Free Speech

Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have officially announced their plans to join other tech giants by swapping out their gun emojis for less offensive toy water guns.  

Social media took center stage on Capitol Hill again Thursday, April 26, 2018. The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing examining the “Filtering Practices of Social Media Platforms.” While certain Republican members of Congress and the pro-Trump duo Diamond and Silk argued social media platforms are politically biased against conservatives, other witnesses and Democrats claimed the hearing…

A page for University of Chicago students to anonymously share confessions, questions, and rants was shut down by Facebook after a post included a meme making fun of French people.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), originally scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday regarding online censorship, has clarified that it will only submit written testimony due to concerns that the hearing will not be substantive.

Bumble, a dating app that claims to be women-centered, has made another round of donations to Planned Parenthood. This followed last month’s move to ban gun photos on the app.

A Scottish YouTuber has been fined after being found guilty of being “grossly offensive” online for uploading a video of his girlfriend’s pug responding to “sieg heil” and “gas the Jews.”

A new poll by the Pew Research Center shows a majority of Americans do not believe the government should rein in the spread of fake news.

A 19-year-old from Liverpool was reportedly found guilty of sending a “grossly offensive message” when she posted rap lyrics on her Instagram account. Prosecutors reportedly increased the teenager’s sentence “as it was a hate crime.”

A resident of the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn was reportedly banned from Facebook for 30 days for discussing the problem of black-on-Jewish crime in the area.  

With over 6 million subscribers, Philip DeFranco is one of the most prolific and popular YouTubers. The site’s lack of transparency when it comes to demonetization, however, is driving him and many other YouTubers away. DeFranco, like other YouTubers, also claimed his videos are being suppressed by internal YouTube algorithms.  

Instagram, Facebook’s popular photo-sharing app, has a blanket ban on nudity. This has not stopped the gay news site PinkNews from instructing users how to track down lesbian porn through the site. More than three-fourths of teens under 18 use Instagram.

Facebook wants you to know it’s not the only website that collects data from users. The company addressed users’ concerns about privacy, which were highlighted during CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony on Capitol Hill last week, in a news release that tries to shift the conversation to Twitter, YouTube, and others participating in the same data-collecting methods that have earned Facebook scorn.

Last week, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman ignited a firestorm when he told Reddit users he would not ban the /r/the_donald subreddit, the pro-President Trump message board, over dubious claims of racism.

The White House officially waded into the controversy surrounding conservative censorship on social media.   During a press briefing on Wednesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered a question by a Breitbart reporter about conservative voices who say they have been suppressed online, particularly by Facebook. The reporter, Michelle Moons, asked Sanders, “Is the White…