Free Speech

Facebook announced a new policy to label state-funded media on its platform. Qatar-backed outlet Al Jazeera has a problem with that. In a letter sent by the media outlet’s lawyers to Facebook’s Vice President Jennifer Gillian Newstead and Head of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert, Al Jazeera wrote that Facebook’s policy would cause “substantial and irreparable harm” to its reputation.

As the hashtag “#youtubeisoverparty” trended following a YouTube policy update, Steven Crowder warned viewers and fellow creators their days on the platform may be numbered. Yesterday, YouTube’s Vice President and Global Head of Trust & Safety Matt Halprin released a policy update titled “An update to our harassment policy,” which YouTube explained will allow it to crack down on “harassment…

The video sharing platform and sister organization to Google may be cracking down on free speech -- this time under the guise of protecting users from “harassment.” YouTube’s Vice President and Global Head of Trust & Safety Matt Halprin released a blog on Wednesday, Dec. 11, titled “An update to our harassment policy.” As of today, YouTube’s blog announced “a series of policy and product…

Ex-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger’s Twitter followers reported that they couldn’t see the tweets he had put out about a social media strike. “Who wants me to organize mass tryouts of decentralized social media networks?” Sanger tweeted on Dec. 2.

A Pinterest tech insider received an award for his part in blowing the whistle on Pinterest’s bias and censorship of conservative content. Whistleblower Eric Cochran received an Impact Award during the 3rd Annual Impact Awards hosted by Liberty Consulting President Ginni Thomas and by United Purpose last Wednesday. He received the prestigious award for what Project Veritas founder James O'Keefe…

“Journalists play a critical role in our society: keep the world honest and balanced. They are true servants of the people,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in a tweet from 2015. But it seems only certain kinds of journalists “play a critical role” on Twitter. Fox News host Pete Hegseth was censored by Twitter, apparently for posting a tweet that showed a screenshot of the manifesto said to have…

A former Facebook employee says that social media companies “owe it to democracy” to increase restrictions on Facebook’s political advertising and “fix the mess” they allegedly created. Facebook’s former government and politics client partner Clare O’Donoghue Velikić wrote an article for The Guardian on Dec. 6 on “how to fix social media’s political ads problem.”

One of the four constitutional scholars who testified at the impeachment hearings on Dec. 3 played an instrumental role in the building of Facebook’s Oversight Board. Noah Feldman, professor at Harvard Law School and director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, testified at the House Judiciary Committee’s public hearing.  

Sources claim that the Democratic National Committee ("DNC") directly lobbied Facebook to police the platform for “malicious actors” and “disinformation” from politicians.The DNC CEO Seema Nanda reportedly wrote the Nov. 21 letter to Facebook to “raise concerns about the company's ability to catch online trolls” and in hopes that the company would “change its political ad policy,” according to…

After taking a stand for free speech on several occasions, is Facebook now backsliding? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg decided to take a pro-free speech stand and allowed political ads without fact-checking as early as October 2019, and amidst pressure from the left, the Big Tech CEO has even doubled down on his pro-free speech remarks. But according to sources speaking to The Washington Post, “…

Dave Rubin has launched two platforms on the same day, which he believes could solve the free speech and censorship problem online. In a Dec. 4 livestream, the host of the Rubin Report Dave Rubin described two platforms he created, Locals.com and the Rubin Report app, which have gone public today. Rubin said that he created the platforms to help solve the “massive problems with Big Tech” that we…

YouTube defines itself as an “open video platform,” where videos that don’t break the rules are free to flourish. But a new blog from the company contradicts its own statement. “The Fours Rs of Responsibility, Part 2” detailed the 30 changes YouTube made to its algorithms in the last year in order to promote what it labelled “authoritative news” and to demote “borderline content.”

Big Tech CEOs for Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other companies signed an agreement with a labor union leader stating that they would uphold the standards set by the Paris Agreement. The United States government, under President Trump, pulled out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, the only country to do so. The statement signed by 78 CEOs said, “[M]any of us came together to rally behind the US’…