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Connecticut Law Ending Religious Vaccine Exemptions for Children Is Upheld
A divided federal appeals court on Friday rejected a challenge to a Connecticut law that ended that state’s decades-old religious exemptions from immunization requirements for children in schools, colleges and daycare.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said ending religious exemptions, while still allowing medical exemptions, was a rational means to promote health and safety by reducing the potential spread of vaccine-preventable diseases.
In a 2-1 decision, Circuit Judge Denny Chin said the April 2021 law contained “no trace” of hostility toward religious believers, and did not violate objectors’ constitutional rights to due process and the free exercise of religion.
He also said many U.S. courts have reviewed vaccination mandates for children that lack religious exemptions, and only one, in Mississippi, has ever found constitutional problems.
Five other U.S. states — California, Maine, Mississippi, New York and West Virginia — also lack religious exemptions.
House Judiciary Targets Anti-Hate Speech Organization in Censorship Probe
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) requested information and documents from an anti-hate-speech organization as part of the committee’s probe into alleged internet censorship by the government.
In a letter sent Thursday, Jordan informed the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), an organization that tracks online hate speech and misinformation, that the committee is looking into the organization’s interactions with the federal government and social media companies.
The letter comes after Elon Musk’s X, formerly called Twitter, sued the CCDH on Tuesday, alleging the nonprofit improperly accessed data while researching the social media platform.
“Certain third parties, including organizations like yours, appear to have played a role in this censorship regime by advising the government and social media companies on so-called ‘misinformation,’ and other types of content — sometimes with direct or indirect support or approval from the federal government,” Jordan wrote in the letter.
Jordan said this “censorship regime,” threatens the First Amendment and “Americans’ civil liberties.”
Jim Jordan Releases New ‘Facebook Files,’ Highlights How Biden Admin Sought to Suppress Daily Wire Content
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) released his third edition of the “Facebook Files,” saying the Biden administration pressured the social media giant to stifle speech the White House didn’t like, including limiting The Daily Wire’s reach on the platform and boosting the reach of legacy media outlets.
In a tweet thread Thursday, Jordan highlighted newly released documents obtained by the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which he chairs. The documents, which were reviewed by The Daily Wire, show that Facebook repeatedly confirmed to the White House that it was working to re-engineer its platform in order to accomplish the administration’s directives on suppressing content that clashed with its COVID vaccine agenda.
“Newly subpoenaed internal notes of meetings between Facebook executives and Biden Admin officials reveal more about the lengths the Biden White House wanted to go to control true speech on Facebook,” Jordan began.
“These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook. More evidence of the censorship-industrial complex. To be continued … ” Jordan concluded.
U.S. Intelligence Has Been Manipulating Wikipedia for Over a Decade: Wiki Co-Founder
The co-founder of Wikipedia has revealed a bombshell concerning long-running suspicions of U.S. intelligence interference and manipulation of the world’s most well-known collaborative online encyclopedia. The site’s co-creator Larry Sanger spoke to journalist Glenn Greenwald on his “System Update” podcast and outlined the known “information warfare” efforts of U.S. intelligence, which have to some extent made Wikipedia a tool of “control” by the left-liberal Washington deep state.
Some observers who have long watched and carefully documented U.S. government involvement in major social media platforms, as well as Wikipedia itself, have commented, “The CIA Is running Wikipedia, Wow, what a shocker. Sanger asserted during Greenwald’s show, “We do have evidence that, as early as 2008, CIA and FBI computers were used to edit Wikipedia,” before posing: “Do you think that they stopped doing that back then?”
Sanger explained that the intelligence agencies “pay off the most influential people to push their agendas, which they’re already mostly in line with, or they just develop their own talent within the community, learn the Wikipedia game, and then push what they want to say with their own people.”
“A great part of intelligence and information warfare is conducted online,” he added, and then specified: “on websites like Wikipedia.” For that reason along with others explored in the interview, Sanger calls it “the most biased encyclopedia” in history.
New Google Tool Lets Users Track and Delete Search Results About Themselves
Google launched new privacy tools to help users track and delete search results about themselves like untrue information, unwanted contact details, or copyright violations, a move to assuage users’ concerns about privacy.
Additionally, Google has also announced today it will introduce a new tool for parents to blur explicit images from their children’s search results.
The new tool, which is only available in the U.S. and in English for now, doesn’t actually delete the information from the internet — it just stops it from showing up in search results. Google suggested users contact the specific website that has posted unwanted information about themselves to request it be removed.
Americans have become increasingly concerned about what big tech platforms do with their private information. Over 80% of Americans said the potential risks they face because of data collection by companies outweigh the benefits they get from signing up on different platforms, a 2019 Pew Research study found.
GOP Representative Wants to Ban COVID Vaccine Mandates in Private Sector
The days of seeing Texas healthcare workers in full protective equipment in drive-thru COVID testing lines are long gone. But conversations about the deadly disease and vaccination against it are not. When COVID vaccines were made available, some companies required their employees to get a shot. The fact that some businesses still mandate this is not ok with one Republican state representative.
CVS Health requires certain employees to be fully vaccinated against COVID and get booster shots. Meta, the platform that operates Facebook and Instagram, also requires a shot to work in the office.
Ahead of the 88th legislative session, the governor said one of his priorities was to end COVID restrictions forever. Lawmakers almost achieved that by passing legislation that says government entities are prohibited from requiring COVID-related masks, vaccines or business shutdowns.
But the law doesn’t touch the private sector, which means places like hospitals and schools can still have COVID vaccine mandates. Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, wants the governor to call a special session to ban COVID mandates at businesses, but that’s unlikely to happen.
TikTok to Face European Privacy Fine by September
TikTok is set to face a privacy fine by early September for its handling of teenagers’ and children’s data, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.
Europe’s network of national privacy regulators, the European Data Protection Board (EDPB), on Wednesday, resolved disagreements among agencies in an investigation into the popular video-sharing platform used by 125 million people in the bloc. Their decision kicks off a process giving TikTok’s lead privacy regulator in the EU, the Irish Data Protection Commission, a month to issue the final penalty and any potential measures. The size and details of the fine are unknown.
The Irish regulator wanted to check whether the Chinese-owned app ensured its default settings sufficiently protected children’s privacy and if the company was transparent enough in how it processed minors’ data. One of the trickiest points has also been TikTok’s age-verification practices, intended to keep minors under 13 off its platform. TikTok is supervised by the Irish Data Protection Commission because its EU headquarters are in the country.
TikTok in 2021 received a €750,000 fine from the Dutch data protection authority for failing to protect Dutch children’s privacy by not having a privacy policy in their native language. The company is also being investigated by Ireland over the potentially unlawful shipping of European users’ data to China.
TikTok’s Algorithm Will Be Optional in Europe
TikTok users in Europe will be able to switch off the personalized algorithm behind its For You and Live feeds as the company makes changes to comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).
According to TikTok, disabling this function will show users “popular videos from both the places where they live and around the world” instead of content based on their personal interests.
These changes relate to DSA rules that require very large online platforms to allow their users to opt out of receiving personalized content — which typically relies on tracking and profiling user activity — when viewing content recommendations.
Another change is that European users between the ages of 13 and 17 automatically won’t be targeted with personalized ads based on their online activities, rather than having to opt-out with a toggle.
ChatGPT and Other AI Chatbots Will Never Stop Making Stuff up, Experts Warn
OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing AI are incredibly popular for their ability to generate a large volume of text quickly and can be convincingly human, but AI “hallucination”, also known as making stuff up, is a major problem with these chatbots. Unfortunately, experts warn, this will probably always be the case.
A new report from the Associated Press highlights that the problem with Large Language Model (LLM) confabulation might not be as easily fixed as many tech founders and AI proponents claim, at least according to University of Washington (UW) professor Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at UW’s Computational Linguistics Laboratory.
“This isn’t fixable,” Bender said. “It’s inherent in the mismatch between the technology and the proposed use cases.”
LLMs are powerful tools that can do remarkable things, but companies and the tech industry must understand that just because something is powerful doesn’t mean it’s a good tool to use.LLMs are powerful tools that can do remarkable things, but companies and the tech industry must understand that just because something is powerful doesn’t mean it’s a good tool to use.
Chinese Parents Trying to Set Screen Limits Get New Ally: The Government
The Chinese government has taken on what may be its most formidable task yet: separating teenagers from their smartphones. China’s internet regulator has proposed rules that would help parents limit the amount of time their children spend online by requiring smartphone makers, apps and app stores to offer a “minor mode” that restricts usage.
Under the draft regulations released by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the feature would limit 16- and 17-year-olds to two hours of internet usage a day. For 8-to-15-year-olds, it would be restricted to one hour, while children under 8 would be limited to 40 minutes a day.
The mode should also bar minors from using any apps between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., the draft says. Online apps for education or emergency services would be exempt from the restrictions, and parents could also apply for various exceptions.
Previous government measures to limit screen time have had limited success. Regulators have been restricting the amount of time minors spend online playing games since 2019. In 2021, even stricter rules allowed children just one hour a day only on Fridays, weekends and national holidays.
