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Congress Is Set to Expose What May Be the Largest Censorship System in U.S. History
This coming week a new House select subcommittee will hold its first hearing on the FBI and the possible “weaponization” of government agencies. A variety of such controversies have contributed to plunging public trust in government and the FBI in particular.
The role of the FBI in prior scandals will remain a point of heated debate in Congress. However, members of both parties should be able to agree on the need to investigate one of the most serious allegations: Censorship by surrogate.
The “Twitter files” revealed an FBI operation to monitor and censor social media content — an effort so overwhelming and intrusive that Twitter staff at one point complained internally that “they are probing & pushing everywhere.” The reports have indicated that dozens of FBI employees worked on the identification and removal of material on a wide range of subjects and that Twitter largely carried out their requests.
The dozens of disclosed emails are only a fraction of Twitter’s files and do not include still-undisclosed but apparent government coordination with Facebook and other social media companies. Much of that work apparently was done through the multi-agency Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), which operated secretly it seems to censor citizens.
U.S. House Plans Vote to End Foreign Air Traveler COVID Vaccine Mandate
The U.S. House of Representatives plans to vote next week on a bill that would end a requirement that most foreign air travelers be vaccinated against COVID-19, Majority Leader Steve Scalise said on Friday.
The Biden administration in June dropped its requirement that people arriving in the country by air must test negative for COVID-19 but has not lifted Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccination requirements. Currently, adult visitors to the United States who are not citizens or permanent residents must show proof of vaccination before boarding their flight, with some limited exceptions.
The U.S. Travel Association said Thursday it has “long supported the removal of this requirement and see no reason to wait until the May expiration of the public health emergency — particularly as potential visitors are planning spring and summer travel.”
The group says the United States “is the only country that still has this requirement for international visitors when there is no longer any public health justification.”
Mayor Adams Ends COVID Vaccine Mandate for NYC Workers
New York City municipal workers no longer need to be vaccinated against COVID-19 — and those fired for refusing to get their shots will get a chance to reapply for their old jobs, Mayor Adams announced Monday.
The municipal coronavirus vaccine mandate which has been in place since November 2021 will officially end this Friday, Adams said in a statement. He said it’s justified to scrap the inoculation requirement because 96% of the municipal workforce is vaccinated.
Since it took effect, about 1,780 city workers have been fired for flouting the vaccine mandate, according to Adams’ office.
While the axed workers won’t automatically get their jobs back upon the termination of the mandate, Adams’ office said they “will be able to apply for positions with their former agencies through existing city rules and regulations and hiring processes.”
California Won’t Require COVID Vaccine to Attend Schools
Children in California won’t have to get the coronavirus vaccine to attend schools, state public health officials confirmed Friday, ending one of the last major restrictions of the pandemic in the nation’s most populous state.
Gov. Gavin Newsom first announced the policy in 2021, saying it would eventually apply to all of California’s 6.7 million public and private schoolchildren.
Nearly all of the pandemic restrictions put in place by Newsom have been lifted, and he won’t be able to issue any new ones after Feb. 28 when the state’s coronavirus emergency declaration officially ends.
One of the last remaining questions was what would happen to the state’s vaccine mandate for schoolchildren, a policy that came from the California Department of Public Health and was not impacted by the lifting of the emergency declaration. On Friday, the Department of Public Health confirmed it was backing off its original plan.
L.A. Shifts Course on Vaccine Mandates for City Workers, Will Approve Exemptions
When Los Angeles city employees file for religious or medical exemptions to the city’s COVID-19 vaccination requirement, the requests are typically reviewed to ensure that exemption requests are valid. But in a twist, the city ordered the approval of all religious and medical exemptions to the vaccine mandate that were filed by city employees as of Jan. 31, according to a city memo reviewed by The Times.
Personnel Department General Manager Dana Brown sent a memo to department heads this week, instructing them to “administratively approve all pending appeals by current employees” filed before Tuesday. Exemption requests submitted after that will continue to be reviewed “on an individual basis and processed according to the Vaccine Exemption Procedures,” the memo says.
Roughly 4,900 employees will be affected by the change outlined in the memo, according to a source familiar with the city’s vaccine requirement who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. In all, more than 5,550 exemptions were sought by city employees, according to the source.
Blaming TikTok for Harming Students Is Easy. Proving It Isn’t
About half of adolescents have had a mental health disorder at some point in their lives, and some school districts are putting at least part of the blame on social media companies that they say addict America’s youth.
It won’t be easy to prove in court, but Seattle schools will try, having sued over the issue. They blame companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Snap Inc. and ByteDance Ltd., the owner of TikTok Inc., for contributing to the mental health crisis among students and say the addictive apps interfere with their ability to fulfill their educational mission.
The connection between the Seattle school district and its students’ mental health isn’t clear and could pose a problem for its arguments to a jury, said Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University School of Law associate dean of research and co-director of the High Tech Law Institute. The district must prove it’s being harmed by students’ addiction to social media in order to win.
Social media addiction is a growing concern and tech companies face an onslaught of litigation as a result. In addition to the lawsuit in Seattle by the city’s school district, more than 100 cases were filed by student users of the platforms making the same allegations. They have been combined in multi-district litigation in Oakland, California, which Seattle may join.
Colombian Judge Uses ChatGPT in Ruling on Child’s Medical Rights Case
A judge in Colombia caused a stir by announcing he had used the AI chatbot ChatGPT in preparing a ruling in a children’s medical rights case.
Judge Juan Manuel Padilla said he used the text-generating bot in a case involving a request to exonerate an autistic child from paying fees for medical appointments, therapy and transportation given his parents’ limited income.
He ruled in favor of the child and wrote in his judgment, dated Jan. 30, that he had consulted ChatGPT on the matter, without specifying to what extent he had relied on the bot. In this case, Padilla said he asked the bot: “Is autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?” among other questions.
Professor Juan David Gutierrez of Rosario University was among those to express incredulity at the judge’s admission. Gutierrez, an expert in artificial intelligence regulation and governance, said he put the same questions to ChatGPT and got different responses. “It is certainly not responsible or ethical to use ChatGPT as intended by the judge in the ruling in question,” he wrote on Twitter.
WHO Releases International Pandemic Treaty Zero Draft That Targets ‘Misinformation’ and ‘Disinformation’
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a zero draft of its international pandemic treaty which will give the unelected global health agency new powers to “tackle” anything that it deems to be “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation” if passed.
The WHO has been pushing the treaty since December 2021 and those drafting the treaty intend to present a final report to the World Health Assembly (WHA), the WHO’s decision-making body, in May 2024.
If adopted, the treaty will be legally binding under international law and the WHO’s 194 member states (which represent 98% of all the countries in the world) would be required to comply with the treaty’s demands to target misinformation.
