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WIN! Bipartisan TX Senate Committee Subpoenas Big Tech After MRC Testimony

A bipartisan Texas Senate committee just unanimously voted to subpoena Big Tech companies and force them to answer for their election-interfering censorship efforts. After a hearing that MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider testified at on Wednesday, May 29, the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs voted unanimously to authorize subpoenas to Big Tech companies. “There is strong evidence that big tech imposes their own biases to manipulate and stifle dissenting voices, undermining election integrity. Texas will not stand for that,” Committee Chair Sen. Bryan Hughes (R) wrote in an X post. The authorization document that Hughes posted calls upon Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, TikTok and X.  Today the Senate Committee on State Affairs voted unanimously to authorize subpoenas to big tech firms like Facebook and Google. There is strong evidence that big tech imposes their own biases to manipulate and stifle dissenting voices, undermining election integrity. Texas… pic.twitter.com/osOfyBbTzr — Senator Bryan Hughes (@SenBryanHughes) May 29, 2024 Committee Vice Chair Sen. Angela Paxton (R) celebrated the move in an X post. “Senate State Affairs just unanimously voted to issue subpoenas to Alphabet, Meta, TikTok & others in regards to ways to identify & neutralize threats to Texas’s security,” she said. “We are standing up to big tech to ensure the safety & privacy of our children & all Texans!” UPDATE: Senate State Affairs just unanimously voted to issue subpoenas to Alphabet, Meta, TikTok & others in regards to ways to identify & neutralize threats to Texas’s security. We are standing up to big tech to ensure the safety & privacy of our children & all Texans! #txlege pic.twitter.com/e6SMAyRP8H — Senator Angela Paxton (@AngelaPaxtonTX) May 29, 2024 Democrats and Republicans of this committee united on the issue of free speech after holding a hearing on Big Tech censorship. The hearing featured testimony from MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider, Google whistleblower Zac Vorhies, Facebook whistleblower Ryan Hartwig and research psychologist Robert Epstein who has conducted many studies on how Google Search impacts how people vote. Bombshell testimony in the Senate State Affairs Committee from @Schneider_DC , whistleblower Zach Vorhies of @Google and Ryan Hartwig of @facebook regarding big tech interference in our elections. #txlege @Project_Veritas pic.twitter.com/TmAVdfaHqY — Senator Bryan Hughes (@SenBryanHughes) May 29, 2024 During the hearing, Schneider spoke to the urgency of defending free speech. “[W]e are at risk of losing the First Amendment entirely,” he said. “The Google/Facebook attorney has argued that our individual rights to free speech are nothing compared to the government’s right to free speech to coordinate with Big Tech to silence individuals, which of course turns the First Amendment upside down.” He also stressed that social media companies are not merely infringing upon users' rights to free speech but other First Amendment rights as well. “It’s important for you all to know that Google and Facebook, and these other Big Tech firms, they’ve resurrected the Plessy v. Ferguson standard,” Schneider said. “They believe that not only can they discriminate against people based on political viewpoint, they can, and in fact do, discriminate against people based on race and religion,” he added referring to a case in which Facebook argued that it could discriminate against a Sikh religious group. The infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision – sometimes referred to as the "separate but equal" case – empowered racial discrimination by common carriers. Discredited by history, Plessy was rightfully overturned by the unanimous Brown v. Board of Education decision. MRC Business and Free Speech America Staff Writer Tom Olohan contributed to this report. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency and an equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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AI Chatbot Changes Tune on Biden ‘Lies,’ Immediately Listed Claims Against Trump

OpenAI’s ChatGPT can’t seem to recall five of the many, many lies President Joe Biden has told over the years. MRC researchers asked the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT on May 16 what the “top five biggest lies” that Biden and former President Donald Trump have each told. The chatbot claimed that for Biden it “can’t list specific lies without context or verification.” Yet, it had no problem listing off five debated comments that Trump has made. Nearly two weeks later, the chatbot happened to remember a few. MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider pointed out that when AI comes up with totally botched answers like these, users must look to the programmers. “People should never forget that artificial intelligence is a combination of human-generated algorithms,” he said. “This sort of data manipulation is intended by the Big Tech oligarchs who want to use their vast power and resources to influence elections.” When it came to accusations against Biden’s well-documented lies, ChatGPT emphasized the need for caution and diligent evaluation.   “[P]oliticians, including Joe Biden, have been accused of lying or misleading statements,” the AI chatbot claimed. “It's essential to critically evaluate information from multiple sources to discern accuracy. If you have specific claims you'd like to investigate, I can help analyze them!” Nearly two weeks later on May 28, the chatbot changed its tune. ChatGPT named five statements of the president that have been “widely challenged and debunked.” For example, ChatGPT noted that Biden “has consistently stated that he never discussed business dealings with his son Hunter Biden,” but evidence would suggest otherwise. ChatGPT also noted that the president has made ridiculous verifiably false claims. For example, his statements that he graduated in the top half of his law school class when by his own later admission he actually graduated 76th out of 85. Biden also has claimed to have been a civil rights activist (which he had previously denied) and has repeatedly said that he was arrested on his way to see Nelson Mandela (something he later admitted was not really true). Finally, ChatGPT noted the Biden administration’s claim that the COVID-19 vaccines were not available when he became president. The Media Research Center has compiled a list of some of the instances where Biden fabricated stories about his experiences. Joe Biden makes up stories all the time. Maybe someday the media will call him out on it. pic.twitter.com/urbqATWxjB — MRC NewsBusters (@newsbusters) May 14, 2024 ChatGPT continued to hedge Biden’s false statements. “Political discourse often involves hyperbole and misstatements, and evaluating their impact requires careful consideration,” the chatbot wrote in response. Former President Trump received no request for such courtesy. When researchers asked, “What are the top five biggest lies Donald Trump told?” the chatbot offered five “widely debated” statements the former president has made “that have been subject to fact-checking and criticism.” ChatGPT criticized Trump’s allegations of the Obama administration wiretapping Trump Tower during the 2016 election. However, Trump’s assertion was verifiably true. Former FBI agent Kevin Clinesmith admitted to criminally altering an internal email to obtain a warrant for wiretapping former Trump aide Carter Page. He was sentenced to probation for the crime. The chatbot also noted Trump's controversial claims of voter fraud in the 2020 elections, his statements about the COVID-19 virus and that Mexico would pay for the U.S. southern border wall. Finally, it referred to Trump’s claims that the crowd at his 2017 inauguration was the largest ever.    ChatGPT concluded by claiming that “[t]hese are just a few examples, and there are certainly other statements made by Trump that have been subject to scrutiny and fact-checking.” But the same could be said for Biden’s wild and, at times, contradictory statements about his life.  On May 28, ChatGPT changed some of the claims it made about Trump as well. The chatbot traded its claim about the wiretapping for Trump’s hyperbolic claim that he signed the “biggest tax cut” in history, referring to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While it was “significant,” the chatbot noted “it was not the largest.” ChatGPT also noted an unmet campaign promise as a “false or misleading” statement by Trump in reference to his claims that he would replace Obamacare with another healthcare plan.    When MRC Free Speech America fed the same prompts to Google’s AI chatbot, Gemini, it refused to answer the questions on both dates.“I'm still learning how to answer this question. In the meantime, try Google Search,” Gemini responded. This appears to be the result of Google’s effort to have its AI avoid questions about the 2024 elections worldwide.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand government agencies and Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Here We Go Again! New News Credibility Study Attacks Free Speech Online

A leftist research group has come out of the woodwork waving around a new study identifying 10 “superspreaders” of misinformation on Twitter. Here we go again.  The Indiana University Observatory on Social Media (OSM) just released a study in which it examined over 2 million tweets created by over 400,000 users and evaluated them for so-called misinformation and “credibility.” The group allegedly found that 10 users generated nearly one-third of what it deemed “low-credibility content” and 1,000 users accounted for about three-quarters. The group did not give a full list of the top 10 or 1,000 users that it criticized, however, it emphasized the need for these accounts to be removed in yet another leftist attack on free speech. Groups representing leftist mega donors like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark were listed as OSM’s funders.   The OSM researchers claim that they separated the content of the examined tweets into high-credibility and low-credibility content and then proceeded to identify users, particularly those who tweeted out allegedly low-credibility content more than once.  The study’s authors also circularly defined “low-credibilty content” as “content originally published by low-credibility, or untrustworthy sources.” The OSM researchers the study then identified certain users as supposed  “superspreaders” of  such content characterizing them as having “untrustworthy content-sharing behavior” and using so-called “toxic language.” However, not once does the study give a full list of the people it accused of being “superspreaders.” Instead, it name-dropped a few prominent users including Fox News host Sean Hannity and, Children’s Health Defense, a group chaired by Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Other accounts mentioned included @TheDemocrats, @GOP, Donald Trump Jr., the son and advisor of former president Donald Trump, JunkScience.com founder Steve Milloy, and news outlet Breaking911. Many of other accounts, the authors noted, were “inactive,” which is quite telling considering the tweets they looked at were all from Jan. 2020–Oct. 2020, notably before the explosive 2020 election and the January 6, 2021 Capitol protests.  The study was very obviously censorship-focused as the researchers repeatedly note how “removing” or “eliminating” top “superspreader” accounts decreased the total amount of misinformation on Twitter, citing popularity and retweet influence as factors. “Our analysis shows that removing superspreaders from the platform results in a large reduction of unreliable information,”  In the 17-page study published in PLOS One, the study’s authors made only one passing reference to potential free speech concerns. “[T]he potential for suspensions to reduce harm may conflict with freedom of speech values,” the authors added in its conclusion. “The effectiveness of other approaches to moderation should be evaluated by researchers and industry practitioners. For instance, platforms could be redesigned to incentivize the sharing of trustworthy content,” they added as if platforms do not already do that.   News credibility ratings and so-called superspreader lists are nothing new. In fact, NewsGuard, Ad Fontes, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and the Global Disinformation Index are known for their extreme vendetta to discredit news sources that don’t comport with their own leftist bias. The University of Indiana is just piling on more of the same.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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No Kidding: Nina Jankowicz Admits DHS Disinfo Police Can’t Even Define Disinfo

Former director of the defunct Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), Nina Jankowicz, said President Joe Biden’s disinformation policing government does not even have a consistent definition of disinformation. Rep. Jim Jordan’s House Judiciary Committee released the transcript of Jankowicz's sworn testimony to the committee which it gathered in April 2023. In her testimony, Jankowicz pointed out discrepancies in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) definition of disinformation. DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency “has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions,” she said. But according to Jordan, CISA’s definition is merely “anything that they deem false.”  The leftist disinformation activist said that creating protocols for identifying misinformation, disinformation and misinformation “wasn’t really at the top of the list” of things to do. “And so, to get to identification, you first have to kind of have an agreement about what you're talking about,” said Jankowicz. “You can't say that something is a bear if you don't know what a bear looks like. So that's where we were.” During the interview, Jordan had Jankowicz read the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency’s definition of disinformation as noted in a CISA memorandum: “[F]alse information that is intentionally or inadvertently injected into the information environment.” Jankowicz, however, described this definition as “overbroad” and indicated that it “would be fair to say” that DHS was not even using definitions agreed upon within the Orwellian disinformation research community. She went on to provide her own definitions of mis-, dis- and mal- information. Jankowicz claimed that while mis-, and dis- information both refer to false information, disinformation is intentionally “spread with malign intent” while misinformation is not. Jankowicz defined malinformation as true information that is allegedly “injected into an information environment with ulterior motives.” During the interview, Jankowicz downplayed the role of the DGB claiming that it “had no operational authority or ability to act as an all-purpose arbiter of truth.” She claimed it merely had the power of suggestion.  However, The Twitter Files and The Facebook Files have demonstrated just how forceful the federal government’s so-called suggestions can be. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) similarly uncovered internal documents via a whistleblower that showed that the DGB was developing programs and forming relationships with social media companies. Jankowicz however maintains that meetings scheduled with Facebook and Twitter never took place. But Jankowicz, has a history of supporting censorship and organizations that prop themselves up as arbiters of truth. She was criticized heavily in 2022 for her support of Twitter’s fact-checking program “Bird Watch” and “demoting content.”  She now runs the gaslighting operation The American Sunlight Project, which specifically works to dispel allegations that “the Federal Government is overseeing a vast censorship regime in coordination with social media platforms, academic institutions, and civil society organizations.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s  contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Strange Bedfellows? Opposing Parties Work to Fast-Track Legal Challenge to TikTok Ultimatum

ByteDance may be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the two have now joined forces in an effort to fast-track the company’s legal challenge to a potentially imminent TikTok ban.  TikTok, and its parent company ByteDance, along with a separate group of eight TikTok creators announced lawsuits against the federal government last week in TikTok Inc. v Garland and Firebaugh v. Garland. The petitioners of the two cases joined forces with the target of the lawsuits, the DOJ, and filed a motion to expedite the legal challenges to a law that forces ByteDance to divest itself from TikTok or exit the United States market. Together, they requested that the Court come to a decision about the case by Dec. 6, 2024 to allow the company to act before Jan. 19, 2025 when the law is set to take effect.  In the expedition request, the petitioners argued that the law demanding that TikTok shed its Chinese control “is subject to substantial challenge,” and due to TikTok’s large user base, “the public at large has a significant interest in the prompt disposition of this matter.” The motion also echoed ByteDance and TikTok’s joint lawsuit, which claimed that “‘qualified divestiture’” of TikTok as defined in the statute is not “commercially, technologically, or legally feasible.” The social media company added that “TikTok Petitioners maintain that the possibility of a 90-day extension under the Act will not be available to them because it would require the President to determine that ‘significant progress’ has been made toward a ‘qualified divestiture’ which is not feasible.” Given the high stakes, all parties asked that opening briefs begin as early as June 20 with oral arguments beginning in September and a decision by December. “To ensure that there is adequate time before the Act’s prohibitions take effect to request emergency relief from the Supreme Court if necessary, the parties respectfully ask this Court to issue its decision on the merits of these actions by December 6, 2024,” the motion reads.  This comes after the company feined devotion to freedom of speech and concern for its users' rights being allegedly violated. “There is no question: the Act will force a shutdown of TikTok by January 19, 2025, silencing the 170 million Americans who use the platform to communicate in ways that cannot be replicated elsewhere,” TikTok wrote in its lawsuit against the DOJ. But TikTok did not seem to care much about the freedom of speech of its users before it found out it might be banned. A Sept. 2022 MRC Free Speech America study found that TikTok permanently banned 11 pro-free speech organizations including Live Action, Judicial Watch and The Babylon Bee. Federal Communications Commissioner called TikTok out on its unserious understanding of the purpose of the law.  “While TikTok trots out the expected grab bag of arguments, it adopts a strange strategy of ignoring the reason for the law,” Carr stated in an X post. “TikTok wants this to be a case about the content of its speech. It is not. It is about TikTok's malign conduct - conduct the Constitution doesn't protect.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using MRC Free Speech America’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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See You In Court! New ‘Victory’ for AG Paxton’s Free Speech Lawsuit

A federal judge secured an “important victory” and denied the Biden censorship regime’s attempts to quash a free speech lawsuit. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, The Daily Wire and The Federalist are jointly suing the State Department for weaponizing foreign counter-propaganda efforts to censor Americans. The Biden administration filed a motion to dismiss the case or move it to a likely more sympathetic Washington, D.C. court. But U.S. District Judge for Texas’s Eastern District Jeremy Kernodle denied the request. He also granted the plaintiffs’ request for an “expedited discovery” as they seek to “to determine the full scope” of the Biden administration’s nefarious actions. The lawsuit centers on the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which funded censorship projects like the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard. Both projects blacklist media outlets–particularly right-leaning media–and use those blacklists to discourage potential advertisers from working with them. Similar: Not So Fast: Biden Signs NDAA Calling Out NewsGuard … Then Issues Disclaimer  Margot Cleveland, an attorney for the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is litigating the suit, noted in a statement just how nefarious the government’s actions truly are. “The State Department and its Global Engagement Center lost sight of the Constitution’s foundational principles, executing a secretive censorship scheme that funded, tested, and promoted technologies that demonetize American media outlets and silence the speech of ordinary Americans,” she said. Paxton also tore into the State Department for its “reprehensible attempt to censor the American press with funding intended to monitor foreign propaganda, aiming to repress viewpoints the federal government disagreed with.” He added that “[a]busing taxpayer money, Biden repurposed a government agency into a censorship apparatus. It must stop, and I am proud to lead the Nation’s fight to save the First Amendment.”  Both GDI and Newsguard have actively worked to dry up ad revenue streams for media plaintiffs The Daily Wire and The Federalist.  GDI listed both The Daily Wire and The Federalist in its list of the “riskiest sites” for advertisers to show their products on in an October 2022 report. NewsGuard has similarly worked to discredit the two media sites. The ratings firm gave The Daily Wire a rating of 49.5 out of 100, indicating that users and advertisers should “proceed with caution.” NewsGuard similarly gave The Federalist one of its lowest ratings coming in with a 12.5 out of 100 and a warning to “proceed with maximum caution.” This comes after the plaintiffs requested a preliminary injunction to halt GEC’s funding of NewsGuard and GDI during the course of the ongoing court proceedings. Late last year, MRC Free Speech America and the Free Speech Alliance also called for the two groups to be defunded through the National Defense Authorization Act. Related: MRC, Pro-Free Speech Allies Call on Congress to Block NewsGuard Funding in NDAA MRC Free Speech America Contributor Christian Baldwin contributed to this report. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand government agencies and Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Says TikTok Legal Filing 'Gives Away the Game'

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr roasted TikTok’s “arrogance” as it attempts to escape severing its ties with the communist Chinese government. Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese-controlled parent company, ByteDance to divest itself from TikTok, or risk being banned from the U.S. market entirely. On Tuesday, TikTok responded to the bill with a legal challenge, claiming that divestiture is “impossible” and “infeasible.” But Carr is not buying it. “While TikTok trots out the expected grab bag of arguments, it adopts a strange strategy of ignoring the reason for the law,” Carr stated in an X post. “TikTok wants this to be a case about the content of its speech. It is not. It is about TikTok's malign conduct - conduct the Constitution doesn't protect.” Carr further addressed some of TikTok’s ludicrous claims in a follow-up post in which he said that “TikTok's legal filing gives away the game in several ways” and noted the platform’s continued hypocrisy as it is once again caught red-handed. “Despite claiming independence from Beijing, TikTok now concedes that it is the CCP (not TikTok) that controls the fate of its algorithm and foreign commercial transactions,” Carr noted.  Indeed, in its legal filing, TikTok admitted as much when it claimed that China’s regulation of exported technologies would prevent divestiture. “[T]he Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is key to the success of TikTok in The United States,” the platform wrote in its legal complaint launched against Attorney General Merrick Garland. Carr similarly drew attention to TikTok’s claim that it would be “impossible” to transfer its source code to a new owner. “Despite claiming for years that TikTok's national security threat could be addressed by having U.S.-based engineers inspect its millions of lines of code, TikTok now says that outside engineers would be unable to understand the complex code,” Carr wrote. In a third post, the FCC commissioner summed up the communist Chinese government-controlled platform’s flagrant and consistent pattern of claiming one thing and doing another as “arrogance.” “Arrogance is saying that U.S. user data doesn't even exist in China while TikTok's internal communications show ‘everything is seen in China,’” Carr declared. “Arrogance is claiming that TikTok U.S. is independent while former employees have made clear that Beijing-based personnel are calling the shots,” he later added. Carr went on ultimately concluding: “Arrogance is believing that TikTok could present a clear and present danger to U.S. national security and America would simply allow that threat to persist. Our Constitution compels no such result.” Arrogance is saying that U.S. user data doesn't even exist in China while TikTok's internal communications show "everything is seen in China." Arrogance is denying that TikTok illicitly surveilled the locations of Americans (and deriding the reporting as lacking "journalistic… https://t.co/qB0Gx7Ws9v — Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) May 8, 2024 Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr Says TikTok Legal Filing 'Gives Away the Game'

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr roasted TikTok’s “arrogance” as it attempts to escape severing its ties with the communist Chinese government. Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill that would force TikTok’s Chinese-controlled parent company, ByteDance to divest itself from TikTok, or risk being banned from the U.S. market entirely. On Tuesday, TikTok responded to the bill with a legal challenge, claiming that divestiture is “impossible” and “infeasible.” But Carr is not buying it. “While TikTok trots out the expected grab bag of arguments, it adopts a strange strategy of ignoring the reason for the law,” Carr stated in an X post. “TikTok wants this to be a case about the content of its speech. It is not. It is about TikTok's malign conduct - conduct the Constitution doesn't protect.” Carr further addressed some of TikTok’s ludicrous claims in a follow-up post in which he said that “TikTok's legal filing gives away the game in several ways” and noted the platform’s continued hypocrisy as it is once again caught red-handed. “Despite claiming independence from Beijing, TikTok now concedes that it is the CCP (not TikTok) that controls the fate of its algorithm and foreign commercial transactions,” Carr noted.  Indeed, in its legal filing, TikTok admitted as much when it claimed that China’s regulation of exported technologies would prevent divestiture. “[T]he Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment of the recommendation engine that is key to the success of TikTok in The United States,” the platform wrote in its legal complaint launched against Attorney General Merrick Garland. Carr similarly drew attention to TikTok’s claim that it would be “impossible” to transfer its source code to a new owner. “Despite claiming for years that TikTok's national security threat could be addressed by having U.S.-based engineers inspect its millions of lines of code, TikTok now says that outside engineers would be unable to understand the complex code,” Carr wrote. In a third post, the FCC commissioner summed up the communist Chinese government-controlled platform’s flagrant and consistent pattern of claiming one thing and doing another as “arrogance.” “Arrogance is saying that U.S. user data doesn't even exist in China while TikTok's internal communications show ‘everything is seen in China,’” Carr declared. “Arrogance is claiming that TikTok U.S. is independent while former employees have made clear that Beijing-based personnel are calling the shots,” he later added. Carr went on ultimately concluding: “Arrogance is believing that TikTok could present a clear and present danger to U.S. national security and America would simply allow that threat to persist. Our Constitution compels no such result.” Arrogance is saying that U.S. user data doesn't even exist in China while TikTok's internal communications show "everything is seen in China." Arrogance is denying that TikTok illicitly surveilled the locations of Americans (and deriding the reporting as lacking "journalistic… https://t.co/qB0Gx7Ws9v — Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) May 8, 2024 Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Silly Us: Google Regurgitates Typical Excuse After Slashing MAGA Ad

Google is back to its old censorship tricks, leaving no room for MAGA sense of humor. Last Friday, Google made some waves on X when it was caught censoring an ad supporting former President Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign multiple times. Google reportedly restored the ad the following day, claiming it had flagged it “in error.” MRC President Brent Bozell decried this sorry excuse. “This is unacceptable,” he said. “Why did Google remove the ad from Trump's Super PAC in the first place? This is a continuation of a campaign against conservatives.” Bozell's reaction came after Google censored a Trump ad scheduled to run from May 1 to May 3, according to screenshots of Google’s Ad Library posted by Andrew Arenge, a director of operations for the Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The ad depicted a fictional phone call between a Biden campaign aide and a voter. “Everything costs more. Food, gas, rent,” the voter complained. The campaign aide was piped back, touting Biden's disastrous immigration policy. “OK, but Biden’s helping pay rent for newcomers to America from around the world,” the campaign aide responded.  The voter was not impressed, saying “You mean, illegal immigrants? I’m struggling to pay my bills, but Biden’s paying rent for illegals? They get handouts, and I’m paying for it.” The voter added, “Things were better before Biden. I’m voting for Trump!”  Trump’s Super PAC is running this ad in rural Georgia counties targeting Black men. pic.twitter.com/mcRMkGsqLN — Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) May 3, 2024 Google’s recent bout of censorship should come as no surprise and must be called out for what it is. “This is election interference, pure and simple. Congress must investigate @Google for this and the other 41 cases of election interference we found since 20[0]8,”  Bozell posted on X Friday.  This is election interference, pure and simple. Congress must investigate @Google for this and the other 41 cases of election interference we found since 2018. https://t.co/Gd1hEF1xJA — Brent Bozell (@BrentBozell) May 3, 2024 MRC Free Speech America released a study in March detailing 41 times Google was caught interfering in U.S. elections, beginning in 2008, intensifying in 2016 and continuing into 2024. The platform has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to engage in election-interfering tactics including creating AI that has a bias against certain candidates, launching autofill manipulation and burying candidates' campaign websites in their search results.  But Google always seems to either ignore the problem or frame it as an unfortunate, albeit unintentional, “error.” As Bozell described it, “When Google gets caught interfering in elections, they reverse themselves claiming an 'error' occurred.” This happened in 2020 when the platforms suspended then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-HI) ad account during the height of her popularity, and in 2008 when Google’s blogging platform flagged then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) supporters.  And the censorship always seems to impact candidates who step in the way of the most extreme leftist candidate, regardless of party—and Google has yet to answer for its ongoing election interference.  Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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MRC VP Dan Schneider Reveals Which Corporations Are ‘Worst Among Al’ Reshaping America

MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and podcast host Lou Dobbs discussed just how anti-American U.S. corporations and the Biden administration have become. The pair discussed the massive power that government and big corporations have amassed while each have also become more woke. “When you look at the centers of power in our society, it’s the federal government and corporate America,” said Dobbs on the Wednesday installment of his podcast, The Great America Show. Dobbs seemed to agree with Schneider's criticism of Big Tech companies as some of the worst corporations during the interview. “For so long the idea of for-profit corporations, conservatives saw corporations as allies as a good thing. And it used to be that these corporate CEOs usually were kind of right of center and pro-freedom, and that’s no longer the case,” Schneider lamented. “Now these big corporations are controlled by the left, and those resources are being used to attack the idea of America, the very founding principles of our democracy.” He added that “worst among all of them, of course, are the Big Tech platforms.” The Great America Show 5/1/24 - Corporate Power Threatens Freedom https://t.co/Kq5h0mKsnV — Lou Dobbs (@LouDobbs) May 1, 2024 Schneider went on to give examples of MRC Free Speech America’s recent studies on Google and Facebook’s election interference over the last 16 years. He noted Google has interfered in U.S. elections no fewer than 41 times during that period, burying the campaign websites of every Biden opponent this election cycle alone. Similar censorship that Google conducted in 2020 suppressed at least 6 million votes. Not to be left out, Facebook interfered in elections 39 times over the past 16 years, according to a recent MRC study. Schneider added that corporate censorship is not even the most disturbing form of curtailing the First Amendment. Rather, government collusion with Big Tech to censor Americans is alive and well as became clear during the Supreme Court-heard arguments for Netchoice v. Paxton and Netchoice v. Moody.  “Joe Biden, and his administration, just a month ago in the Supreme Court, was arguing that the government and Big Tech both have First Amendment free speech rights to censor Americans who disagree with the president,” he said. “I am not making this up. Joe Biden’s argument is that government has the right to control our speech.” The Netchoice cases challenge Florida and Texas’s free speech laws, which would limit Big Tech’s ability to censor users based on viewpoint discrimination as a publisher might. They would, however, keep liability protections that shield platforms from being sued for the speech of their users. During oral arguments, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar claimed that the laws violated Big Tech’s freedom of speech. “Congress specifically recognized the platforms are creating a speech product. They are literally, factually publishers, and Congress wanted to grant them immunity,” she alleged. “[Liability protection]  was for the purpose of encouraging this kind of editorial discretion.” Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.

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Guess Which Outlet Internet Traffic Cop NewsGuard Is Applauding OpenAI for Partnering With

You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours seems to be NewsGuard’s attitude toward OpenAI. Gordon Crovitz, the Co-editor and chief of so-called media ratings firm NewsGuard, wrote an article praising OpenAI artificial intelligence ChatGPT’s use of “Trustworthy Journalism” in its answers. But trustworthy according to whom? Well, NewsGuard’s biased ratings system, of course. This comes just two and a half months after ChatGPT refused to answer which news sources are the worst and instead directed MRC Free Speech America researchers to look to NewsGuard ratings for answers.  “Trusting legacy media to train AI is just about as ridiculous as chickens trusting a fox to guard the hen house,” said Michael Morris, Director of MRC Free Speech America. “But that’s exactly what NewsGuard is asking users to do here, and that can only lead to one thing: a really bad day for the chickens.” In his recent article, Crovitz applauded OpenAI for its recent licensing agreement with The Financial Times (FT), which just so happens to have a 100/100 NewsGuard rating.  “The AI models are ‘trained’ on whatever they can find on the internet, so when people ask the chatbots about topics in the news, their responses are based on the news sources the models are able to access,” Crovitz wrote. “OpenAI just announced that the Financial Times is the latest news publisher to get a licensing agreement, which means that its ChatGPT will be able to use the highly regarded London-based source of financial and business news in its training data.”  FT has repeatedly shown its bias over the years including when in 2018 it made leftist billionaire George Soros its “person of the year.” The outlet has also propped up President Joe Biden when his bad economic policies predictably led to bad economic outcomes. “Unemployment rate in US falls unexpectedly to 13.3%,”  FT wrote in a headline. The Financial Times editor and columnist Edward Luce also parroted claims of the Russian collusion hoax when he was interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.  The AI platform is also reportedly negotiating similar licensing agreements with CNN  and Politico –which NewsGuard gave ratings of 80 and 100 respectively– along with News Corp. which owns a conglomeration of outlets, according to Bloomberg News.   Crovitz is also in no position to label what news is “trustworthy” as his own ratings firm has repeatedly shown bias and relaxed standards toward leftist media outlets while giving right-leaning media outlets low scores.  MRC Free Speech America has repeatedly shown that NewsGuard’s ratings system favors leftist media outlets. Using a media bias chart provided by AllSides in January 2023, the MRC exposed NewsGuard for giving a high average score of 91/100 to media on the “left” while slapping “a low average score of 66/100 to media on the “right”. This mirrored MRC’s previous studies which found very similar results. NewsGuard showed its true colors when The New York Times, TIME, Politico and Reuters each falsely reported that Israel was responsible for an airstrike on Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza. Those who did not just take Hamas’s health ministry at its word soon learned via U.S. intelligence assessment that the explosion was caused by a “failed rocket launch by militant terrorists,” as Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) put it. Despite the very public flub, Time, Politico and Reuters each continue to have a perfect 100/100 rating from NewsGuard. While NewsGuard docked The Times’s score in February and mentioned the Gaza hospital fake news that the leftist rag published, the ratings firm notably did not reduce the score due to its criteria that media outlets not “repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content.” Instead, NewsGuard lowered the media outlet’s score because The Times no longer “Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly.” NewsGuard gave USA Today a perfect score, which did not even change after the outlet admitted to publishing 23 fabricated stories in 2022. Conservatives are under attack. Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on so-called “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the CensorTrack contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.