Hunter Biden

A US federal judge handed the censorship-obsessed wing of the Republican party a major win on Tuesday by blocking Biden officials from contacting social media firms to suggest content moderation takedown requests. The preliminary injunction, delivered by way of a 155 page-ruling on Independence Day, marks the most significant policy outcome to date stemming largely from the right-wing backlash to the so-called Twitter Files and other half-baked theories accusing deep state boogeymen of illegally colluding with Big Tech to…

In 2022, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey left the company. One of his new projects, Bluesky, is a social media app that looks exactly like Twitter. The difference? Bluesky promises an unprecedented level of control over your scrolling experience. The goal, essentially, is to undo all of Dorsey’s self-described mistakes, fixing social media and maybe, pie-in-the-sky hopefully, the whole internet in the process. The company’s first step to that lofty goal is doing the work in public. If you know where to look, you can watch…

Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News, would very much appreciate it if Media Matters for America would stop monitoring media. The Rupert Murdoch-owned network sent Media Matters a cease and desist letter on Friday, demanding that the non-profit watchdog take down leaked, behind-the-scenes footage of Tucker Carlson being an off-putting creep and criticizing his employer. How Much of Guardians of the Galaxy Did James Gunn Plan From the Start? | io9 InterviewThe Carlson videos, released under the headlines…

House Democrats and Republicans sparred Thursday over how Twitter handles government requests for Twitter to review posts, in the second House committee showdown over reports known as the “Twitter Files” released by several journalists on the platform. Republicans called in Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, two of the journalists who released threads of the files, as witnesses in a hearing for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government. The hearing ramped up House GOP leaders’…

Photo: Pool (Getty Images)House Republicans this week rammed through an ill-constructed, self-aggrandizing “anti-censorship” bill supposedly aimed at preventing federal agents from pressuring tech companies to stifle conservatives. The bill, inspired in part by Republican outrage over Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story and other so-called Twitter Files revelations, passed 219-206 in a straight party-line vote. The bill’s almost guaranteed to die in the Democratically controlled Senate.As written, the…

Journalist Matt Taibbi, who last year was in the spotlight for releasing the controversial set of documents from Twitter’s internal communication, labelled ‘Twitter Files’, has released another set of documents in a series of tweets. In the latest edition of Twitter Files, Taibbi has accused US politicians, including Democratic Senator from Maine, Angus King, and Republican Mark Lenzi, a State Department official, of trying to influence Twitter for political gains.2. The #TwitterFiles have revealed a lot: thousands of…

Photo: Pool (Getty Images)House Republicans, as early as this week, could have a powerful new panel at their disposal to grill Big Tech companies over long-alleged, but largely unproven accusations of conservative censorship and government collusion. Though Democrats and tech industry experts refute the committee’s premise, the panel could nonetheless force tech companies and their executives directly into the center of a meandering GOP spotlight seeking to reveal even the tiniest modicum of evidence thattech companies…

Elon Musk on Saturday said he supports the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for their work towards protecting the public, and that some people from the organisation did contact Twitter employees to censor content and suppress voices. The 'Twitter Files' earlier alleged that top Twitter executives, including former top FBI lawyer Jim Baker, suppressed and censored former US President Donald Trump in the days before the 2020 election, finally deplatforming him on January 8, 2021 - two days after the storming of the…

Elon Musk arrives at the justice center in Wilmington, Del., Tuesday, July 13, 2021.Photo: Matt Rourke, File (AP)Twitter Spaces, the audio feature that allows people to participate in group chats using the social media platform, has been disabled and it’s not clear whether it will ever return. The move comes after Elon Musk joined a group chat hosted by BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos on Thursday night, where the Twitter CEO spoke incoherently about his new rules around what the billionaire called “doxxing.”Musk banned…

Photo: kavi designs (Shutterstock)Late Thursday night, Substack journalist Bari Weiss tweeted a batch of screenshots detailing how Twitter limited the visibility of the accounts of several people popular among the online right.Weiss has been given unprecedented access to Twitter’s internal systems by CEO Elon Musk, and aimed to expose the inner workings of the company’s “deamplification/visibility filtering,” as former head of Twitter trust and safety Yoel Roth called it in a tweeted Slack message. Weiss herself dubbed…