Business

“Free speech platform” is an easy label and a lousy buying guide. Every site has rules, hosting limits, payment processors, users who report things, and someone who eventually asks whether posting a 14-minute rant from a truck counts as civic engagement.The real question is what kind of conversation you want, how public it should be, and how much control you have over your feed and privacy.What to compare before you joinFeed: public posts, groups, channels, or private rooms?Moderation: what rule...

Last checked: September 3, 2026. This guide is about picking a platform by the job you need done, not chasing a buzzword. “Alternative social media” is a lazy label for a very simple problem: the big site you used stopped working for what you actually needed. Maybe the group became a dumpster fire. Maybe the feed is 90 percent ads. Maybe you want a place to publish without rebuilding your audience from scratch every time an algorithm gets bored. The useful question is not “What is the best alt...

Last checked: September 3, 2026. This is a practical comparison of public documentation and each platform’s main format. Features, policies, and availability can change. If Facebook is not doing the job for you, do not replace it with “another app” and hope for the best. First decide what job you actually need replaced: a local group, a public feed, a private community, video, or a place where every post is not swallowed by an algorithm before anyone sees it. The fast answer For a Facebook-st...

Louisville-based Heuser Health agreed to pay $2,646,186.72 to resolve allegations that it overbilled Medicare and TRICARE for expensive skin-substitute products used in wound care.Federal rules required the company to bill based on its actual invoice price. The government alleged Heuser Health submitted claims using higher invoice amounts, which drove reimbursements above what taxpayers should have paid.It is amazing how a “skin substitute” can apparently turn into a cash substitute when the inv...

Honeywell Aerospace agreed to pay $2,042,518 to settle Justice Department allegations that it failed to meet cybersecurity requirements on a Defense Department contract.According to the settlement, a Honeywell business unit submitted claims for payment while one of its networks did not comply with required federal cybersecurity standards between 2020 and 2023.The company got paid to protect defense information. The government says it had to pay again when the protection did not meet the contract...

Richeline Anisso Fung was a full-time DHS-CISA employee while also working contractor jobs tied to the DEA, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Federal Highway Administration, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and USDA, federal prosecutors said.Her timesheets sometimes claimed more than 24 hours in a day. On four days in February 2022, prosecutors said Fung claimed 33 hours of work. On another, 32.Fung pleaded guilty after admitting the scheme caused nearly $250,000 in taxpayer losses. Tur...

Detroit tax preparer Rodney Underwood pleaded guilty after federal prosecutors said he filed more than 200 nearly identical false tax returns for clients across Detroit.The returns used fake dividend income and fake withholding amounts to trigger refunds people were not entitled to receive. The false claims totaled more than $7 million, with an actual government loss of about $6.2 million.Underwood also left the paid-preparer section blank, prosecutors said, so the returns looked like clients fi...

Federal prosecutors say Christian Felipe Rodriguez Peraza and his wife, Brenda Tamayo Corona, helped run a timeshare-resale scam that preyed on Americans who owned property on Mexico’s Pacific coast.The pitch was that a buyer had already been found. The catch was always another fee, tax, or government payment before the victims could collect. Prosecutors say the group allegedly impersonated officials and used real lawyers’ identities to make the stories look legitimate.The alleged loss: more tha...

Federal prosecutors say Si Man Lam helped move counterfeit luxury watches imported from China through social media accounts, websites, and shipping operations.Customs officers seized 378 counterfeit Rolex, Cartier, and other watches addressed to Lam’s New York residences, with an estimated authentic retail value of about $6.4 million. Investigators later searched her home and seized roughly $900,000 in cash.The alleged business model was apparently simple: sell fake status symbols online, then l...

Heather Murdock was the bookkeeper and office manager at a Hartford law firm. Federal prosecutors say she spent years writing false checks to herself, forging the owner’s signature, and then editing the books so it looked like legitimate vendors had been paid.Murdock pleaded guilty to bank fraud and tax evasion after admitting she stole about $753,838.70 from the firm and its owner, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Prosecutors said she also concealed the income from the IRS.When the pers...

William Sarris founded Linqto, a platform that offered investors access to private companies before an IPO.Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Sarris and other former executives in an alleged $450 million fraud scheme. The charges include securities fraud, broker-dealer fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy.That is a very expensive way to learn that “early access” can be the part you should have read twice.These are criminal charges, not convictions.Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern Distr...

Adam Gentile was sentenced to four years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud tied to money stolen from two former medical-practice employers.Federal prosecutors said the scheme drained millions from the practices. Gentile was ordered to pay $7.1 million in restitution and forfeit $7.8 million.Imagine trusting someone with the books, then discovering the books were apparently just a shopping list with better formatting.Source: U.S. Department of Justice, September 2, 2026RightOnly is wh...