Tom Parker
Tom Parker is a founder and lead editor for Reclaim The Net and provides news and analysis on how we can promote free speech, stop censorship, and protect our personal data online.
Twitter suspends three more high profile conservative accounts with 400,000+ followers
CC, Carpe Donktum, and Nick Monroe have all been locked out of their Twitter accounts as big tech continues to purge conservatives from social media.
Bounding Into Comics page with over 250,000 followers banned by Facebook
Bounding Into Comics believes its page has been censored because it calls out anti-Republican and anti-Trump comments from high profile figures in the entertainment industry.
The UK police are investigating political candidate Carl Benjamin for an online joke
This is the latest in a series of UK police investigations into offensive online comments this year.
Google will add podcasts to search results later this year
This could encourage users to listen to their podcasts directly in Google Search and lead to more invasive tracking of their podcast listening habits.
Instagram will let 3rd parties fact check your memes
The tech giants want to be the sole arbiters of truth.
UK universities expel students for online “hate speech”
Top staff at the universities are rejecting free speech and proactively policing jokes and pranks that they deem to be online “hate speech.”
YouTube quietly removes “Broadcast Yourself” motto from its official blog
It’s the latest sign that YouTube no longer cares about the independent content creators that helped grow its platform.
Tutanota launches Secure Connect – an encrypted contact form that facilitates secure, confidential communication between journalists and whistleblowers
The open source contact form can be easily added to any news site for free and allows people to anonymously send end-to-end encrypted messages and files to website representatives.
Facebook bans sharing and linking to Infowars content
Users who attempt to share Infowars content will be censored unless they explicitly condemn the content.
Facebook will now ban you based on who you associate with
Reports from The Verge and The Washington Post say that Facebook is now banning people for interacting with individuals that it labels as “hate figures” and terminating accounts based on user’s offline behavior.
The Facebook ban of Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Louis Farrakhan was part of a coordinated campaign with mainstream media outlets
Many mainstream media outlets were tipped off before the bans took place and even published reports saying some of the accounts had been banned while they were still online.
Sonic the Hedgehog movie trailer reaction videos targeted with false YouTube copyright claims
Reaction videos should be protected under fair use but a number of music labels have filed bogus claims against YouTube creators reacting to the trailer, even when no trailer audio was used.