harvard University, published a lengthy tweet on his X account Sunday evening responding to an article about him published by The Washington Post earlier in the day. Here is that post in its entirety:

I am sure all of us have had the experience of reading a story about a subject you know well and finding it replete with inaccuracies and falsehoods. One then turns the page and reads an article about a subject one knows less well and makes the mistake of believing that this other story is accurate. I am guilty of this sin. I am sadly repeatedly reminded to mistrust what I read in the media, and I am not alone. Destruction of confidence in our media is contributing to societal breakdown, and that is a very unfortunate state of affairs.

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Report: Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House

Vaccine Shot

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

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Americans Increasingly Turning Away from Political News as 2024 Election Nears

The American public is focusing less and less on political news in recent months, even as a crucial presidential election draws nearer.

According to Axios, Americans are instead turning back to consumption of non-political content such as sports and entertainment, indicating a decline in political interest that spiked in 2020 ahead of that year’s presidential race. While numerous events in 2020, such as the nationwide race riots and the lockdowns as the result of the Chinese Coronavirus, led to increased political engagement and culminated in record-high voter turnout, there have been fewer major events in the lead-up to 2024.

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Roger Simon Calls Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin a ‘Monument of Journalism’

Carlson Putin

Roger Simon, co-founder of PJMedia and current columnist for The Epoch Times, joined Friday’s edition of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy to discuss Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Simon said he was “absolutely riveted” by the interview, adding the amount of information discussed was “impossible to digest immediately.”

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Tucker Carlson Releases Interview with Vladimir Putin

Tucker Carlson Vladimir Putin

Former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson on Thursday released his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he addressed his rationale behind the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and his view of diplomacy with the west.

Carlson attracted considerable scrutiny from western media for conducting the interview, which he defended as a part of his duty as a journalism. 

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PR Group Behind ‘Watchdog’ NewsGuard Hit with $350 Million Settlement over OxyContin Marketing

French public and advertising giant Publicis Groupe — the lead funder of  “disinformation watchdog” NewsGuard — has agreed to pay $350 million as part of a settlement with state attorneys general over the company’s role in America’s opioid crisis. “Today’s filings describe how Publicis’ work contributed to the crisis by helping Purdue Pharma and other opioid manufacturers market and sell opioids,” said a press release from South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson. “Court documents detail how Publicis acted as Purdue’s agency of record for all its branded opioid drugs, including OxyContin, even developing sales tactics that relied on farming data from recordings of personal health-related in-office conversations between patients and providers.” “The company was also instrumental in Purdue’s decision to market OxyContin to providers on patient’s electronic health records,” said the press release. At the same time it is paying this $350 million settlement over its marketing tactics — Publicis Groupe, headed by CEO and Chairman Arthur Sadoun (pictured above) is also the “largest corporate investor” in NewsGuard, a company whose co-founder said it is a “vaccine against misinformation,” reported Lee Fang in RealClearInvestigations. NewsGuard said it “provides transparent tools to counter misinformation” and in 2021, it announced a partnership with Publicis to “combat…

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500 Journalists Laid Off in January

The decline of the mainstream media continued in the first month of 2024, with over 500 journalists being fired in January alone.

As Politico reports, there were 538 layoffs in the month of January in the media industry, including jobs in print, broadcast, and digital media. The report from Challenger, Gray, & Christmas suggests that the trend first seen in 2023 will not be slowing down in 2024. Last year, there were 3,087 layoffs in the news industry, which marked the highest annual total since the 16,060 firings in the year 2020, which was primarily due to the Chinese Coronavirus pandemic.

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Sen. Blackburn Slams Big Tech Companies in Fox Interview

Sen. Marsha Blackburn Fox News

A U.S. Senator from Tennessee took to Fox News to slam Big Tech companies over the dangers their platforms pose to America’s youth. 

“You know, I wish that each one of those [tech executives] would have taken their turn at apologizing to those parents,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told Harris Faulkner on “The Faulkner Focus.” “You look at the amount of pornographic material on X, you look at what Snap has done, connecting kids to pedophiles and drug dealers, TikTok, with the kids that have done these TikTok challenges and lost their lives, Discord which is used for chats and gaming, and kids are meeting really bad actors. Every one of them owed those parents that were in that room an apology and those kids – friends of kids – who had lost their lives that showed up wearing those t-shirts. Some were worth more than $230 which is what [Meta CEO Mark] Zuckerberg said a teen was worth to them on social media.” 

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Commentary: Ban TikTok or Let Beijing Control Our Broadcast Networks, Too

Tiktok User

In the dynamic landscape of global entertainment, the influence of Beijing over Hollywood has long been a topic of heated discussion. While the box office power of the Chinese market has waned, giving a breath of creative freedom back to our filmmakers, there looms a new and more pervasive form of influence on Hollywood and well beyond: TikTok.

Beijing may have lost theatrical market leverage, but it has more than made up for that with an overpowering social media presence that has become an epidemic, not just in Hollywood but throughout the United States. In fact, the Chairman of Congress’s Select Committee on China, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), accurately labels TikTok as “digital fentanyl” and has been aggressively campaigning to ban the social media app.

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Virginia Democrats Shut Down Social Media Regulations After Gov. Youngkin Promised Bills to Protect Commonwealth Kids

Kids on a Smartphone

Two bills put forward by Republicans in the Virginia House of Delegates were defeated in the a subcommittee by Democrats on Monday, just months after Governor Glenn Youngkin said promised to file bills targeting social media companies, particularly TikTok, to protect children in the commonwealth.

Defeated by a margin of two votes, HB 1161 would have required social media platforms to obtain a verifiable form of parental consent for minors to use the platform and for parental consent to be obtained a second time before social media companies could collect personal data from minors.

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The New York Times Fails to Report Accurately on Election of New AZGOP Chair Gina Swoboda, an Election Integrity Champion

Election integrity champion Gina Swoboda was elected chair of the Arizona Republican Party on Saturday, prompting negative coverage from the mainstream media. Endorsed by both Donald Trump and Kari Lake, she won the election in a landslide over another MAGA conservative, Arizona Corporation Commissioner Jim O’Connor, but The New York Times portrayed the election as chaotic and evidence of the party’s “yawning ideological divide.” 

The article said Swoboda “runs a nonprofit group that has falsely claimed to have found huge discrepancies in voting records in a number of states.” The article linked to a piece by ProPublica which reported on the work of Swoboda’s Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef). VoteRef discovered discrepancies between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast in numerous states. ProPublica cited objections to the report from several election officials as evidence the work was invalid. 

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Top Trans Doctor Bemoans How ‘White’ the Sex Change Industry Is in Unearthed Video

Psychologist Dr. Wallace Wong claimed that transgender medical care is suffering from the influence of white people during a medical training course for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) in September 2022, according to a video obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

WPATH is an international organization founded in 1979 that seeks to train medical and mental health professionals on how to treat transgender patients, including minors, according to its website. During WPATH’s 27th annual training symposium, Wong gave a presentation on how medical professionals should handle minority clients and their families, saying transgender minorities “don’t trust the white culture,” according to the video obtained by the DCNF.

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Commentary: David Frum and the Axis of Errors

David Frum

Writing in The Atlantic, David Frum, former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and cheerleader for endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Global War on Terror, warns us that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 presidential election NATO will be wrecked, our allies around the world will suffer “potential disaster,” and “above all” Ukraine will be left to the mercy of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Given Frum’s track record of advice about wars, one wonders why anyone would take his advice. Frum takes credit for Bush’s phrase the “axis of evil” to describe Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Frum’s advice about war should be labeled the “axis of error.”

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Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti Warns Instagram Effects ‘Catastrophic’ on Teens, Cites Unredacted Complaint Against Meta

Friends Phone

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti told The Tennessee Star in a Thursday phone interview that his office’s unredacted lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, shows the company is using strategies to increase Instagram user engagement which are “catastrophic” to teenage girls, and warned that other social media companies may soon land within his crosshairs.

Speaking to The Star, Skrmetti explained that his office’s unredacted complaint against Meta, which it released last week, outlines “a very sophisticated effort by a very sophisticated company to design a product that kids would have a hard time not using.” Meta’s focus on children, Skrmetti said, was motivated by a desire to keep them using the platforms into adulthood, when the company will have collected years worth of data that can be used by advertisers.

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Associated Press Paid by Left-Wing Groups to Spin Global Warming Coverage

The widely-read Associated Press (AP) has received numerous donations from far-left groups, leading to the outlet’s reporting on so-called “global warming” from a clearly left-wing slant akin to the language used by such groups.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, the AP received $300,000 in 2022 from the Denmark-based KR Foundation, a nonprofit group which claims to be focused on the “rapid phase-out of fossil fuels,” as well as transforming journalists into “community activists for climate change.” KR further intends to force “U.S. banks out of fossil fuels,” and shut down “some existing [oil and gas] infrastructure.”

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Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti Claims Meta Knowingly Made Instagram Addictive to Children in Unredacted Lawsuit

AG Skrmetti

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti (R) released on Wednesday the unredacted lawsuit he is leading against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, which alleges Meta created Instagram using “deceptive and unfair business practices that are fomenting a mental health crisis in this state.”

Skrmetti stated in a press release that his office’s “complaint makes clear that Meta knew its platforms were hurting kids and made a very clear decision to choose money over the mental health of its young users.” The attorney general said that “Tennessee law protects kids from companies, big or small, that mislead and hurt them” and that the state “will continue to aggressively enforce that law.”

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Turkish Smugglers Use Social Media to Help ‘Citizens of Every Country’ Reach the U.S. Border

Illegal Immigrants

Turkish smugglers appear to be using social media platforms to help migrants from across the globe enter the U.S. illegally through the southern border, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of Telegram and TikTok posts.

The advertisements offer arrangements for travel, visas and transportation directly to the U.S.-Mexico border for migrants in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Border Patrol encounters of migrants crossing the southern border illegally have hit numerous records in recent years, with more than 2.2 million encounters in fiscal year 2022 and more than 2 million in fiscal year 2023, according to federal data.

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Bill Gates’ Foundation Poured Millions into Chinese Government Organizations in 2022

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation paid out or approved for future payment roughly $23 million in grants to Chinese government organizations during its 2022 reporting period, tax documents show.

The nonprofit listed grants to over 20 different Chinese entities, including Chinese government agencies, labeled as “foreign government” on its 2022 tax forms. The majority of the grants were for projects related to public health research and analysis, including several projects involving diseases and vaccine delivery.

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Leaked Donor List Confirms Far-Left Donors Backing Media Matters

Media matters

A leaked list of donors proves that the far-left group Media Matters for America is backed by numerous left-wing megadonors, despite the group claiming to be an independent media watchdog.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, while Media Matters is not required to disclose its donors due to its status as a “charity,” the group may have accidentally revealed its top five biggest donors in a public filing made with the New Mexico Attorney General’s office in November.

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Censorship Concerns Rise over State and Local Governments Registering Their Domain Names with CISA

Pinal County’s website, Maricopa County’s website, and other government websites across the country recently switched their registrars from the federal government’s General Services Administration to a new registrar started by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

CISA has come under heightened scrutiny in recent years for targeting “disinformation” through its Disinformation Governance Board. The board works with Big Tech to shut down unpopular information about COVID-19, elections, and other controversial topics.

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Journalists, Medical Groups, Big Business Emerge as Biden Allies in Social Media Censorship Case

Journalists Press

President Joe Biden’s administration is getting some big-name allies as it defends against a landmark free speech infringement lawsuit. Their argument: protecting Americans from indirect censorship by government officials undermines the First Amendment, national security, and public health.

Advocacy groups for journalists, academics, doctors, technologists, and big business, and a powerful senator, made various forms of these arguments in friend-of-the-court briefs to the Supreme Court in the days before and after Christmas. 

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New York Times Sues AI Giants for Alleged Copyright Violation

The New York Times sued artificial intelligence (AI) giants OpenAI and Microsoft on Wednesday for alleged copyright violation.

OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat are large language models that are trained on data from the internet and generate text based on prompts from users. The tech giants trained these chatbots with millions of the NYT’s copyrighted articles without permission, the outlet alleges in the complaint.

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TikTok Data Reveals Content Favors CCP Goals, According to New Study

TikTok China

The popular video app TikTok seems to be promoting content to align with the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) goals, a Thursday study found.

Hashtag data showed that content sensitive to the CCP is far less popular on TikTok than on its rival, Instagram, accordingto the study by Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University. A comparison between Instagram and TikTok showed that the number of posts about non-sensitive hashtags in the realm of politics and pop-culture was fairly similar based on how many users each platform has, but the number of posts on hashtags for topics sensitive to the CCP was substantially higher on Instagram than on TikTok.

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University with Gender Clinic Funds Study to See if Puberty Blockers Causes ‘Lasting’ Brain Changes for Kids

The University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) approved a $600,000 grant for a study hypothesizing that puberty blockers used on children will lead to “lasting changes” in the brain, according to documents obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In 2018, an American Academy of Pediatrics committee, which included a member of UW’s faculty, released a policy on transgender hormone treatments claiming that the effects of puberty blockers are reversible, a claim that has since been widely echoed by trans advocates. The university’s gender clinic already offers hormones to minors, but new documents obtained by the DCNF reveal that the study, which was approved for a $600,000 grant in July, hypothesizes that “short-term” transgender treatments will have “lasting changes” on the brain, internal organs and behavior.

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Facebook Sees Rise in Antisemitic Posts, Censorship of Pro-Israel Content: Reports

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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Tennessee Attorney General Skrmetti Reveals Google Will Pay $700 Million to Settle Monopoly Lawsuit

Skrmetti Google

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti revealed on Wednesday that a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general announced a $700 million agreement with Google to settle their lawsuit alleging the technology company engaged in anticompetitive practices to stifle competitors to its Google Play Store.

Skrmetti stated that “Google will no longer profit from the inflated app costs it forced through its abuse of market power,” and said the settlement “will reduce app prices and increase consumer choices on the Android platform. Our office is proud to protect consumers, secure $700 million in financial relief, and be a part of this bipartisan effort to ensure one of the most powerful companies in the world follows the law.”

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Director of Internet Free Speech Nonprofit Says EU is Angling to Make X Purchase ‘Middleware’

Elon Musk X EU

Mike Benz, the director of a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, is sounding the alarm on the European Union’s investigation into X, formerly known as Twitter, for what it claims are breakages of the multinational conglomerate’s hate speech laws. 

Benz, an attorney and the executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), says that the EU’s plan is to force X into implementing a mandatory “disinformation compliance” service like NewsGuard. Such products have been termed “middleware.” 

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Tech Watchdog Dr. Robert Epstein’s Shock Report: Google Uses ‘Ephemeral Content’ to Shift Millions of Votes Towards Democrats

Dr. Robert Epstein, founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies joined Monday’s episode of The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy and revealed the shocking truth about how Google manipulates search engines to change voting behavior. Dr. Epstein, an expert in psychology, shares his extensive research on the subject and exposes the impact of Google’s control over” ephemeral content.” With the ability to shift millions of votes, Google poses a significant threat to the integrity of elections. However, Dr. Epstein offers a solution to stop their manipulations and reveals how his pioneering system, AmericasDigitalShield.com, is poised to protect the 2024 election. Join us as we delve into this eye-opening conversation and uncover the truth behind Google’s influence on our democracy. TRANSCRIPT Michael Patrick Leahy: 12:20 PM; broadcasting live from our studios in downtown Nashville. Original All Star panelist Crom Carmichael in-studio with us; on the newspaper line right now. Dr. Robert Epstein, Ph.D. in psychology; also an expert on how Google manipulates search engines to change voting outcome. Welcome Dr. Epstein. Thanks for joining us today. Robert Epstein: Sure. It’s my pleasure. Michael Patrick Leahy: Now, you’re the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies…

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