Tag: social media

French PM Puts Telecoms On Alert For Nationwide Social Media Blackout As Far-Left Riots Spiral

Student grievances may have sparked the unrest, but one communist protester explained the turmoil in the streets is part of a broader revolution against “Macron and capitalism.”

Prepare For Nationwide Social Media Blackout

By late Saturday evening, French authorities had detained almost 1,000 people during demonstrations and riots that drew at least 400,000 participants, while far-left uprisings spread across other parts of Europe.

About 110,000 people demonstrated in Paris, according to the Interior Ministry. The government deployed about 70,000 officers across major metro areas.

Michael Shellenberger reports:

France’s Prime Minister asked telecom companies to prepare to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence.”

Separately, far-left unrest emerged in Albania, Spain, and Brussels, as well as in Italy’s cities of Naples, Rome, and Milan.

Footage from across Europe today, as communists stage a broader revolutionary movement:

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Half a dozen gardaí raided Kirk Loco’s home at dawn over a tweet, trial hears

Kirk Loco is on trial in Ireland over a single tweet. Two years ago, he warned his community that a man had exposed himself near a 14-year-old girl on a public bus. Police never charged that man, an asylum seeker who cannot be named under a court order. They charged Kirk instead.

On Friday in Bray District Court, south of Dublin, a Garda sergeant testified that half a dozen officers arrived at Kirk’s home at 6:30 a.m. with a search warrant, seized his devices and arrested him. She agreed that Kirk had checked his story with the girl’s family before he posted it. Yet police took a statement from the man on the bus, and never from the girl.

Kirk was arrested for “knowingly making a false report,” but he is now charged with sending a “threatening or grossly offensive communication.” Throughout the day, the prosecution referred to the man on the bus as the injured party, saying the tweet had “caused him stress.”

The girl, now a year older, also took the stand and described a drunk man with his shirt lifted and his belt open. On cross-examination, the prosecutor played the bus CCTV and told her she looked “happy enough.”

The trial resumes Thursday, Oct. 29, when Kirk is expected to testify. Rebel News boss Ezra Levant was in the courtroom, and his full account of the testimony is in the thread below.

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Utah man federally charged after allegedly making threats online to ‘blow up’ a synagogue

A Utah man who allegedly posted “I wanna blow up a synagogue” online has been indicted on federal charges after investigators recovered six pipe bombs, two rifles, and ammunition from his home, according to the Department of Justice.

Skyler AJ Rose, 22, of Ogden, was indicted Wednesday by a federal grand jury in Salt Lake City. The charges include attempting to commit a hate crime, possession of an unregistered destructive device, and threatening to kill and injure people and destroy a building with an explosive, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

According to court documents, Rose made multiple threatening social media posts on December 23, 2025, including the threat to bomb a synagogue. Investigators traced the posts to an IP address associated with the home where he lived.

The FBI contacted the Ogden City Police Department for assistance visiting the residence, and investigators confirmed that the social media handle belonged to Rose, authorities said.

During a search of the home, law enforcement allegedly recovered six improvised explosive pipe bombs, one inert device, and materials and components that could be used to build additional pipe bombs. Investigators also seized two rifles with accompanying magazines and ammunition, along with a Samsung cellphone.

A subsequent search of the phone allegedly revealed that Rose had searched online for a synagogue near him in November 2025, a month before the threatening posts. Authorities also alleged that the phone contained hundreds of cached images and screenshots depicting child sexual abuse material.

“Today’s indictment stops in its tracks an alleged plan to carry out a violent attack on a synagogue,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Department of Justice will take decisive action to protect American worshippers from violent threats, no matter where they occur.”

US Attorney Melissa Holyoak credited federal investigators and local police with stopping the alleged threats before anyone was harmed.

“Let these charges serve as a clear warning: if you attack or attempt to attack a place of worship, you will face the full force of the federal government,” Holyoak said.

Rose’s initial appearance is scheduled for Friday, October 23, at 1:30 pm at the Orrin G. Hatch US Courthouse in Salt Lake City.

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Germany plans to force social media platforms to fill 20% of algorithmic recommendations with ‘state-approved’ content

Germany’s federal states are proposing that social media platforms reserve at least 20 percent of algorithmic recommendations for content from a pool of approved media outlets deemed important for opinion diversity, according to a draft under public consultation. The proposed measure is already being slammed as a state-mandated propaganda effort that would force German citizens to view content friendly to the ruling establishment parties.

The measure is part of the second stage of a planned Digital Media State Treaty developed by the Broadcasting Commission of the Federal States. Under the draft, public broadcasters such as ARD, ZDF and Deutschland Radio would automatically qualify for certain offerings.

Meanwhile, private outlets would generally need to apply and demonstrate that they meet criteria including news and political reporting, information and educational content, documentaries, local or regional coverage, original journalistic production, editorial staffing and accessibility standards. Approvals would be decided by the 14 state media authorities.

In other words, the state wants to control what people are seeing in their feeds.

As the Berliner Zeitung reports, the media law involves “media quotas with an advantage for ARD and ZDF,” which are two state broadcasters that already have a massive advantage over private competitors. Both outlets, which are notoriously in favor of mass migration and known for their anti-AfD bias, and which employ virtually all left-wing journalists, are already known for not playing on a level playing field.

Austrian remigration activist Martin Sellner, along with other right-leaning accounts, already are warning about the new plans.

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Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion Penalty for Misleading Facebook Users About Data Privacy

A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion penalty for misleading Facebook users about data privacy.

The judgment is related to the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal from nearly 10 years ago.

The jury found that Meta had more than 40 million violations of New Mexico’s unfair practices act.

CNBC reported:

Meta was ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy case that stemmed from the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal from nearly a decade ago.

The penalty, revealed in a court filing, comes after a jury in a Santa Fe courthouse found in September the social media giant liable for misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from flourishing on its services.

Although the jury concluded that Meta had over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000, a New Mexico judge was responsible for determining the ultimate fine. The Wednesday filing showed that the state was awarded $219.5 billion, but the penalty was ultimately reduced to $25 billion.

“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act – $5,000 per violation found by the jury,” New Mexico district court judge Francis Mathew wrote in the filing.

The judge added that interest on the penalty shall accrue at the rate of 15% each year until the fine is paid off in full.

In August, a court ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund over child harm.

New Mexico Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta to air pollution and called it a “public nuisance.”

“Although Meta is not alone in this regard, its social media platforms are a significant contributing factor to the current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth established by the substantial evidence in this case,” Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote in the ruling over the summer, CNBC reported.

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Eleventh Circuit Lets Georgia Social Media Age Checks Proceed

A federal appeals court has given a green light to a controversial part of a Georgia law that requires social media platforms to verify the age of every user, and in the case of those under 16, obtain parental consent.

The ruling came on Thursday, October 15, from a panel composed of Judges Newsom, Luck and Tjoflat, with Judge Kevin Newsom writing the opinion.

The case now goes back to the district court, but the decision did not address whether the law is ultimately constitutional – only that NetChoice went about its lawsuit the wrong way and did not provide enough evidence to prove the law is not constitutional.

Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said, “While we are disappointed in the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling, the court notably did not hold that SB 351 is constitutional.”

On June 26, 2025, Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia ruled that the law was too vague, that it was preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and that it likely violated the First Amendment, and blocked it.

The law’s social media part requires platforms to “make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of account holders” and obtain a parent’s consent for anyone under 16. For those under 16, platforms can only use age and location for ad targeting.

According to the court’s own summary, the law “requires platforms within its ambit to verify the ages of all their users.”

If a platform does not verify, it must “apply the special conditions applied to minors under this chapter to all account holders.” The ways a platform can confirm a parent include “Collecting information related to the minor’s parent’s or guardian’s government issued identification or financial or payment card information.”

The attorney general can seek up to $2,500 for each violation.

There is also another section of the law that requires sites that are more than 33.33 percent “harmful to minors” to check every visitor’s age, including by submitting government-issued ID. This part of the law has been in force since July 1, 2025, and was not challenged by NetChoice.

The Eleventh Circuit panel found that NetChoice had standing to sue but did not meet the test set by the Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice to prove the law was unconstitutional in a facial challenge – that is, across the full range of its application. The group had to show that the law was unconstitutional across the board, and it did not.

“NetChoice hasn’t provided even a full list of its own members to which SB 351 applies,” Judge Newsom wrote.

“We’ve learned the facial-challenge lesson the hard way,” the ruling states. “We needn’t address the merits of its First Amendment claim,” it continues.

The panel also reversed the lower court’s ruling that said the law was too vague and that it was preempted by Section 230.

Attorney General Chris Carr said, “This is a major win for Georgia families and a huge blow to those who would stand in the way of commonsense solutions to protect our kids.”

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Truth Social Stock Hits All-Time Low as Userbase Craters on Trump’s Twitter Clone

Donald Trump’s Twitter clone, Truth Social, is in serious trouble.

The company has weathered bad news before, hitting all-time low stock prices on multiple occasions over the past year. But those days now look balmy in comparison, with the social network’s shares sliding more than 7.5 percent on Monday alone and setting a new rock bottom of just $6.40. Zooming out doesn’t paint a prettier picture, either: over the past month, the company’s stock has fallen a stomach-churning 29 percent.

It’s easy to empathize with any investors looking to ditch the company. It never had much of a raison d’être beyond “funnel some money to Trump,” and the president’s declining political fortunes — not to mention looming midterms that are likely to undermine his remaining power — have weakened even that grift-era pitch.

As the Daily Beast reported last week, not even its users are sticking around, with analytics data suggesting that its daily traffic has cratered by more than 30 percent over the past year. For a company that was already posting huge losses every quarter, that’s grim news — and it sounds like the company’s remaining investors may now be seeing the writing on the wall.

As its fortunes have soured, Truth Social has tried a series of eyebrow-raising pivots into gambling and crypto that failed to gain traction. It also moved to merge with a nuclear fusion company and started selling early access to Trump’s messages on the platform, in a move that was widely derided as an attempt to profit off his position as president.

So far, none of those moves have showed any signs of turning around the company’s fortunes. Add it all up, and it’s hard not to wonder whether Truth Social will survive as long as Trump’s second administration.

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Rosie O’Donnell Claims Elon Musk Could Use Satellites to Rig Midterm Elections in Bizarre TikTok Rant

Deranged comedienne Rosie O’Donnell has suggested that Elon Musk could use his Starlink satellites to manipulate the upcoming midterm elections.

In a video posted to TikTok, O’Donnell expressed hope that a sufficiently large turnout would prevent Republicans from interfering with the election results.

“When this is over — hopefully on November 4th when people show up en masse and they cannot rig the election or use Elon Musk’s satellites to alter the election because the turnout will be so large — hopefully then we will be able to see a tremendous decline in the MAGA cult,” she declared.

O’Donnell offered no evidence for her unusual claims.

Similar allegations spread among anti-Trump activists following the 2024 presidential election, with some suggesting that Musk’s Starlink satellite network had been used to manipulate voting machines.

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The Left’s Rank Hypocrisy On ‘Socialist Influencers’

If memory serves me, while serving in Congress amidst a heated midterm battle in the mid-2000s, I made a cable television appearance where I was asked an “ambush” question. Well, it wasn’t quite an ambush question, because the station in question was left-wing; hence, the anchor’s Pavlovian parroting of the Democrat talking point du jour was really no surprise. The question was something along the lines of “Does every Republican blindly listen to Rush?”

“Who doesn’t love a Canadian power rock trio?” I replied. My interrogator was nonplussed. I elaborated, “Though I do prefer Triumph.”

In truth, the Rush in question was actually Mr. Limbaugh, who was at the height of his renown. Looking for an issue, the Democrats trotted out the canard that Republicans didn’t work for their constituents but were in the thrall of a radio show host, following his dictates heedless of what the public wanted.

The Democrats’ strategy quickly petered out, largely because Mr. Limbaugh’s pro-American and commonsensical views were shared by scores of millions of Americans. Thus, even if some Republicans were influenced to one degree or another by Rush’s views, those views were also shared by many of their right- and center-right constituents, who formed the base of their electoral coalition.

What evokes this memory is how the rank hypocrisy of today’s leftists, particularly the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), regards their associations with social media, particularly radical leftist socialist influencers – one of whom, in fact, claims to aspire to being the radical version of Rush Limbaugh.*

The ideological difference between Mr. Limbaugh and today’s shrill leftist socialist influencers is patent, as their anti-American content readily attests to their quest for clicks, celebrity, and money. (At present, I am unaware of these socialist influencers voluntarily putting their streaming revenues into a pool to be apportioned by a commissar for the common good of the oppressed.)

Be it hating all Americans or – as if to prove the depths of their animus – justifying the murderous terrorist attacks on our nation on September 11, 2001, or rationalizing away domestic left-wing political violence, these socialist influencers, to varying degrees of self-indulgent animus and self-imposed ignorance, aver that the “United States of Amerika” is irredeemably racist, misogynistic, inequitable, and wholly corrupt, and must be radically transformed into a socialist utopia by an omnipotent government controlled and commanded by them and their bilious, unproductive ilk, who have never run anything but their mouths.

Sane people would be tempted to think these anti-American, socialist cranks would be ignored by sound minds. They are. But sound minds are in ever-shortening supply these days. That is why they are increasingly being listened to and heeded by politically like-minded listeners.

In the instances of those listeners who become DSA and other ideologically aligned far-left candidates, there is the question of how truly they dance to the socialist influencers’ tune – especially in electoral areas that are not deep blue progressive hellscapes.

What happens is the far-left candidate proclaims to the far-left, socialist, America-loathing voters how they, too, share that view. To help prove their bona fides as radicals and defeat a Democrat establishment candidate in a primary, they associate and, in some cases, physically appear with socialist influencers on the campaign trail.

Once they win their primary, however, the far-left/DSA Democrat realizes that America-loathing is not a great general election issue, so they begin to distance themselves not only from such socialist influencers but also from their own words.

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Florida wins key ruling allowing it to enforce a law that targets social media use by kids

The state of Florida won a key court decision Wednesday that allows it to enforce a ban on social media accounts for kids under 14 and other restrictions.

The law was one of the most restrictive in the U.S. on social media use by children when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it in 2024.

The law implicates the First Amendment, an appeals court said, but “likely does so in a content-neutral manner.”

It would likely survive a full legal challenge “because it doesn’t burden substantially more speech than necessary to advance the important interest in protecting minors from social media addiction,” a panel from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 3-0 opinion.

The law bans social media accounts for Florida children under 14 and requires parental consent for use by kids who are 14 or 15.

Industry trade groups the Computer & Communications Industry Association and NetChoice sued Florida, arguing that the law violated the free-speech rights of social media providers and users. A judge in 2025 said the law likely was unconstitutional and granted an injunction.

That injunction was put on hold while the appeals court heard the case. The lawsuit, with the injunction now overturned, will return to federal court in Tallahassee.

The appeals court noted that the law covers social media platforms “that have been determined to induce heavy use by children, and applies only to platforms that use both algorithms and one of several addictive features.”

An email seeking comment from the Florida attorney general’s office was not immediately answered. NetChoice said it was disappointed with the decision.

“We are currently evaluating all of our options as we continue the fight to ensure Floridians’ rights to free expression online are protected, and parents remain in the driver’s seat when it comes to making decisions for their families,” said Paul Taske, a lawyer at NetChoice.

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