Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/9/2021 Commentary A realignment, as many have observed, is now unfolding in American politics. The Republican Party and its conservatism is now the home for the “Somewheres,” to borrow the term from David Goodhart’s 2017 book, “The Road to Somewhere,” which refers to the more traditionalist, hardscrabble patriots of the American heartland. The Democratic Party and its increasingly hard-left progressivism, by contrast, is the home for the “Anywheres”—those highly educated, mobile, “woke” elites comprising the bicoastal ruling class. The Big Tech issue...

Source: IN.gov Date: 4/7/2021 Attorney General Todd Rokita announced today that he is investigating whether five Big Tech companies have potentially harmed Indiana consumers through business practices that are abusive, deceptive and/or unfair. In particular, Attorney General Rokita is probing methods by which the companies have limited consumers’ access to certain content — often deleting or obscuring posted material reflecting a politically conservative point of view. Such manipulation prevents consumers from making informed choices, Attorney General Rokita said. “In a free society, few...

Source: Breitbart Date: 4/7/2021 Music streaming service Spotify has reportedly continued to censors episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast from its platform as part of its $100 million exclusive deal with the show. 42 episodes have now been censored by the platform, with reports indicating more episodes are likely to disappear. Some censored episodes appear to have been targeted based on jokes. DigitalMusicNews reports that the music and podcast streaming service Spotify has continued to remove episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast as part of its $100 million deal with the show....

Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/7/2021 Commentary Recently, Facebook took down Lara Trump’s interview with former President Donald Trump, warning that Trump’s content was banned on the platform. In doing this, Facebook made a new escalation in its censorship project. First, Facebook took the position Trump could not post because his claims of election fraud, leading up to the events of Jan. 6, posed a clear and present danger to the peaceful transfer of power. Second, Facebook said Trump could not post at all, in a sense implying that even his future posts might pose a similar danger. Now...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/7/2021 Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said on April 7 that he will be scrutinizing five big tech companies that might have potentially caused harm to Indiana consumers through “abusive, deceptive and/or unfair” practices. The five companies to be scrutinized by Rokita are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Rep. Todd Rokita (R-Ind.) announces the 2018 budget blueprint during a press conference on Capitol Hill in Washington on July 18, 2017. (Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters) The attorney general is particularly looking into procedures...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/7/2021 Commentary On April 5, Justice Clarence Thomas announced that the Supreme Court soon will have to put an end to Big Tech tyranny. He cited the “glaring” problem of social media platforms like Facebook and Google wielding unlimited power to censor users whose views they don’t like. These tech giants, he argued, ought to be regulated like “common carriers,” which are legally required to serve all customers. AT&T can’t refuse to open a phone account for you or limit your conversations. Amtrak cannot pick and choose who rides its trains. Thomas’s...

Source: NBC News Date: 4/9/2021 Video of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and a panel of scientists apparently trading in Covid-19 misinformation has been pulled from YouTube. The video of DeSantis’ roundtable discussion last month at the state Capitol in Tallahassee was removed on Wednesday because it violated the social media platform’s standards, YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez said. It had been embedded in a Tampa-area TV station's news story and it's removal was flagged by the American Institute for Economic Research, a "free market" think tank based in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.   “YouTube...

Source: Big League Politics Date: 4/6/2021 The American ruling class never sleeps and now they’re propping up a new organization to fight so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Joseph Vasquez of NewsBusters reported that the Aspen Institute Commission on Information is being funded by the likes of billionaire oligarchs such as Bill Gates and George Soros to “fight ‘mis- and disinformation.’” The Aspen Institute features Katie Couric, a seasoned corporate media mouthpiece, as its co-chair. Vasquez observed that “Couric recently suggested during a segment with HBO host Bill Maher...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/5/2021 Google did not infringe Oracle’s copyright when it used that company’s programming code in the Android cellphone operating system, the Supreme Court ruled this morning overturning a lower court ruling that favored Oracle. Oracle had been seeking an estimated $9 billion in damages in the decade-old litigation between the tech companies that could have changed the rules of the road for the software industry. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the 6-2 decision for the high court in Google LLC v. Oracle America Inc., court file 18-956. The case came to the court...

Source: American Conservatives Date: 4/4/2021 Twitter temporarily suspended Georgia GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account on Sunday after she tweeted an Easter message. Rep. Greene tweeted a message on Easter morning: “He is Risen – Death could not hold him. Rejoice in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” VIEW TWEET Twitter suspended Greene shortly after she tweeted her Easter message.  No specific reason was given for the suspension. “We have determined that you have violated the Twitter rules, so we’ve temporarily limited some of your account features,” Twitter said. VIEW TWEET Update: Twitter...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 4/1/2021 The Texas Senate passed a bill that forbids social media companies that have at least 100 million users per month to block, ban, demonetize, or discriminate against any of their users due to their political views. Senate Bill 12, which is sponsored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, passed on Thursday and would apply to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other platforms. Hughes said in a video posted on Twitter that the bill is going to “get Texans back online.” “I think we all have to acknowledge, these social media companies are the new town square,”...

Source: Business Insider Date: 4/3/2021 A user in a low level hacking forum on Saturday published the phone numbers and personal data of hundreds of millions of Facebook users for free online. The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses. Insider reviewed a sample of the leaked data and verified...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 3/24/2021 Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said Tuesday it is suing Facebook in France for allegedly violating the European nation’s consumer code with deceptive promises to fight hate speech and false information. In a press release, the Paris-based free press watchdog alleged that the U.S. social media giant has broken its own terms of services to “allow disinformation and hate speech to flourish” on the platform, including “hatred against journalists” and “significant disinformation about COVID-19.” The RSF cited two reports as evidence of Facebook’s alleged...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 3/22/2021 Facebook on March 22 issued an announcement on how it plans to combat misinformation on its platforms. The technology giant also said it took down 1.3 billion fake accounts between October and December 2020. “Tackling misinformation actually requires addressing several challenges including fake accounts, deceptive behavior, and misleading and harmful content,” Guy Rosen, vice president of integrity at Facebook, wrote in the statement. Rosen said they have a group of “more than 80 independent fact-checkers, who review content in more than 60 languages,”...

Source: The BL Date: 3/22/2021 On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Facebook’s request to intervene in a $15 billion class-action lawsuit alleging that the company illegally monitored its users’ online activities when they were not using the platform, in violation of the federal Wiretap Act. “Facebook’s user profiles would allegedly reveal an individual’s likes, dislikes, interests, and habits over a significant amount of time, without affording users a meaningful opportunity to control or prevent the unauthorized exploration of their private lives,” the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 3/21/2021 A motion to establish a Senate select committee to examine the influence and censorship of Big Tech companies has stalled, with the Senate vote split evenly 32-32. Liberal Senator Alex Antic was prompted to raise the motion in January after tech giant Twitter permanently banned former U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media account. “Big Tech companies such as Twitter are now effectively the arbiters of who is entitled to freedom of speech. This is enormously dangerous,” Antic previously told The Epoch Times. The committee would have been charged...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 3/22/2021 Commentary There is a lot of chatter among conservatives (well, among some conservatives) about finally dispensing with chatter and moving on to action. We’ve had a lot of diagnosis. Where’s the treatment? As a first offering in this big project, I’d like to propose three courses of action. None is original. This pleases me. Novelty in human affairs is often—I’d go so far as to say “generally”—counter-productive. My first proposal is to follow the advice of Laurence Silberman, the eminent jurist who was appointed to the D.C. Court of...

Source: 2KUTV Date: 3/16/2021 (CBS News) — Twitter officials say they tracked QAnon for years, as adherents of the conspiracy theory spread misinformation and vitriol on the platform. While Twitter monitored, collected data and tried to suppress the reach of QAnon accounts, it had stopped short of outright banning them. That changed after the Capitol riot. On January 12, six days after the insurrection, Twitter publicly disclosed it had suspended 70,000 accounts. A Twitter spokesperson now tells CBS News the number has more than doubled — with more than 150,000 accounts suspended for engaging...

Source: Fox 40 Date: 3/16/2021 MOSCOW (AP) — Russian authorities said Tuesday they would block Twitter in a month if it doesn’t take steps to remove banned content, a move that escalates the Russian government’s drawn-out standoff with social media platforms that have played a major role in amplifying dissent in Russia. Russia’s state communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, last week announced it was slowing down the speed of uploading photos and videos to Twitter over its alleged failure to remove content encouraging suicide among children and information about drugs and child pornography. The...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 3/15/2021 A top Facebook official told an undercover journalist that the social media giant has grown too powerful and should be broken up, according to a video released by Project Veritas on March 15. The undercover clips show Benny Thomas, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, opining about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg having too much power, expressing concerns about Zuckerberg’s biotechnology startups, and warning about the advent of artificial intelligence. “I would break up Facebook, which means I would make less money probably, but I don’t care. Like,...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 3/16/2021 Famed cartoonist and political commentator Scott Adams told his audience that YouTube removed two of his videos because they contained comments regarding the November election. He said it feels like YouTube is setting him up for a penalty that could lead to his channel being purged from the Google-owned online video platform. In his March 15 daily livestream, Adams said that YouTube informed him that two of his January videos “promoted false election claims” and were taken down. As far as he could tell, the videos did no such thing, but YouTube,...

Source: NBC DFW Date: 3/5/2021 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and State Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola) are set to discuss a bill filed with the Texas Legislature that aims to "help prohibit social media companies from censoring Texans based on the viewpoints they express," the governor's office says. According to the Texas Legislature, Senate Bill 12 would give Texans a way to get back online if a social media company bans or blocks their account based on their political or religious views. Abbott said the bill aims to "prevent social media platforms from 'canceling conservative speech.'" "Too...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 2/26/2021 Big tech companies are “aiding” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in achieving its goal of being a global superpower, said Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) during day two of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)—the largest annual conservative conference. Blackburn was speaking Friday afternoon about freedom of speech in the United States and abroad, when she started bringing up the relationship between Big Tech companies in the United States and the CCP. “China is trying to cancel the United States of America,” Blackburn added. “China...

Source: The Epoch Times Date: 2/8/2021 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he’s working with state legislators on a bill to prevent big tech companies from taking action to moderate user content based on political viewpoints. “We are working with Sen. [Bryan] Hughes on legislation to prevent social media providers like Facebook & Twitter from cancelling conservative speech,” Abbott said in a Feb. 7 statement on Twitter. His announcement follows a Florida proposal that would seek to penalize social media companies that de-platform candidates during an election. The legislation would fine companies $100,000...

Source: Wired Date: 2/2/2021 Google’s impending takedown of third-party cookies in Chrome is a big win for privacy. And Google Google Chrome is ditching third-party cookies for good. If all goes according to plan then future updates to the world’s most popular web browser will rewrite the rules of online advertising and make it far harder to track the web activity of billions of people. But it’s not that simple. What seems like a big win for privacy may, ultimately, only serve to tighten Google’s grip on the advertising industry and web as a whole. Critics and regulators argue the move...

Source: Epoch Times Date: 1/22/2021 A sex trafficking victim has filed a lawsuit against Twitter in a U.S. district court in California, alleging that the social media giant knowingly received and distributed child pornography from which it could benefit. According to the court filing, John Doe said he was solicited and recruited for sex trafficking as a minor. After his escape, material depicting his abuse was disseminated on Twitter. “When Twitter was first alerted to this fact and John Doe’s age, Twitter refused to remove the illegal material and instead continued to promote and profit...

Source: Breitbart Date: 11/26/2019 In the past week alone, it was reported that Twitter has suspended journalist Andy Ngo for tweeting inconvenient facts about the purported “epidemic” of transgender deaths, and undercover journalism organization Project Veritas from running recruitment ads. But if you’re a pedophile who wants to discuss your attraction to minors — Twitter’s just fine with that. Big League Politics discovered a little-noticed, quietly enacted Twitter rule change from March, which says “Discussions related to child sexual exploitation as a phenomenon or attraction towards...

Source: WebFX Date: 9/29/2019 In modern America, it feels like you have an unlimited variety of entertainment and media options right at your fingertips. Television, film, and video game companies seem to come out of the woodwork in today’s startup-centric economy. Who knows what they’ll do next? But while it may seem like you have limitless options, most of the media you consume is owned by one of six companies. These six media companies are known as The Big 6. While independent media outlets still exist (and there are a lot of them), the major outlets are almost all owned by these six...

Source: Wired Date: 2/4/2004 The Pentagon canceled its so-called LifeLog project, an ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person's entire existence. Run by Darpa, the Defense Department's research arm, LifeLog aimed to gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees or does: the phone calls made, the TV shows watched, the magazines read, the plane tickets bought, the e-mail sent and received. Out of this seemingly endless ocean of information, computer scientists would plot distinctive routes in the data, mapping relationships, memories, events and...