Tag: Big Tech

Trump Sends Clear Message to Big Tech with His Pick for Top DOJ Spot

Daily Caller News Foundation
Gail Slater

President-elect Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will tap economic policy adviser to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance, Gail Slater, as assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Before his second victory, Trump repeatedly called out Big Tech’s involvement in manipulating information behind the scenes, alleging that the companies have “systematically” colluded to advance a “censorship regime.” In an announcement on Truth Social, Trump stated the corporations have used their “market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans” and “those of Little Tech.”

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Censorship Empire Strikes Back with UN Disinformation Declaration, German Charges for Memes

Just the News
UNAOC Conference

The second Trump administration may presage the significant retrenchment, if not collapse, of what critics call the censorship-industrial complex, a symbiotic and sometimes coercive relationship among the U.S. government, private researchers and Big Tech to suppress disfavored narratives and political movements such as populism.

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‘Absolutely Unconvincing’: Courts Uphold State Bans on Transgender Procedures for Kids

Kaitlin Housler
Doctors Surgery

In the weeks before the Supreme Court reviews the constitutionality of Tennessee’s ban on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions for gender-confused minors, federal and state courts have upheld similar laws against so-called gender affirming care for children as a proper exercise of legislative power over medical practice.

It’s a worrying sign for transgender activists and allies now reconsidering their strategy in light of pending Republican control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, likely affected by the Biden administration’s imposition of gender identity over sex in federal regulations and 2024 Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris’s support for taxpayer-funded transgender surgeries for inmates.

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Tech Leaders of Amazon, Apple, Meta, Google Say They Look Forward to Working with Trump

Just the News
Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Andy Jassy

Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon, congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday for an “extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory” after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris.

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Trump’s Improbable Comeback Also Engineered a Significant Exodus from Democrat Party

Just the News

Donald Trump pulled off the most improbable comeback in American political history Tuesday night, securing a likely return trip to the White House by beating back a relentless tide of media, Big Tech and Democrat opposition that stretched from the courthouse to the social media sphere.

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Commentary: Trump Has a Plan to Finally Fix the U.S. Electric Grid

Daily Caller News Foundation

Citing the need for more electricity to continue growing the artificial intelligence (AI) sector and keep the U.S. tech industry ahead of China, former President Donald Trump on Sept. 5 vowed in a second term to issue a “national emergency declaration to achieve a massive increase in domestic energy supply.”

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TikTok May Be Held Liable for Girl’s Death, Upending Three Decades of Tech Immunity

Just the News
Montana TikTok Ruling

The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet” may not be as powerful as believed by the bipartisan chorus demanding reform of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

TikTok’s biggest immediate problem now may be its own users, their parents, and state attorneys general, rather than the state and federal lawmakers seeking to ban the Chinese-owned company and force ByteDance to sell it to an American entity, following a 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling Aug. 27 that denies TikTok legal immunity for an algorithm choice.

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Big Tech Liable for Breaking Promises to Users that Led to Suicide, Death Threats: Appeals Court

Just the News
Smart Phone Filled with Apps

Days before the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sent Big Tech lawyers scrambling by upending three decades of judicial precedents on Section 230 immunity from liability, its West Coast counterpart warned platforms their immunity had limits, too.

While far smaller in scope than the 3rd Circuit’s ruling that TikTok could be held liable for a little girl’s death by algorithmically recommending the video she fatally copied, likely to provoke Supreme Court intervention, the 9th Circuit ruling Aug. 22 against third-party Snapchat app developer Yolo also suggests judges are growing skeptical of maximalist views of the 1996 law.

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Analysis: Newsela Is the ‘Media Literacy’ Provider Active in 90 Percent of American Schools

Foundation for Freedom Online
Newslea Media Literacy

One of the nation’s largest and fastest growing  educational technology platforms, Newsela, is also a foremost provider of “media literacy” lessons for schools. The platform started in 2013 has experienced tremendous growth. Its educational products are used in over 90 percent of schools.

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Commentary: Left Lets Mask Slip on Plans to Demolish the Supreme Court

Minnesota Sun Staff
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at a rally

The Left has let the mask slip and made clear that it intends to pack or otherwise decimate the Supreme Court.

President Joe Biden announced last week in a Washington Post op-ed that he would promote a “reform” of the nation’s highest court that would include term limits and new “ethics” rules for justices.

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Commentary: Kamala Harris and the Californication of America

Minnesota Sun Staff
Kamala Harris

If you have ever confronted the astonishing hatred that San Francisco Bay Area Democrats have for anything Republican, much less MAGA Republican, then you understand why Kamala Harris may become the next president of the United States.

This isn’t a hate that is grounded in reality. It is nurtured by decades of propaganda, backed by trillions of dollars in big tech wealth, and, lately, the most powerful tools of mass hypnosis and Pavlovian conditioning the world has ever seen. If you question any of their pieties—climate, race, gender, Trump—you are instantly and permanently dehumanized. It is impossible to change their minds. There is no room for nuance. There is no tolerance for alternative perspectives. You are hated. You are garbage. Give up. Die.

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Gaetz Demands DHS Hand Over Docs on Big Tech Ties, Alleged Censorship of Trump Assassination Attempt Info

Admin

Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz demanded Wednesday that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas provide any key documents that could shed light on his agency’s ties to Big Tech and alleged efforts to censor online information surrounding the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

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Google Insists ‘No Manual Action’ to Hide Trump Assassination Attempt from Search Suggestions

Just the News

Google’s search engine conspicuously left out Donald Trump in autocomplete suggestions for “assassination,” “assassination attempt” and even “president donald” Sunday, drawing criticism from social media users including X owner Elon Musk that it was censoring recent history.

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Study Suggests Big Tech Can Influence Flocks of Undecided Voters ‘Without People’s Awareness’

Minnesota Sun Staff
Google Search

A study has found that tech companies can influence the decisions of large numbers of undecided voters with search suggestions on search engines.

The study, conducted by Dr. Robert Epstein and several other affiliates of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), sought to determine whether the suggestions that pop into the search bar when using engines like Google can influence the voting behavior of undecideds. Its findings suggest that the “search suggestion effect” (SSE) is real and powerful, so much so that search engine operators controlling search suggestions could have “the power to shift a large number of votes without people’s awareness,” Epstein told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Democrat Lawfare Failed to Derail Trump Campaign So Far, While Triggering Financial Avalanche

Just the News
Donald Trump

Four indictments and one set of convictions later, a Democrat-led lawfare strategy has failed so far to derail Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House, but it has triggered an avalanche of financial support as the former president hold leads in most battleground states that will decide the 2024 election.

No where was Trump’s resilience more obvious than his travels across the West Coast this weekend, where he collected $12 million at a Silicon Valley fund-raiser at the home of a Big Tech executive who used to support Hillary Clinton, scored millions more at events in blue southern California and then jetted off to Las Vegas for a boisterous rally in Nevada where a post-conviction poll showed him leading that once-Biden-friendly state by five points.

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Big Tech Championed Zero Emissions but Now Its Power-Hungry Data Centers are Straining the Grid

Just the News
Data center

For years, tech giants in California and Washington have been leading the charge to eliminate fossil fuels from the grid. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple, for example, are members of Climate Group RE100, an organization of major corporations who are dedicated to accelerating “change toward zero-carbon grids at scale by 2040.”

In 2018, Apple proclaimed that it was globally powered entirely by 100 percent renewable energy.

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Commentary: Big Tech Wants to Crush Your Entire World and Trap You in Virtual Hell

Minnesota Sun Staff
Woman wearing Apple Vision Pro goggles

Apple’s recent ad for a new, thinner iPad featured a hydraulic press smashing everything the new gadget could supposedly replace: paints, musical instruments, a clay bust, arcade cabinets, record players, books.

The new iPad promises a future in which humanity has forgotten the whisper of the brush over the canvas, the vibration of a guitar string, the joy of finding a note tucked into an old used book, and the easy camaraderie of children cheering each other on as they take turns at a challenging arcade game. The craftsmanship that went into these objects is now obsolete. You don’t have to go anywhere, touch anything.

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Commentary: Congress Unveils Plan to Hold Entire Internet Hostage Annually to Extort Big Tech

Minnesota Sun Staff
Cathy McMorris Roberts anf Frank Pallone Jr

“It would require Big Tech and others to work with Congress over 18 months to evaluate and enact a new legal framework that will allow for free speech and innovation while also encouraging these companies to be good stewards of their platforms. Our bill gives Big Tech a choice: Work with Congress to ensure the internet is a safe, healthy place for good, or lose Section 230 protections entirely.”

That was House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Ranking Member Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) in a May 12 oped in the Wall Street Journal outlining their proposed draft legislation, the “Section 230 Sunset Act,” that would end Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protections on Dec. 31, 2025 for millions of interactive computer services, including websites, e-commerce stores and other small businesses.

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Conservatives Urge House to Hold Hearing on Google Gemini Over 2024 Election Integrity Concerns

Just the News
Rep. Jim Jordan

The hearing Republicans are calling for would increase public scrutiny on Google’s AI application and potentially inherent bias.

Conservative and Republican groups nationwide are urging House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to hold a hearing about potential problems posed by Google Gemini, with concerns specifically about whether it could influence the 2024 presidential election.

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Commentary: Big Tech Wants to Sneak Its AI Agenda Through State Legislatures

Minnesota Sun Staff
Connecticut State Sen. James Moroney with Texas State Rep. Giovanni Capriglione

Most conservatives are aware Big Tech is an insidious force in American life. Tech giants censor free speech, promote wokeness, and fund far-left groups. A number of Republicans at the federal level want to curtail the massive power Big Tech wields in our country.

However, at the state level, many Republicans are lining up to serve the interests of the tech giants. Big Tech knows that there’s little appetite at the federal level to do its bidding. So corporations like Microsoft are now lobbying state legislators to enact the AI regulations they want. It’s a campaign few Americans know about, but it could dramatically impact their lives.

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Google Threatens to Demonetize Wall Street Watchdog as GOP Targets Ad Collusion

Just the News
Wall Street Bull

Google’s artificial intelligence isn’t particularly bright when it comes to evaluating publishers’ compliance with its advertising policies, if the experience of a heterodox economics blog with outsized influence is any indication.

With a megaphone from Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi, both darlings of progressives in the “Occupy Wall Street” era, Naked Capitalism accused Google of making “flagrant errors” in its threats to demonetize the 18-year-old site for verboten content.

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Commentary: Republicans Roll over on ‘Climate Change’

Minnesota Sun Staff
Climate Change

Why are Republicans supine in the fight against the Marxist takeover of our entire way of life? They are petrified, for some reason, about engaging the debate on the “science” of “climate change.”

This abandonment of the playing field has allowed climate spending to overtake the landscape like Kudzu vines on steroids.

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

Peter D'Abrosca
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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Senate Rejects Bill Stripping Section 230 Protections for AI in Landmark Vote

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Senate shot down a bipartisan bill Wednesday aimed at stripping legal liability protections for artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal first introduced their No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act in June and Hawley put it up for an unanimous consent vote on Wednesday. The bill would have eliminated Section 230 protections that currently grant tech platforms immunity from liability for the text and visual content their AI produces, enabling Americans to file lawsuits against them.

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Commentary: A Way to Protect Kids Online That Passes Constitutional Muster

Minnesota Sun Staff

A bipartisan group of senators is about to take Big Tech CEOs to task on Jan. 31, 2024, by having them publicly address their failures to protect kids online. And the CEOs need to! The harms social media poses to children are well documented and, at this point, indisputable—even by the companies themselves.

YouTube admits that it hosts harmful content for children and even calls for legislation to address the problems it helps create. YouTube’s CEO indicated as much when he published his “principled approach for children and teenagers.”

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Commentary: SCOTUS Takes Up Free Speech Case, Putting Biden Administration’s Censorship Regime on Trial

Minnesota Sun Staff

Late Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear Missouri v. Biden, a case that may end the Biden administration’s circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing censorship to Big Tech. The case was initially filed by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, along with various private plaintiffs who allege that social media platforms censored them at the behest of federal agencies. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty ruled for the plaintiffs on July 4, enjoining the agencies from communicating with platforms about “content moderation.” The Biden administration sought relief from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lost again, making a Supreme Court clash inevitable.

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Expert to Arizona Legislature: Kari Lake Would Have ‘Won Easily’ If Google Hadn’t Interfered in the 2022 Election

Rachel Alexander

State Representative Alex Kolodin (R-Scottsdale), chair of the Arizona House Ad Hoc Committee on Oversight, Accountability, and Big Tech, held the first of a series of hearings last week investigating the impact of Big Tech’s election interference.

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‘Legal’ Concerns Halt NIH $154 Million ‘False Information’ Program

Minnesota Sun Staff

The National Institutes of Health halted a $154 million research program intended to study “equitable health communication” and combat alleged medical misinformation.

The “pause” came “in the context of the current regulatory and legal landscape around communication platforms,” according to a website for the initiative.

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Commentary: Thanks to Hacks and Henchmen, ‘Misinformation’ Is Now Code for Doing Government Dirty Work

Minnesota Sun Staff

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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Minnesota Secretary of State: Election Officials Within Their Rights to Work with Big Tech to Fight ‘Outright Disinformation’

Minnesota Sun Staff

Fresh off a legislative session where Steve Simon was able to check off nearly every item on his election reform “wish list,” the recently re-elected Minnesota secretary of state took some time to speak to both national and local media about how he views the landscape of the upcoming 2024 election, and as he calls it the “democracy business.”

According to Simon, those who intend to suppress the vote with election-related “disinformation” or intimidation may be tripped up by new election-reform laws recently passed by the Democrat trifecta in the Minnesota Legislature. But he told the Washington Post in an interview this week that he doesn’t believe those new voter protections in Minnesota will necessarily deter disinformation efforts come 2024.

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Biden Admin Asks for Emergency Order Stopping Ban on Big Tech Censorship Coordination

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Biden administration requested an emergency order Thursday night to pause the preliminary injunction issued by a federal judge to prevent officials from communicating with social media platforms to censor protected speech.

The administration asked to immediately halt the injunction, issued by Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry A. Doughty on Tuesday, or to issue a seven day administrative stay while their appeal to the Fifth Circuit, which was filed on Wednesday, is pending. Doughty’s injunction bars federal officials in the Department of Health and Human Services, FBI and other agencies from communicating with social media platforms for “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”

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Judge Orders Biden Administration to Limit Contact with Social Media Platforms

Just the News

A Louisiana federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Biden administration to limit its contact with social media platforms, determining that the government likely violated the First Amendment by working to censor disfavored political viewpoints online. Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointed U.S. District Court judge, issued a preliminary injunction barring federal officials and agencies from contacting social media firms to seek the removal of protected speech, Politico reported.

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Hundreds of Former Federal Surveillance Officials Have Moved to Jobs in Big Tech

Admin

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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Analysis: The RESTRICT Act Could Be Used to Shut Down Any App That Challenges the ‘Reported Result’ of an Election

Admin

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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Commentary: Government Censorship Agency Scrubs Disinformation Web Page About Its History Interacting with Social Media Platforms

Minnesota Sun Staff

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the censorship agency everyone has been talking about, has scrubbed its Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation (MDM) webpage, https://cisa.gov/mdm to remove any mentions of interacting with “appropriate social media platforms” to “route disinformation concerns”.

How malinformative, to use the agency’s jargon. Malinformation, per the agency, “is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” By removing mentions and the context of the agency’s stated history of interacting with social media platforms, the agency is apparently attempting to mislead, harm and manipulate the public into believing it never did those things in the first place.

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Big Tech Faces Potential Reckoning at Supreme Court

Minnesota Sun Staff

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a landmark case that could see every major social media platform become liable for harmful content on their websites, changing the game forever when it comes to legal protections for such companies.

As reported by Politico, the case Gonzalez v. Google is centered around the family of a woman who was killed in the Paris terrorist attacks in November of 2015. Her family claims that the video-sharing platform YouTube, which is owned by Google, should be held liable for allowing pro-ISIS propaganda videos to be hosted on the site, which the family claims helped radicalize one of the attackers.

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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: ‘What Protections do Americans Have That Data Tracking the Unvaccinated Won’t Be Used Illegitimately?’

Susan Berry, PhD

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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Congress Takes First Shot at Federal Censorship: A Moratorium on DOJ Payments to Social Media

Just the News

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.

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Article III Project Founder Believes Jim Jordan Has No Intention of Holding Big Tech Accountable

Just the News

Article III Project founder and President Mike Davis says he doubts House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan will hold Big Tech accountable for its abuse of power for colluding with the federal government.

“Jim Jordan has no intention of actually holding big tech accountable,” Davis said on the Wednesday edition of the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “He pretends like he is fighting against Big Tech, but behind the scenes he’s making these key decisions like opposing bipartisan reforms last Congress and appointing someone who is pro Big Tech.”

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Big Tech-Aligned Group Wants to Go ‘Nationwide’ in Shaping Election Operations

Admin

A Big Tech-aligned group funded through liberal dark money is moving to expand “nationwide,” even though about half the states have banned using private money to run elections. The Center for Tech and Civic Life launched the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence in partnership with organizations funded by the liberal Arabella Advisors and Democracy Fund, as The Daily Signal previously reported. The tech center is the same group that distributed $350 million in election-administration grants in 2020 from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

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Alliance of Big Tech, Dark Money Groups Partners with Counties in State That Bans ‘Zuckerbucks’ for Elections

Admin

The group that distributed most of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial election grants in 2020 has designated at least two Utah counties as part of a new effort, despite a state ban on private money funding election operations. The two local juridictions are Cache County, with a population of 137,00, and Weber County, population 267,000.

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Flow of U.S. Intelligence Analysts into Big Tech Jobs Raises Alarm

Just the News

As Congress and the courts delve deeper into federally sanctioned censorship by Big Tech, a troubling revolving door has emerged between the U.S. intelligence community and the Big Tech giants on the front lines of one of the fiercest battles over free speech in modern American history. A Just the News review of LinkedIn employment histories of senior Big Tech executives found that at least 200 former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, National Security Council and Homeland Security Department have landed Silicon Valley jobs, many within content moderation units regulating supposed “disinformation” and disproportionately throttling news and opinion deviating from approved, left-tilting norms.

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