Meta donated $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inaugural fund, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
Read MoreZuckerberg’s Meta Gave $1 Million To Trump’s Inaugural Fund
Tag: Facebook
Commentary: The Fading of Freedom in the Western World
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.
Read MoreCommentary: Amid School Sex-Abuse Impunity, a Suspect Ensnared by an Alleged Victim
Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.
And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs.
Read MoreTop Kamala Campaign Staffers Aided Biden-Harris Admin’s Social Media Censorship Efforts
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.
Read MoreMark Zuckerberg Admits Biden Administration ‘Pressured’ Facebook to Censor Americans
Meta Platforms CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted on Monday that the Biden administration “repeatedly pressured” his team for months in 2021 to censor content related to COVID-19, including content from ordinary Americans.
Read MoreApple Files to Dismiss DOJ Antitrust Case Against Its Smartphone Business
Apple has filed a motion to dismiss a case from the United States Department of Justice claiming that it monopolizes the smartphone market using anticompetitive practices making it harder to switch to another phone. Antitrust experts say this case, if won by the DOJ, could set dangerous precedent by granting the government power to more easily define companies as monopolies and practices as monopolistic, and determine what companies must do or cannot do to avoid the label.
The United States Department of Justice and 16 Attorneys General — including California and the District of Columbia — filed a lawsuit in March alleging Apple illegally monopolizes the smartphone market, such as green boxes with “social stigma” for non-Apple text messages and Apple smartwatch incompatibility with other operating systems.
Read MoreTrump Blasts Facebook, Google for ‘Wrongly Censored’ Photo of Assassination Attempt
Former President Donald Trump blasted Facebook and Google Tuesday after Facebook admitted it had censored photos of Trump’s assassination attempt, images widely seen as a major moment and rallying point for the Trump campaign.
Users on X, formerly known as Twitter, began posting online this week that Google searches for Trump’s assassination, including the photo, were not being autocompleted like other searches. They also posted screenshots saying that searches for Trump turned up news for Trump’s opponent, Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
Read MoreMeta Finally Lifts Lingering Restrictions on Trump Months Out from November
Tech giant Meta announced Friday it will be lifting former President Donald Trump’s “heightened suspension penalties” on Facebook and Instagram as the 2024 elections grow closer.
President of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, released an updated statement on the company’s site, announcing the change to the protocols from January 2023, specifically for Trump’s restrictions, in order for users to “hear from political candidates.” The company stated the previous restrictions on Trump had been placed in “response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances” following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
Read MoreCommentary: Facebook Post Sparks Debate Over Possible Mistrial in Trump Case
I think that it was the great Miranda Devine, she of the “laptop from hell” fame, who first called the world’s attention to the latest wrinkle in the long-running “Get Trump” extravaganza in New York. Anyway, I first heard about it from her post on X Friday. “If this is legit,” she wrote, commenting on a letter purportedly from Acting Justice Juan Merchan to Donald Trump’s Counsel and the Manhattan DA’s office, “it should wipe out Trump’s conviction.”
Eh, what?
Read MoreMaricopa County and Arizona Sec. of State Censored 2020 Election Audit Hearing, Elected Officials
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.
Read MoreRubio, Consumer Advocate Want Chinese Online Retailers Investigated
Lawmakers and consumer advocates are calling for a federal investigation into online Chinese retailers Temu and Shein.
The companies have spent billions of dollars in online American advertising with social media companies such as Meta, parent of Facebook and Instagram, and Google. The probe is warranted, critics say, because of anti-competitive practices skirting U.S. trade and public safety regulations; alleged use of slave laborers to make products sold at cut-rate prices; and advertising targeting children, low-income families and older Americans.
Read MoreEmails Show Facebook Chafed at Biden White House Pressure to Suppress COVID-19 Lab Leak Story
The preliminary staff report is the result of a months-long investigation into the alleged coercion, where President Joe Biden’s White House reportedly pushed social media platforms such as Facebook, Amazon, and YouTube, to censor books, videos, and posts.
Emails released Wednesday show Facebook officials chafed at the Biden White House pressure campaign to censor reports that the COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak in China.
Read MoreFacebook Interfered with U.S. Elections Almost 40 Times Since 2008: Study
Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.
Among the group’s findings are Facebook censuring 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and House candidates on their platform. For example, the company removed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account. The company also “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020, according to the MRC’s analysis.
Read MoreWhite House Pressure to Censor Social Media No Worse than Yelling at Journalists, SCOTUS Suggests
Federal officials privately scold reporters and attempt to shape or even stop their coverage on a regular basis, without getting sued for First Amendment violations.
How close is that to White House aides privately and repeatedly badgering their counterparts at social media companies and President Biden publicly accusing Facebook of “killing people,” for insufficient censorship of disfavored narratives on COVID-19?
Read MoreCommentary: Big Tech Needs First Amendment to Censor You
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.
Read MoreProsecutors Say Former Facebook DEI Executive ‘Abused a Position of Trust’ When Defrauding Company $4 Million
Barbara Furlow-Smiles, a Georgia resident and former Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) executive at Facebook, admitted on Tuesday to defrauding the company of more than $4 million from 2017 until 2021.
Federal prosecutors say Furlow-Smiles “abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive” to steal “millions of dollars” from Facebook while “ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission.”
Read MoreNew Mexico Sues Facebook and Instagram for Hosting Child Sexual Abuse, Solicitation, and Trafficking Content
New Mexico is suing Facebook and Instagram for creating “prime locations” for sexual predators to share child sexual abuse, solicitation, and trafficking content.
NM Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a civil suit filed against Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, alleging that “certain child exploitative content” is ten times “more prevalent” on Facebook and Instagram than on pornography site PornHub and the adult content platform OnlyFans.
Read MoreChina Ramps Up Crackdown on American Tech
Over the past few months, China has escalated its efforts to exert control over American technology companies by implementing new requirements, bans and restrictions.
The Chinese government is clamping down on American technology companies by throttling their already limited access to the country’s massive economy, according to new requirements, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday. The country has also challenged American technology dominance by developing rivals to the latest smartphones and artificial intelligence (AI), as well as announcing export limits to key metals in July.
Read MoreMeta’s Oversight Board Rules That Company Stifled Speech by Removing Posts About Abortion
Meta’s Oversight Board ruled Wednesday that Facebook and Instagram showed “patterns of censorship” by removing posts about abortion that the social media platforms claimed constituted death threats.
The board had been weighing a series of posts that were initially taken down by Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, for potential death threats against both pro-abortion and pro-life advocates before being reinstated after appeals from the users. The board took up the case in June and announced this week that Facebook had erred by removing the posts, according to the ruling.
Read MoreMeta’s Epidemic of Chinese ‘Spamouflage’ Propaganda
Meta recently took “what appears to be the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world,” off its platforms, according to the company’s quarterly Adversarial Threat Report released this week.’
The social media accounts that made up the covert influence operation — collectively dubbed “Spamouflage” — were active all over the world, including in America, major U.S. allies, Taiwan, and the Chinese diaspora.
Read MoreMusk: Fight Against Zuckerberg Will Be Live-Streamed on X with Proceeds Going to Veterans
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.
Read MoreCommentary: Thanks to Hacks and Henchmen, ‘Misinformation’ Is Now Code for Doing Government Dirty Work
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.
Read MoreBiden White House Ordered Facebook to Censor Vaccine Memes and Tucker Carlson Posts
On Thursday, newly-released files show that the Biden Administration actively pressured the social media giant Facebook to censor meme posts that made fun of the COVID-19 vaccine, as well as posts by then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
As reported by the New York Post, the files released by the House Judiciary Committee show that Andy Slavitt, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, sent an email in April of 2021 to Facebook’s president for global affairs Nick Clegg. Clegg then sent an email to colleagues saying that Slavitt “was outraged — not too strong a word to describe his reaction — that [Facebook] did not remove this post.”
Read MoreHouse Judiciary Committee Questions Zuckerberg on Potential Censorship on Threads
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.
Read MoreStudy Finding Facebook Does Not Censor Conservatives Is ‘Deeply Flawed,’ ‘Laughable,’ Experts Say
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.
Read MoreGeorgia Man Wins Lawsuit Against Facebook over Account Lockout
A man from Georgia who sued Facebook for denying him access to his personal account has won, according to Fox 5 Atlanta.
Read MoreVirginia Hair Salon Fires Christian Stylist for ‘Homophobic’ Post Criticizing Disney Plus on Facebook
A Virginia hair salon fired a Christian stylist over a Facebook post criticizing the streaming movie service Disney+.
“My Facebook is my page,” Sidney York, the fired stylist, told The Daily Signal in an interview Wednesday. “I understand it’s a touchy subject and people may be offended over it, but it had nothing to do with my job.”
Read MoreCommentary: Facebook’s TikTok Problem
TikTok hasn’t exactly got Facebook dancing in the streets.
The Chinese-owned social media app is rapidly eating away at Facebook’s user base, especially among the under-30s crowd, which seems to think that Facebook is for the over-the-hill crowd.
Read MoreFormer Georgia U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler Joins Governor Kemp as He Signs ‘Zuckerbucks’ Ban into Law
Chairwoman of the nonprofit group Greater Georgia and former Georgia U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler recently joined Governor Brian Kemp as he signed Senate Bill 222, also known as the “Zuckerbucks” ban, into law.
Read MoreHundreds of Former Federal Surveillance Officials Have Moved to Jobs in Big Tech
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.
Read MoreAnalysis: The RESTRICT Act Could Be Used to Shut Down Any App That Challenges the ‘Reported Result’ of an Election
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.
Read MoreMeta Launches Paid Verification Service
Meta on Friday launched a paid verification service for Facebook and Instagram that offers a profile badge and identity monitoring services in exchange for subscription fee.
While the company will not charge fees to existing verified accounts, others seeking verification must pay $11.99 per month on the web or $14.99 per month on mobile device, according to The Hill.
Read More‘I’m Back!’: Trump Breaks His Facebook Silence
Former President Donald Trump made his first post on Facebook Friday since being banned in 2021 following the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol building. “I’M BACK!,” the former President posted, including a video clip from his 2016 election-night victory over former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Read MoreCongress Takes First Shot at Federal Censorship: A Moratorium on DOJ Payments to Social Media
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.
Read MoreMeta to Reinstate Trump’s Facebook, Instagram Accounts
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.
Read MoreDemocratic Congressman: ‘No One Can Defend Having Classified Documents’ at Penn Biden Center
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.
Read MoreCDC Regularly Called the Shots on Facebook’s COVID-19 Censorship Decisions, Docs Show
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.”
Read MoreNew Bill Would Ban Feds from Working with Big Tech to Censor Americans
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.
Read MoreSocial Media Use in Children Linked to Significant Brain Changes
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.
Read MoreRegulator Fines Tech Giant Millions for Showing Targeted Ads Based on User Activity
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.
Read MoreFeds Use Facebook to Study COVID Vaccine, Testing, and Mask Messaging
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.
Read MoreZuckerbucks-Backed Group Back in Wisconsin
The liberal voting activist group that dumped $350 million of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s money on local election offices during the 2020 presidential election is back again with another $80 million to give over the next five years.
And Wisconsin once again will be front and center in the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s “generosity.”
Read MoreMore Evidence Reveals CDC Colluded with Social Media Giants to Silence COVID ‘Misinformation’
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.
Read MoreMeta’s ‘Unequal’ Moderation Policy Protects Elites on Facebook and Instagram: Report
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.
Read MoreCommentary: The Legacy Media Is Ossified by Their Corruption and Blinded by Their Progressive Agenda
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…
Read MoreFBI Met with Twitter ‘Weekly’ Ahead of 2020, Warned of ‘Hack-and-Leak’ Operations
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.
Read MoreH&R Block, Other Tax Prep Services Sending ‘Sensitive Financial Information’ to Facebook: Report
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.
Read MoreFacebook, Instagram Parent Company Meta Cuts 11,000 Jobs
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, on Wednesday laid off 11,000 employees, or 13% of its workforce, amid lowered revenue.
The company, which had more than 87,000 employees in September, grew dramatically at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Read MoreCommentary: Government Colludes with Big Tech to Censor Americans
Despite plenty of negative media attention this year on the now-dissolved Disinformation Governance Board, government collusion with social media platforms is ramping up.
This collaboration between the Department of Homeland Security and companies such as Twitter and Facebook to police the speech of Americans requires a legislative remedy.
Read MoreFacebook Allegedly Gives The FBI Users’ Info Without Their Consent
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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