Free Speech Online - Page 3

Elon Musk has reportedly chosen Linda Yaccarino, a seasoned media executive, World Economic Forum chairperson, and coronavirus vaccination campaign creator, to lead Twitter hoping to bring stability to the platform that has been recently characterized by turbulence and controversy.

A report by Lee Fang, a former journalist for the Intercept, states that the FBI is pressuring Facebook and other social media platforms to censor “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian officials — even when the information is not false.

Wikipedia could be banned from the UK as a result of impending censorship legislation, the charity that hosts the website has warned.

California bill AB 587, touted by Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom as a fix for “disinformation” on social media, has been challenged by a First Amendment lawsuit brought by podcaster and journalist Tim Pool, satirical website the Babylon Bee, and Minds.com, a free-speech friendly social media platform.

The  Democrat-dominated Connecticut legislature is seeking to create a censorship board through Senate Bill 6410 to regulate online speech.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar: there’s a national security panic. Foreign adversaries threaten the homeland. Petty bipartisan disputes are put aside, and draft legislation is rushed out. At last, Congress is doing something.

Elon Musk’s Twitter has restricted accounts of prominent conservative politicians, journalists, and activists that are raising awareness about the fact that radical transgender activists called for a “Trans Day of Vengeance” ahead of the mass shooting at a Nashville Christian school, carried out by a woman who identified as transgender.

The past several months have revealed a huge amount of government pressure on social media platforms to censor public content. New emails revealed through Missouri v. Biden show the administration went further, urging Facebook to censor private communications on its WhatsApp messaging service too.

In the latest Twitter Files report published on Friday, journalist and author Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter partnered with the Virality Project, which warned the social media platform that “true stories that could fuel hesitancy,” complained that “anti-vaccine” accounts were retweeting the CDC, and ironically ran searches for the term “surveillance state” while looking for more information to censor.

NewsGuard, the establishment “news-rating” project that presents itself to the public as an impartial authority on the trustworthiness of news publishers, is telling reporters that it is not “government funded” — despite receiving a $750,000 contract from the Department of Defense to track “misinformation.”

Thanks to leaks, lawsuits, the Twitter Files, and congressional inquiry, the sheer size and complexity of the “disinformation” industry is starting to be exposed.

A 59-year-old woman in Poland is facing up to five years in prison for posting pro-Russian and pro-Putin sentiments on Facebook last year.

Rep. James Comer (R-KY), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has announced the markup of bills aimed at preventing the government from colluding with private companies to censor American citizens.

Slack, the instant messaging platform mainly used as an online workspace, has told Chaya Raichik, creator of the viral “Libs of TikTok” account, that she can no longer use their service.

According to the latest drop of the Twitter Files, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) flagged accounts his office disliked to the social media platform, accusing Americans of being “suspicious” for reasons including being excited by a Sen. Rand Paul visit, mentioning immigration in their tweets, or being followed by a political rival.

Former President Donald Trump can now post on Facebook and Instagram after having his accounts restored by Mark Zuckerberg and the Masters of the Universe.

The government is reportedly considering a measure to force social media companies to ban misogyny online as a part of the Online Safety Bill.

Video platform Vimeo has censored Dead Name — a documentary about parents struggling to protect their children from life-altering medical interventions on their gender — over so-called “hateful conduct.”

Despite being a self-described “free speech absolutist,” Elon Musk’s Twitter has reportedly caved to censorship pressure from a foreign government. Musk has complied with requests from the Indian government to remove a BBC documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

DuckDuckGo, the search engine that bills itself as a privacy-centered alternative to Google, but appears to censor conservative news to an even greater degree than its giant competitor, has been dinged by a privacy ratings service for lacking transparency.

Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Monday, which revealed how the pharmaceutical industry lobbied social media to reinforce their own narratives and censor the public conversation around coronavirus vaccines and vaccine policies.

Twitter allowed America’s biggest pharmaceutical companies to spread misinformation that hurt their competitors, according to a new batch of the Twitter Files released by Lee Fang, a journalist for the Intercept.

Fed and former Deputy Counsel at Twitter, Jim Baker, had to be taught during his stint at the social media giant that “optimism” is not misinformation, according to the latest tranche of Twitter Files, reported by journalist David Zweig.

A new Twitter Files investigation has revealed the many tools that company executives employed to blacklist and shadowban conservative voices. The thread posted to Elon Musk’s platform reveals that the internal Twitter name for shadowbanning is “visibility filtering.”

French President Emmanuel Macron demanded that Elon Musk abides by European Union restrictions on speech on Twitter in a meeting on Friday.

Elon Musk’s Twitter released internal discussions about censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story Friday night via journalist Matt Taibbi.

Twitter owner Elon Musk recently tweeted that he visited Apple’s headquarters where he met with CEO Tim Cook. Musk described the threat of Apple blacklisting Twitter from the iPhone App Store as a “misunderstanding.”

A new report reveals that Apple was Twitter’s biggest advertiser in Q1 2022, accounting for almost $50 million in revenue. Elon Musk now claims Tim Cook’s company has “mostly stopped advertising” on Twitter, a move that comes during the busy holiday shopping season.  The loss of such a major customer could be a problem for Musk’s Twitter before even taking into account Apple’s threat to drop the platform from the App Store.

Twitter owner Elon Musk said today that Apple has threatened to suspend the platform from its app store, threatening “war” against the hardware company in subsequent tweets.

Twitter has reportedly shut down its office in Brussels this week in a potential shot across the bow at the bloc over freedom of speech.

Yoel Roth, the rabidly anti-Trump former Twitter employee who briefly served as the site’s top censor, has penned an article for the New York Times explaining how a coalition of regulators and corporate interests can prevent Elon Musk from fully restoring free speech on the platform.

Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk is attempting to regain the favor of major advertisers by promising to make changes to the platform to address fears over “hate speech” and misinformation.

Instagram, the image-sharing platform owned by Facebook (now known as Meta), plans to mandate a previously optional feature that automatically censors a list of prohibited words in direct message (DM) requests and Story replies.

SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is reportedly offering to buy Twitter at his original offered price of $54.20 per share.

A coalition of globalist nonprofits, academic institutions, and one private company reportedly worked with arms of the federal government and Democrat activist organizations to censor news websites in the runup to the 2020 election, and plans to do so again in 2022.

Google-owned YouTube restored a viral video of a speech from the winner of the Italian election, Giorgia Meloni, claiming it was “mistakenly” removed from the platform. The speech went viral after Meloni’s win, but had been posted to the platform without problem since 2019.