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DC Council Could Delay Coronavirus Vaccine Mandate for Kids
A year after introducing a law that requires DC students over 12 to be vaccinated against the coronavirus, DC Council member Christina Henderson will put forward emergency and temporary legislation to delay the plan by another school year. The delayed deadline will go up for a vote on Nov. 1, Henderson (I-At Large) told The Washington Post.
The earlier law was introduced in October 2021 and passed two months later. It was set to be enforced at the beginning of this school year, but to give more time for schools to prepare and students to get vaccinated, city officials extended the deadline until Jan. 3.
In the year since that law was introduced, much has changed about the way public health officials understand the coronavirus, Henderson said. Guidance around masking and social distancing has been relaxed. Universities and school districts have abandoned consideration of vaccine mandates. Nationwide, COVID-related deaths have fallen considerably.
Henderson said she wants to delay the city’s coronavirus vaccine mandate so that it takes effect during the 2023-2024 school year and, in the meantime, revisit the measure — which could include conversations over whether it should exist at all.
When Algorithms Promote Self-Harm, Who Is Held Responsible?
When 14-year-old Molly Russell died in 2017, her cell phone contained graphic images of self-harm, an email roundup of “depression pins you might like” and advice on concealing mental illness from loved ones. Investigators initially ruled the British teen’s death a suicide.
But almost five years later, a British coroner’s court has reversed the findings. Now, they claim that Russell died “from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content” — and the algorithms themselves are on notice. This isn’t the first time that technology and suicide have collided in high-profile cases that push the boundaries of both science and law. And it certainly won’t be the last.
A growing body of research suggests that social media platforms play a role in depression, body image issues, and other mental health challenges among users. While most cases to date have focused on the individuals who use platforms to cyberbully others, the inquiry into Russell’s death marked “perhaps the first time anywhere that internet companies have been legally blamed for a suicide,” according to The New York Times.
Yet the British ruling does not necessarily mean that social media companies are being held accountable. For one, a coroner’s court cannot exact punishment; Meta and Pinterest executives were compelled to testify, but no one is paying up, let alone going to prison. More importantly, the available research linking mental health problems and social media platforms mostly hinge on associations — X and Y both changed, but whether one caused the other is hard to say. Attributing definitive responsibility for social media-linked suicides remains meaningfully out of reach.
Thousands Urge U.K. Government to Rehire Care Workers Sacked Over COVID Vaccine Mandate
Tens of thousands of people have urged the U.K. government to apologize, reinstate and compensate care workers who were forced out of their jobs by a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, according to campaign group Together.
By Friday, more than 23,000 people had signed a petition published by the group on Monday, calling on Prime Minister Liz Truss and Health Secretary Thérèse Coffey to reconcile with the approximately 40,000 social care workers who lost their jobs after refusing to take the jabs.
The civil liberty group, which started in 2021 as a campaign against COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates, published a letter on the same day when Janine Small, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets, told the European Parliament that the company’s COVID-19 vaccine had not been tested for its effectiveness on stopping transmission before it entered the market.
Mathematician on AI Dystopia and Human Superiority Over Machines
As computing technology rapidly advances, there has been much discussion of the potential threats posed by artificial intelligence. But the author of a book that explores the nature of machine versus human intelligence has said some of these debates over the future of AI have been overhyped and may be distracting from more pressing issues.
Junaid Mubeen, a research mathematician turned educator and author of Mathematical Intelligence: A Story of Human Superiority Over Machines, which will be published November 1, told Newsweek one of the reasons he wrote the book was that AI has generated significant amounts of publicity recently.
“Some of it may be justified because there are exciting developments coming through, but much of it, I think, is overhyped,” Mubeen said. “And I think there’s a real risk that we’re going to rush to judgment, exaggerate the capabilities of AI in the process and undermine our own human intelligence.
Mubeen pointed to prominent figures from Silicon Valley and beyond, who discuss potential threats that are perhaps a few years or decades away while not paying the same attention to the potential harms of artificial intelligence technologies today. Some examples of these potential harms include the use of AI in mass surveillance programs or how some algorithms reinforce social biases based on the data they have been trained on.
COVID Vaccine Mandate Dropped for Most Military Members: Defense Chief
The Canadian Armed Forces plans to press ahead with the forced expulsion of dozens of unvaccinated troops despite a new order from defense chief Gen. Wayne Eyre on Friday ending the military’s blanket COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
In an interview with The Canadian Press, Eyre said that is because service members are expected to follow legal orders — and that a refusal by some troops to get their shots “raises questions about your suitability to serve in uniform.”
The comments came as Eyre released a highly anticipated new vaccine policy that effectively suspends his previous requirement for all Armed Forces members to be fully vaccinated or face disciplinary action.
Vaccines will no longer be required for all those serving in uniform, including as a prerequisite for joining the military, but will instead be based on the roles and responsibilities of individual service members. The defense chief’s new order includes a list of those who will still need two doses of a Health Canada-approved vaccine, with an emphasis on quick-response units such as special forces and the disaster assistance response team.
German Health Minister Urges Stepped-up COVID Measures
Germany’s health minister on Friday urged the country’s 16 states to consider stepping up their measures against the coronavirus amid a rise in new cases.
Health Minister Karl Lauterbach said he favors requiring mask-wearing indoors, a measure that has largely faded in Germany except on public transport, in medical facilities and in care homes.
“The direction we’re going in isn’t a good one,” Lauterbach told reporters in Berlin. He added that it would be better for states to impose limited restrictions now than stricter ones later. “The sooner we step on the brake the better it will be,” he said.
Misinformation Most Amplified on TikTok, Twitter: Report
Posts spreading misinformation are most amplified on Twitter and TikTok, according to a new report that looked at the spread of false narratives online. The Integrity Institute, an advocacy group, found that Twitter and TikTok have the highest “Misinformation Amplification Factor,” a figure the report’s authors used to track the spread of misinformation.
Twitter and TikTok’s high levels of the Misinformation Amplification Factor are based on the mechanisms for “virality” on the platforms, the report found.
On TikTok, most content is public and views are generated by recommendations dependent on machine learning models that predict engagement, meaning misinformation can spread “far beyond the followers of the account that created it,” the report stated.
The report identified the highest number of misinformation posts on Facebook, based on the sample analyzed. But posts with misinformation are amplified to a lesser degree on Facebook than on Twitter and TikTok because Facebook’s sharing option has what the report called a higher level of “friction.”
Targeted Billboard Ads Are a Privacy Nightmare
Advertisers are using insights gleaned from targeted digital advertising and applying them to create physical billboards capable of serving up tailored advertisements catered to the types of people viewing them. If that concept sounds eerily familiar that’s because it’s precisely the type of physical targeted advertising vision Tom Cruise encounters when walking through a shopping center in Steven Spielberg’s 2002 sci-fi hit, The Minority Report.
These targeted billboard ads, which have existed for several years but are growing in popularity, are the subject of a new report from the U.K.-backed civil liberties group Big Brother Watch. The report aptly called “The Streets are Watching,” provides a deep dive into ways a handful of companies use facial recognition-enabled billboards to analyze the world around them and then use that data to serve up pedestrians personalized ads.
Though advertisers favor the practice for its efficiency, the report argues the mass collection of users’ data poses an inherent privacy concern with high-stakes risks. If normalized, the authors warn that targeted billboard ads threaten to potentially do away with the idea of anonymously passing through a crowd.
