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Biden Admin Led Massive ‘Speech Censorship Operation,’ Former State AG Will Testify + More
Biden Admin Led Massive ‘Speech Censorship Operation,’ Former State AG Will Testify
The Biden administration has led “the largest speech censorship operation in recent history” by working with social media companies to suppress and censor information later acknowledged as truthful,” former Missouri attorney general Eric Schmitt will tell the House Weaponization Committee Thursday.
Schmitt, now a Republican senator from Missouri, is expected to testify alongside Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and former Missouri deputy attorney general for special litigation, D. John Sauer. The three witnesses will discuss the findings of their federal government censorship lawsuit, Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al — which they filed in May 2022 and describe as “the most important free speech lawsuit of this generation.”
The testimony comes after Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration, alleging that President Biden and members of his team “colluded with social media giants Meta, Twitter, and YouTube to censor free speech in the name of combating so-called ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation.’”
Missouri and Louisiana have been able to gather documents and depositions from federal officials as part of the discovery process — including a deposition of Dr. Anthony Fauci, in which they questioned him on the COVID lab-leak theory, efficacy of masks, vaccines and more.
Top Massachusetts Court Backs Boston in COVID Vaccine Mandate Fight, Throws Out Lower Ruling
The state’s top court has ruled in favor of the city in the battle over its COVID-19 mandate, throwing out the preliminary injunction against the Wu administration and clearing the way for future versions of such policies.
Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Elspeth Cypher wrote the opinion issued Thursday, throwing out an appellate judge’s order not to enforce the vaccine-mandate police from December 2021 — a policy under which no one’s ever been disciplined.
This fight stems from the start of the Omicron-variant surge in December 2021, when new Mayor Michelle Wu announced that every city employee would have to get the COVID-19 jab by mid-January or face suspension and possible termination.
Any employees, including the plaintiffs, could be subject to any future vaccine mandates — whether regarding COVID-19 or something else. That’s one of the reasons why the city kept pushing this case even when by its own admission the situation with COVID has changed and lessened from the depths of the Omicron-variant-driven surge of January 2022.
TikTok Is Addictive for Many Girls, Especially Those With Depression
Nearly half of the adolescent girls on TikTok feel addicted to it or use the platform for longer than they intend, according to a report that looks at social media as a central facet of American girlhood.
TikTok leads the way in total time on its platform, with girls who use it logging more than 2.5 hours a day, according to researchers from Brown University and the nonprofit Common Sense Media. But YouTube is only a bit behind, at nearly 2.5 hours, with Snapchat and messaging apps at about two hours, and Instagram at 92 minutes. Many girls surveyed, ages 11 to 15, use multiple platforms daily.
Among those most vulnerable to the downsides of social media were girls with moderate to severe symptoms of depression, who were more likely to say their lives would be better without social media. More of them used social media “almost constantly.” With TikTok, 68% said they felt addicted or used it more than intended, compared to 33% of girls with no depressive symptoms.
Jacqueline Nesi, co-author and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown, also pointed out that three-quarters of girls with moderate to severe depression symptoms who use Instagram report encountering suicide-related content at least monthly. Similarly, 69% reported the same issue on TikTok and 64% on Snapchat and YouTube.
RESTRICT Act Is Orwellian Censorship Grab Disguised as Anti-TikTok Legislation
The RESTRICT Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Tom Thune (R-SD), is aimed at blocking or disrupting transactions and financial holdings linked to foreign adversaries that pose a risk to national security, however, the language of the bill could be used to give the U.S. government enormous power to punish free speech.
Warner, a longtime opponent of free speech who, as Michael Krieger pointed out in 2018 (and confirmed in the Twitter Files) pushed for the ‘weaponization’ of big tech, crafted the RESTRICT act to “take swift action against technology companies suspected of cavorting with foreign governments and spies, to effectively vanish their products from shelves and app stores when the threat they pose gets too big to ignore,” according to Wired.
Bad actors listed in the bill are China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
In reality, the RESTRICT Act has very little to do with TikTok and everything to do with controlling online content. The RESTRICT Act can also be used to punish people using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) if they’re used to access banned websites and directs the Secretary of Commerce to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate” that which is deemed a national security risk associated with technology linked to the above countries.
Penalties include fines of up to $1 million or 20 years in prison or both.
Ending COVID Vaccine Mandate for State Agencies Advances in NC House
Winston-Salem Journal reported:
An N.C. House bill that would end COVID-19 vaccine mandates for certain government agencies and political subdivisions cleared its second House committee Wednesday.
House Bill 98, titled Medical Freedom Act, was recommended by Judiciary 1. It goes to the gatekeeper Rules and Operations committee.
The bill would prohibit city, county and state government agencies and certain political subdivisions from requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for employees.
HB98 also would not allow the State Board of Education, local public school districts, colleges and universities to require students to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination or be vaccinated for one or multiple doses.
Kansas Senate Approves String of Bills Targeting Vaccine Requirements, Public Health Measures
The Kansas City Star reported:
The Kansas Senate narrowly approved three bills Wednesday targeting vaccine requirements and the power of local and state health officials despite low chances the policies could become law.
The upper chamber voted 24 to 16 to prohibit the Kansas Department of Health and Environment from requiring COVID-19 vaccines in schools or child care centers — something KDHE Secretary Janet Stanek has said she does not plan to do.
The Senate also approved bills removing the state-level meningitis vaccine requirement in Kansas colleges and blocking any schools or employers from questioning the validity of a religious exemption request for vaccine requirements, and stripping state and local health officials of their power to adopt rules and regulations preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
Lawsuit Seeks to Invalidate EMS Vaccine Mandate
A legal challenge filed on behalf of Mainers who lost their jobs as a result of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate could determine whether the Maine Emergency Medical Services (Maine EMS) had the authority to implement such a mandate.
Health Choice Maine (HCM), a non-profit group that advocates for medical freedom, is the driving force behind the decision to challenge the mandate. The case has 18 named plaintiffs, as well as classes of John and Jane Does.
Corey Bonnevie, a 20-year veteran paramedic who has worked in western Maine for 15 years, said even before the mandate caused the EMT ranks to shrink, he had often found himself as the only ambulance servicing an area of 1,500 square miles or more.
Bonnevie said he had a religious exemption for the flu vaccine and a medical exemption. A medical doctor provided him with the exemption after he had a serious adverse reaction to a flu immunization. But the company he worked for refused to accept his pre-existing medical and religious exemptions, he said.
American IQs Rose 30 Points in the Last Century. Now, They May Be Falling.
A new study of human intelligence posits a narrative that may surprise the general public: American IQs rose dramatically over the past century, and now they seem to be falling.
Cognitive abilities declined between 2006 and 2018 across three of four broad domains of intelligence, the study found. Researchers tracked falling scores in logic, vocabulary, visual and mathematical problem-solving and analogies, the latter category familiar to anyone who took the old SAT.
If you want to ascribe blame, look no further than this screen. Cognitive researchers hypothesize that smartphones and smart speakers, autocomplete and artificial intelligence, Wi-Fi and runaway social media have conspired to supplant the higher functions of the human brain. In its quest for labor-saving tech, the world may be dumbing itself down.
AI Ethics Group Says ChatGPT Violates FTC Rules, Calls for Investigation
A prominent AI ethics organization submitted a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission this week urging the agency to investigate ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and halt its development of future large language learning models.
The complaint, filed by the Center for AI and Digital Policy (CAIDP), alleged OpenAI’s recently released GPT4 model is, “biased, deceptive, and a risk to privacy and public safety.”
CAIDP issued the complaint just one day after a wide group of more than 500 AI experts signed an open letter demanding AI labs immediately pause the development of LLMs more powerful than GPT4 over concerns they could pose, “profound risks to society and humanity.”
The complaint claims GPT4, which was released earlier this month, launched without any independent assessment and without any way for outsiders to replicate OpenAI’s results. CAIDP warned the system could be used to spread disinformation, contribute to cybersecurity threats, and potentially worsen or “lock in” biases that are already well-known to AI models.
Hawley, Paul Clash on Floor Over TikTok Ban
Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) clashed Wednesday afternoon over the future of TikTok in a spirited exchange on the Senate floor that shows disagreements over how to regulate the controversial app across party lines in Congress.
The two conservative stars butted heads when Hawley attempted to gain unanimous consent to pass his bill to prohibit TikTok from operating in the United States and ban commercial activity with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance.
Paul suggested that proponents of banning TikTok are peddling fear and argued that domestic Big Tech companies also collect vast amounts of data from American users without much scrutiny or interference from the federal government. “I think we should be aware of those who peddle fear. I think we should be aware of those who use fear to coax Americans to relinquish our liberties,” he said.
“We confirmed from the testimony of the TikTok CEO that TikTok has the ability to track American’s data, to track Americans’ location, to track Americans’ personal lives whether they want it to or not,” Hawley said.
Paul, however, argued that it should be up to individual Americans whether or not to use TikTok and that the federal government shouldn’t decide for them.
Elon Musk and Others Urge AI Pause, Citing ‘Risks to Society’ + More
Elon Musk and Others Urge AI Pause, Citing ‘Risks to Society’
Elon Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives are calling for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, in an open letter citing potential risks to society and humanity.
The letter, issued by the non-profit Future of Life Institute and signed by more than 1,000 people including Musk, called for a pause on advanced AI development until shared safety protocols for such designs were developed, implemented and audited by independent experts.
“Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable,” the letter said. The letter detailed potential risks to society and civilization by human-competitive AI systems in the form of economic and political disruptions and called on developers to work with policymakers on governance and regulatory authorities.
“The letter isn’t perfect, but the spirit is right: we need to slow down until we better understand the ramifications,” said Gary Marcus, a professor at New York University who signed the letter. “The big players are becoming increasingly secretive about what they are doing, which makes it hard for society to defend against whatever harms may materialize.”
Federal Judge Rules Google Tried to ‘Hide the Ball’ by Deleting Chat Logs in a Big Antitrust Case
Google intentionally sought to “hide the ball” in a high-profile antitrust case by automatically deleting employee chat messages that could have been used as evidence in the suit, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, dealing a blow to the tech giant.
The ruling condemns Google’s document preservation practices and their impact on litigation, which could have a broader impact as the company defends a range of suits on multiple fronts.
Google will not face immediate sanctions for its missteps apart from having to cover the legal fees that plaintiffs incurred in bringing the sanctions motion, wrote Judge James Donato in his order. A non-monetary penalty could still be imposed following further court proceedings. But Donato repeatedly criticized Google this week for trying to keep sensitive chat logs out of the record.
California State University Intends to End COVID Vaccine Mandates
The California State University (CSU ) — the nation’s largest four-year higher education system — intends to rescind coronavirus vaccine mandates for students, faculty, and staff, as reported by its faculty association on March 2.
The system’s office of human resources and labor relations determined it will “no longer require students to be fully vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus,” according to the California Faculty Association, a union representing 29,000 CSU faculty members.
The college’s plan to cancel its mandate follows California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s announcement on Feb. 28 ending the state’s COVID-19 State of Emergency.
The University of California (UC) and CSU implemented similar vaccine mandates for the fall 2021 semester in a joint announcement, and both currently require a booster shot to be compliant.
Lawmakers Debate Who to Blame for COVID School Closures: Teachers’ Unions or Trump?
House members spent a Tuesday hearing debating who to blame for school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic, with Republicans deriding the influence of teacher’s unions and Democrats blasting the Trump administration.
During the hearing, titled “The Consequences of School Closures: Intended and Unintended,” members of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic agreed that school closures had devastating effects on children and students.
But there was little common ground on who to blame for that damage. Republicans raised concerns outside groups such as teachers’ unions had too much input in the guidance the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put out regarding school closures that ultimately led to students learning from home for an extended period of time.
Chairman Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) announced he sent letters to the CDC, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and 14 other non-governmental groups asking them to detail their roles or communications with the CDC regarding guidance on school closures.
Arkansas Sues TikTok, ByteDance and Meta Over Mental Health Claims
The state of Arkansas has sued TikTok, its parent ByteDance and Facebook-parent Meta over claims the companies’ products are harmful to users, in the latest effort by public officials to take social media companies to court over mental health and privacy concerns.
All three lawsuits claim the companies have violated the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and seek millions, if not billions, in potential fines. The suits were filed in Arkansas state court.
The complaints come amid mounting pressure in Washington on TikTok for its ties to China and as states have grown more aggressive in suing tech companies broadly, particularly on mental health claims. Suits by school districts or county officials in California, Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Washington state have targeted multiple social media platforms over addiction allegations.
The suit against Meta particularly zeroes in on the company’s impact to young users’ mental health, alleging that Meta’s implementation of like buttons, photo tagging, an unending news feed and other features are addictive and “intended to manipulate users’ brains by triggering the release of dopamine.”
Masking Still Required in About Half of Medical Offices, Poll Finds — but That Percentage Is Down From a Year Ago and Is Expected to Continue Dropping, MGMA Says
Nearly half of medical groups continue to require masking even as local public health officials have dropped mask mandates, according to a recent poll from the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).
The 49% of groups that still have mask requirements varied in how they were enforced, with 72% saying they applied to everyone — patients, staff, and visitors. Another 20% said they applied only to symptomatic patients and the staff members working with them, and 8% said masks were required for staff but optional for patients and visitors.
The number of practices requiring masking is expected to keep dropping in coming months, MGMA said, “as several respondents told MGMA that they are located in one of the West Coast states set to drop government-mandated mask rules as of April 3.”
U.K. to Avoid Fixed Rules for AI — in Favor of ‘Context-Specific Guidance’
The U.K. isn’t going to be setting hard rules for AI any time soon.
Today, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) published a white paper setting out the government’s preference for a light-touch approach to regulating artificial intelligence. It’s kicking off a public consultation process — seeking feedback on its plans up to June 21 — but appears set on paving a smooth road of ‘flexible principles’ that AI can speed through.
Worries about the risks of increasingly powerful AI technologies are very much treated as a secondary consideration, relegated far behind a political agenda to talk up the vast potential of high-tech growth — and thus, if problems arise, the government is suggesting the U.K.’s existing (overstretched) regulators will have to deal with them, on a case-by-case basis, armed only with existing powers (and resources). So, er, lol!
The 91-page white paper, which is entitled “A pro-innovation approach to AI regulation”, talks about taking “a common-sense, outcomes-oriented approach” to regulating automation — by applying what the government frames as a “proportionate and pro-innovation regulatory framework.”
TikTok Ban Backup Plan? ByteDance-Owned Instagram Rival Lemon8 Hits the U.S. App Store’s Top 10
As U.S. lawmakers move forward with their plans for a TikTok ban or forced sale, the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance is driving another of its social platforms into the Top Charts of the U.S. App Store.
ByteDance-owned app Lemon8, an Instagram rival that describes itself as a “lifestyle community,” jumped into the U.S. App Store’s Top Charts on Monday, becoming the No. 10 Overall app, across both apps and games. Today, it’s ranked No. 9 on the App Store’s Top Apps chart, excluding games.
This is a dramatic move for the little-known app and one that points to paid user acquisition efforts powering this surge. Prior to yesterday, the Lemon8 app had never before ranked in the Top 200 Overall Charts in the U.S., according to app store intelligence provided to TechCrunch by data.ai.
The firm confirms that such a fast move from being an unranked app to being No. 9 among the top free apps in the U.S. — ahead of YouTube, WhatsApp, Gmail and Facebook — implies a “significant” and “recent” user acquisition push on the app publisher’s part. Unfortunately, because the app is so new to the App Store’s Top Charts, third-party app analytics firms don’t yet have precise data on Lemon8’s U.S. installs, or how those installs have recently changed over the past few days.
Biden: World ‘Turning the Tide’ After Backslide on Democracy
President Joe Biden on Wednesday offered an optimistic outlook on the health of democracy worldwide, declaring that leaders are “turning the tide” in stemming a yearslong backslide of democratic institutions.
He said the U.S. will spend $690 million bolstering democracy programs — supporting everything from free and independent media to free and fair elections — around the world. He said he also wanted to use the summit to foster discussion about the use of technology to “advance democratic governance” and ensure such technology is “not used to undermine it.”
The U.S. has come to an agreement with 10 other nations on guiding principles for how the governments should use surveillance technology, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preview the agreement before its formal announcement.
Earlier this week, Biden signed an executive order restricting the U.S. government’s use of commercial spyware tools that have been used to surveil human rights activists, journalists and dissidents around the world.
The CDC Must Answer for Its Mental Health Scandal + More
The CDC Must Answer for Its Mental Health Scandal
The recklessness of the U.S. government’s policies during the COVID-19 pandemic, which sowed fear and confusion in the minds of millions of Americans, is beginning to come to light thanks to the ongoing hearings by the House Oversight Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The consequences of school closings will be the topic of this week’s hearing. What we now know is that in 2021, almost 60% of female high school students experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness.” One in four “fantasized a possible suicide plan.”
These alarming statistics come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Youth Risk Behavior Survey, released a few weeks ago. Since then, concerned social scientists have analyzed and evaluated the data about our troubled youth to come up with a possible cause.
It’s ironic that the report came from the CDC, the agency most likely to blame for this new wave of depression and despondency among young people. The CDC’s COVID-19 policies shut children in their homes for almost two years, isolating them from peers and extended family, forcing them to lose ground educationally due to solitary online classes, creating anxiety by constant doom-and-gloom overstatements and forcing vaccines on already immune children.
IRS Visited Twitter Files Journalist Matt Taibbi’s Home Same Day as Congressional Testimony
An IRS agent stopped by the home of Twitter Files journalist Matt Taibbi the same day of his congressional testimony on the weaponization of the government, according to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, who’s demanding an explanation over the oddly timed visit.
Jordan sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel and the Department of Treasury on Monday in hopes of getting to the bottom of why the federal agent appeared at Taibbi’s New Jersey home on March 9 and left a note, according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal that cited the letter.
The note reportedly instructed Taibbi to call the IRS four days later. When he did, an agent told him his 2018 and 2021 tax returns had both been rejected due to identity theft concerns.
Taibbi has been deeply involved in researching and reporting the Twitter Files — based off a trove of internal documents at the social media giant meant to expose unfair bias in the company’s past content moderation and the social media giant’s previous contact with government officials.
Following China: JP Morgan Chase Wants People to Pay for Goods With Face Scans
JPMorgan Chase has announced plans to pilot a new payment technology that would allow customers to pay with their palm or face instead of a traditional credit or debit card.
Following similar technological implementations in China, if the pilot program goes well, the bank intends to roll out the service to its broader base of U.S. merchant clients and usher in a new wave of biometric payments that privacy enthusiasts have been concerned about.
The rise of biometric technology, which uses unique body measurements to authenticate a person’s identity, is being pushed by corporations to make this the default payment method across the world.
Over the past few years, China has become a global leader in the implementation of this biometric recognition payment technology. The payment method has transformed the way millions of people conduct transactions daily.
Cops Used Creepy Clearview AI a Million Times, CEO Says
Clearview AI, the shady U.S. facial recognition firm whose surveillance tech is used by at least 2,400 law enforcement agencies, says police have run nearly a million searches using its service.
The company’s database of images scraped from social media sites now reportedly numbers around 30 billion, a staggering 50% increase from figures reported just last year. Despite repeated fines and years of pushback from civil liberties organizations, the figures suggest business is still booming for Clearview.
Clearview’s data collection methods have come under fire from privacy advocates who believe the company collects billions of face scans without first obtaining content. That means anyone’s publicly available Facebook or Instagram selfies could, in theory, one day be used by law enforcement to connect them with a crime.
“It’s appalling that a company could steal billions of our photos, but it’s even worse that the police are paying them for that data,” Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Executive Director Albert Fox Cahn told Gizmodo. “The police should be investigating Clearview AI for theft, not awarding it contracts. This sort of surveillance capitalism chills democracy and puts us all at risk.”
Americans Hooked on Chinese Apps
The standoff between the U.S. government and TikTok underscores a growing problem for policymakers: Chinese apps are booming in America, but most U.S. apps aren’t able to operate in China.
Why it matters: Mobile apps are one of the most powerful vectors for expanding trade and exporting soft power, given how widely accessible they are, how much time is spent on them, and how little regulatory oversight there is online.
Chinese companies are able to “leverage China’s one billion internet users to test user preferences and optimize their AI models at home, then export the tech overseas,” The Wall Street Journal notes. But given censorship demands in China, American tech firms can’t reciprocate.
Driving the news: In the past 30 days, four of the top 10 most-downloaded apps in the U.S. across Apple’s iOS store and the Google Play store are owned by Chinese companies.
Amazon Subsidiaries Worry Data Protection Advocates
It’s no secret that Amazon has masses of data on customers, sourced mainly from millions of Prime subscribers. But it also gets data from subsidiaries that mediate many aspects of daily life.
From customers’ reading habits on Amazon Kindle to the groceries they like to buy on Prime, Amazon has perfected the art of tracking. The software is so good at predicting user preferences that third parties can hire its algorithms through Amazon Forecast.
But it doesn’t stop there. The big tech titan has purchased more than 100 companies since it was created. The firms enable it to gather more consumer data to inform predictions. Amazon’s technology has shifted from simply waiting for and responding to your requests to anticipating them. In a demo of Amazon’s Alexa, when you ask the voice assistant to book movie tickets, it follows up by asking whether you want to make a dinner reservation or call an Uber.
But “it is potentially problematic if Amazon is sharing data between the different companies it owns,” Simon David Hirsbrunner, from the human-centered computing research group of Freie Universität Berlin, told DW, as consumer data is collected in different contexts. “Amazon’s data scientists might not be able to identify and manage privacy issues dependent on these specific contexts.”
Technology Addiction Has Created a Self-Help Trap
The past can answer one of today’s most perplexing problems. Why, despite multiple reports from Silicon Valley whistleblowers revealing that technology companies are using manipulative designs to prolong our time online, do we feel personally responsible? Why do we still blame ourselves and keep seeking new self-help methods to decrease our time online?
We can learn from the past because in this case, the tech companies did not innovate. Instead, the technology industry manipulated us following an old playbook, put together by other powerful industries, including the tobacco and food industries.
When the tobacco and food industries confronted allegations that their products harmed their consumers, they defended themselves by raising the powerful American social icon of self-choice and personal responsibility.
This meant emphasizing that consumers are free to make choices and, as a result, are responsible for the outcomes. Smokers and their families sued the tobacco industry for the devastation of smoking, including lung cancer and early death. But, for decades, they failed to win their lawsuits because the tobacco industry argued successfully that they chose to smoke and, therefore, they are responsible for the results.
The tech industry is already applying this strategy by appealing to our deeply ingrained cultural beliefs of personal choice and responsibility. Tech companies do this directly when faced with allegations that they are addicting users.
COVID App for England and Wales Discontinued as Usage Dwindles
The COVID contact-tracing app for England and Wales, which was downloaded 31 million times during the course of the pandemic, is being wound down later this week.
Coming about three years since the first nationwide lockdown, the move is part of a drive to encourage people to “learn to live” with the virus. Users of the app will receive a notification on Tuesday telling them it is being discontinued. They will no longer receive alerts informing them when they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
Dwindling usage meant the app was in danger of becoming defunct, as COVID measures — such as free tests — were removed and vaccination take-up grew. However, the NHS app will continue to allow people to request a certificate proving their COVID vaccination status as part of any requirements for international travel.
The COVID app was launched to let people check in at venues using a QR code, inform them what restrictions were in force based on their location, and keep track of how many days they had left to isolate if they had been in contact with someone who had tested positive. The latest figures show the app has been downloaded 31,681,000 times, of which just 103,885 downloads were this year.
Generative AI Set to Affect 300 Million Jobs Across Major Economies
The latest breakthroughs in artificial intelligence could lead to the automation of a quarter of the work done in the U.S. and eurozone, according to research by Goldman Sachs.
The investment bank said on Monday that “generative” AI systems such as ChatGPT, which can create content that is indistinguishable from human output, could spark a productivity boom that would eventually raise annual global gross domestic product by 7% over a 10-year period.
But if the technology lived up to its promise, it would also bring “significant disruption” to the labor market, exposing the equivalent of 300 million full-time workers across big economies to automation, according to Joseph Briggs and Devesh Kodnani, the paper’s authors. Lawyers and administrative staff would be among those at greatest risk of becoming redundant.
In the U.S., this should apply to 63% of the workforce, they calculated. A further 30% working in physical or outdoor jobs would be unaffected, although their work might be susceptible to other forms of automation. But about 7% of U.S. workers are in jobs where at least half of their tasks could be done by generative AI and are vulnerable to replacement.
WeChat: The CCP’s Ultimate Tool to Control Chinese Americans
While the world is awakening to the threat of TikTok, WeChat is another Chinese social media platform that is infiltrating and monitoring a huge population of Chinese people overseas.
Lydia Liu is a Chinese American who found herself becoming a victim of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) censorship through WeChat, a Chinese-owned social media video-sharing app.
When WeChat banned her official account, she felt the CCP had deprived her of her rights as an American to speak freely about American affairs. “The CCP’s long arm has stretched way too far,” she told The Epoch Times on March 21.
By excluding foreign players such as Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and PayPal from the Chinese market, the CCP has exploited WeChat — a complex amalgamation of the above-mentioned apps’ features — as a powerful tool for social control. The app dictates what users see, what they say and even their purchasing power in the Chinese-speaking world.
Biden White House Urged Meta to Crack Down on ‘Vaccine-Skeptical’ Content on WhatsApp Private Chat + More
Biden White House Urged Meta to Crack Down on ‘Vaccine-Skeptical’ Content on WhatsApp Private Chat Platform
Newly-released communications between the Biden administration and Meta show an effort to crack down on so-called “vaccine-skeptical” content shared on the private communications platform WhatsApp.
Independent journalist David Zweig reported on Friday that the White House went beyond Twitter to curb COVID-related posts. Emails obtained through discovery from the ongoing Missouri v Biden legal battle show email exchanges from the White House to the tech giant began just days after President Biden took office.
Zweig stressed that unlike Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta, WhatsApp is an encrypted direct messaging platform. Citing Meta, “90% of WhatsApp messages are from one person to another. And groups typically have fewer than 10 people.”
City Council Members Demand CUNY Lift COVID Vaccine Mandate
A bipartisan group of City Council members is demanding CUNY join much of the rest of society by rescinding its requirement that students taking in-person and hybrid courses be vaccinated for COVID-19.
“We believe it is past time CUNY follow most other major institutions and lift the vaccine mandate for students,” wrote the Council’s eight-member Common Sense Caucus in a letter Thursday to CUNY Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez.
The letter notes that while CUNY vaccination requirements remain active, the city last month rescinded an order previously requiring all municipal staffers and most city contractors to be jabbed.
That followed earlier liftings of COVID-19 vaccine mandates by the city Health Department, including for private employers, childcare providers and visitors to city public schools.
2023: The Year Digital Identities Go Mainstream
Since the pandemic, we’ve seen the use of digital identity evolve alongside our hybrid lifestyles, as more businesses and government agencies were pushed to move interactions online rather than in person.
By 2021, several countries began exploring digital vaccine passports for travel given the acute need for convenient, secure confirmation of a traveler’s health status. Although not a concern anymore for most governments and individuals, it’s a use case that drove home the value of digital identities more clearly to both private companies and government entities.
2022 was another major year for digital identity as we saw some foundational pieces fall into place. In the U.S., the TSA authorized the first few companies to use mobile IDs to pass through airport security, including Airside and Apple. Apple took this a step further to begin partnering with states that offer mobile driver’s licenses to enable storing and using them within its digital wallet, including for the TSA screening process.
These moves show an increasing trend toward a world of reusable identity — or a “verify once, share anywhere” approach to digital identity verification. In fact, according to market research firm Liminal, the global market size for shareable or reusable identity will grow from $32.8 billion in 2022 to $266.5 billion by 2027.
Utah’s Social Media Restrictions Won’t Be ‘Foolproof,’ Governor Says
Utah’s recently enacted legislation restricting the way minors use social media will not be “foolproof,” the state’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said Sunday.
The new laws, which will take effect next year, set a digital curfew on social media users younger than 18, require minors to get parental consent to sign up for accounts and demand social media companies verify the ages of users in Utah.
“We understand that there are definitely going to be enforcement issues anytime you wade into this type of industry. It’s going to be tough. We don’t expect that we’re going to be able to prevent every, you know, every young person from getting around this,” Cox said.
“Kids are really smart. That’s one of the problems,” he told host Chuck Todd.
Though he is urging Congress to enact similar federal-level laws, states must lead when it comes to social media regulation, Cox said, predicting that other states will follow Utah’s example, despite potential legal pushback from social media companies.
McCarthy Says House Will Press Ahead With TikTok Bill After CEO’s Testimony
Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said that the House will move forward with a proposed TikTok ban bill after the social media platform’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified before Congress on Thursday.
“It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data,” McCarthy wrote in a tweet on Sunday.
Several lawmakers in recent months have introduced legislation that would prohibit the downloading and use of TikTok in the U.S.
McCarthy said that he would support a nationwide ban on TikTok, noting there’s already a “bipartisan concern” with lawmakers on security risks the social media platform brings.
Popular Apps With Chinese Ties Can Gather More Data Than TikTok
As Congress weighs an unprecedented ban on the wildly popular Chinese-owned TikTok over supposed security concerns, millions of Americans are downloading Chinese-designed apps to their phones that pose greater privacy risks with no outcry from lawmakers or regulators.
Known as mobile virtual private networks, or VPNs, the apps create a virtual tunnel through the internet that disguises a user’s virtual and physical location, in theory rendering them anonymous to the websites they visit, the communications providers that take them there, and advertisers and government snoops trying to suck up information along the way.
But experts have warned for years that everything the VPNs hide, they can see themselves. That means users who are working not to reveal who and where they are as well as what they are doing online are surrendering that very information to the VPNs. Some VPNs have the capability to see even more, including encrypted email content and banking information, because they have been placed in a highly trusted position on user devices.
Some of the most popular VPNs have misled consumers about their practices while disguising their origins, ownership and locations, including apps based in China or controlled by Chinese nationals, according to corporate records reviewed by The Washington Post as well as interviews and researchers.
Lawsuit Claims U of L Health Shares Private Patient Data With Facebook Parent Company Meta
Louisville Courier-Journal reported:
In a lawsuit that could become a class action, the mother of a pediatric psychiatric patient alleges U of L Health shares the personal health information of patients with Meta — Facebook’s parent company — in violation of federal privacy laws.
The suit claims the data includes prescription drug histories and diagnoses, and that the information is automatically sent to Meta through computer code known as the Meta Pixel, embedded into U of L Health’s website.
The complaint notes the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a bulletin on Dec. 1 warning the practice could violate HIPAA, the federal patient privacy law, and that impermissible disclosure of personal health information can cause “myriad harm to individuals, including identity theft, financial loss, discrimination, stigma, mental anguish, or other serious negative consequences to the reputation, health, or physical safety of the individual.”
The Professor Trying to Protect Our Private Thoughts From Technology
Private thoughts may not be private for much longer, heralding a nightmarish world where political views, thoughts, stray obsessions and feelings could be interrogated and punished all thanks to advances in neurotechnology.
In a new book, The Battle for Your Brain, Duke University bioscience professor Nita Farahany argues that such intrusions into the human mind by technology are so close that a public discussion is long overdue and lawmakers should immediately establish brain protections as it would for any other area of personal liberty.
Advances in hacking and tracking thoughts, with Orwellian fears of mind control running just below the surface, is the subject of Farahany’s scholarship alongside urgent calls for legislative guarantees to thought privacy, including freedoms from “cognitive fingerprinting,” that lie within an area of ethics broadly termed “cognitive liberty.”
Farahany, who served on Barack Obama’s commission for the study of bioethical issues, believes that advances in neurotechnology mean that intrusions through the door of brain privacy, whether by way of military programs or by way of well-funded research labs at big tech companies, are at hand via brain-to-computer innovations like wearable tech.
“All of the major tech companies have massive investments in multifunctional devices that have brain sensors in them,” Farahany said. “Neural sensors will become part of our everyday technology and a part of how we interact with that technology.”
France Bans Recreational Apps Like TikTok on Government Devices
France is the latest country to take steps to ban TikTok from government-managed devices. Stanislas Guerini, the Minister of Public Transformation and Service, and his services issued a statement announcing the move and the reasoning behind this change.
But there’s a twist: Instead of simply banning only TikTok, the French government is saying that all recreational apps are now banned from work devices.
TikTok has said several times that the company doesn’t share user data with the Chinese government. The company has tried to reassure European governments by saying that it will set up and run multiple data centers to store local users’ data in Europe in the near future.
So what is a recreational app exactly? Guerini’s office told the AFP and AP news agencies that some of these apps include TikTok (obviously) as well as Twitter, Instagram, Netflix, Candy Crush and other games, as well as dating apps.
Big Tech’s Big Downgrade
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy.
Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to workarounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users.