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Former ESPN Reporter Allison Williams Sues Network and Disney After Vaccine Mandate Led to Firing
Former ESPN reporter Allison Williams is suing the sports network after she was fired in 2021 for failing to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Williams and former ESPN producer Beth Faber filed a joint lawsuit against ESPN and Disney in Connecticut on Wednesday, claiming their religious beliefs were violated.
The lawsuit claims that ESPN and Disney made no efforts to accommodate Williams, who offered to work remotely, test regularly and wear a mask, although NFL teams, college football teams and certain venues didn’t exclude the unvaccinated.
Williams’ exemption request was denied in October 2021 and she was subsequently terminated a week later after refusing to get vaccinated, the suit says. Faber’s religious exemption was also denied and she was fired in September 2021 after nearly 31 years at the network. In the lawsuit, Faber said an ESPN HR representative told her “maybe God has led you to a new career, when God closes a door, he opens another.”
Social Media’s Effects on Teen Mental Health Comes Into Focus
Experts are increasingly warning of a connection between heavy social media use and mental health issues in children — a hot topic now driving major lawsuits against tech giants.
Why it matters: Seattle Public Schools’ recently filed a lawsuit against TikTok, Meta, Snap and others — which accuses the social media giants of contributing to a youth mental health crisis — and is one of hundreds of similar cases.
Driving the news: Some scientists who study technology’s effects on children say the negatives far outweigh any positives.
“Most of the large studies show that heavy users of social media are about twice as likely to be depressed as light users,” says Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and leading expert on the subject, whose forthcoming book, “Generations,” describes the differences among the six current generations of Americans.
Tech Companies Want Your Kid’s Birth Date. Should You Tell Them?
Technology companies already know all about you and your family, including your location, interests and other demographic details. But recently, they have been asking a question that can feel a little too personal. Streaming services, games and social media companies want to know young children’s birth dates.
When Disney Plus started demanding that existing users enter their children’s exact birth date to continue streaming, many parents were alarmed. The app often knows a child is watching thanks to built-in settings that let you set up profiles for kids.
More tech companies are trying to confirm the exact ages of their users, including those who are under 18. In addition to streaming services like Google’s YouTube and Disney Plus, social media companies including Instagram and various games and services have been asking for birth dates.
“It’s understandable that parents feel hesitant. Companies are already collecting so much information on their users that they should be able to infer what ages they are,” said Irene Ly, policy counsel at Common Sense Media.
In the Next Pandemic, Let’s Pay People to Get Vaccinated
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that people like money. If you show them the cash, they’re generally more likely to do what you want, whether that be to stop smoking, work out or keep up with their medication.
As vaccines started to roll out of labs during the pandemic, governments began wondering: How can we encourage as many people as possible to get vaccinated against COVID-19? Countries tried a mishmash of approaches: They rolled out rigorous public health messaging, engaged with hard-to-reach communities, got celebrities to plug the vaccines and made them compulsory.
But policymakers and academics also suggested another, controversial approach — why not just offer people cold, hard cash? This reignited a thorny debate.
In a new paper published in the journal Nature, researchers Florian Schneider, Pol Campos-Mercade, Armando Meier and others addressed these concerns. In 2021, Meier and his colleagues conducted a randomized trial to see if financial incentives increased vaccine uptake. In their study, published in the journal Science in October 2021, Meier and his coauthors recruited over 8,000 people in Sweden and offered a portion of them $24 to get vaccinated within the next 30 days, while the others were offered nothing.
The researchers found that the cash incentive boosted the proportion of people who got vaccinated by about 4%. That number didn’t change significantly when factoring in age, race, ethnicity, education or income. Other research during the pandemic also found that financial incentives were effective.
Biden’s Plea to Lawmakers in Rare Op-Ed: Unite to Hold Tech Accountable
President Joe Biden called on Republicans and Democrats in Congress to unite and pass legislation that places new guardrails on the tech industry, writing in a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that the administration’s current authority to rein in Big Tech isn’t enough.
Biden focused on three key areas of tech legislation he hopes to see this Congress. First, he urged lawmakers to pass federal privacy protections that limit the collection of sensitive data and advocated for banning targeted advertising to children altogether.
Next, he reiterated a more tempered version of a call he made on the campaign trail in 2020 to “fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” the law that protects online platforms from being held liable for their users’ posts while preserving their ability to moderate such content. He also called for more transparency around the algorithms tech companies use to determine what information users see to ensure they are not pushing unsafe content to kids or discriminating against groups of users.
Finally, Biden called for “fairer rules of the road” when it comes to competition in the tech sector.
Federal Government Proposes Greater Role in Local News
The federal government is looking to get more involved in your local news outlets, according to their latest proposal.
In a report released last week, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) proposed issuing public policy to help local journalism and combat misinformation. The GAO reported that local news’ lack of economic viability was the problem causing over 2,000 local newspapers to close since the early 2000s.
The GAO proposed tax incentives or credits, direct government funding, government advertising, federal grants or loans and even government intervention with respect to dominant internet platforms to bolster local nonprofit news. Their report also proposed that the government should establish policies to shield certain “public interest journalism” from market failure.
The GAO admitted that no universal definition of “public interest journalism” exists. However, they stated that they define “public interest journalism” as that which covers issues of “public significance to engage citizens and inform democratic decision-making,” which includes investigations on “civically important topics.”
Germany Launches an Attack on Google’s Data Harvesting
German regulators are tightening the screws on Google’s data business, announcing plans to force the search giant to give users more control over how information is tracked and used across its subsidiary businesses, a threat to the tech giant’s empire in the continent’s largest economy.
The move came Wednesday from Germany’s anti-trust regulator Bundeskartellamt, German for Federal Cartel Office. In a statement, Bundeskartellamt said Google doesn’t give users enough say over how the company collects and shares data across its various services (Google Search, YouTube and Maps, for example) as well as combining that information with data collected from third-party apps and websites. This allows Google to create dossiers about users for advertising purposes, or use consumer data to develop algorithms and other products.
Bundeskartellamt said Google’s settings are too vague, and the company must provide more transparency over how and why data is collected. Google can’t discourage users from using these controls by designing its interfaces so it’s easier and faster to just say yes to whatever the company wants to do with your data.
Notably, this ruling isn’t about privacy, at least not directly. Bundeskartellamt’s mandate is competition, and the assessment finds that Google’s data harvesting practices give it an unfair advantage in the marketplace due to the company’s outsized position in the digital economy.
Meta Faces a Future of More Legal Woes and Falling Revenues
Since Facebook officially became Meta in October 2021, the company has lost more than two-thirds of its stock market value. Its difficulties can’t all be attributed to the name change, but the “Meta era” has so far brought little but bad news for Mark Zuckerberg and his company’s shareholders.
Just over a month before the rebrand, Meta, which controls the platforms Instagram and WhatsApp, hit an all-time stock market high. Just a few weeks later, the revelations of whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen proved hugely damaging. Haugen leaked thousands of internal company documents to The Wall Street Journal, revealing the extent to which the company had prioritized profit over dealing with hate, violence and misinformation on its platforms.
Throughout 2022, the problems kept piling up. The share price has been on a sharp downward spiral for 15 months now. Its revenues and ad sales are falling while regulatory scrutiny is intensifying. Then there’s the massive spending on the metaverse, which is increasingly spooking investors.
Meta was officially the worst-performing company on the S&P 500 index in 2022. Amid a wider sell-off among the major tech firms, Meta is the one struggling most of all.
EU Court: Tourists May Get Refunds Over COVID Measures
Travelers whose package tours were ruined by the imposition of restrictions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic may be entitled to at least a partial refund, the European Union’s highest court said Thursday.
The European Court of Justice weighed in after being asked for its opinion by a court in Germany. The Munich court is considering the case of two people who bought a two-week package vacation for the Spanish island of Gran Canaria starting on March 13, 2020, just as the pandemic hit Europe. They are seeking a 70% reduction in the price because of restrictions that were imposed there two days later and their early return.
The EU court found that “a traveler is entitled to a reduction in the price of his or her package where a lack of conformity of the travel services included in the package is due to restrictions that have been imposed at the travel destination to fight the spread of an infectious disease, such as COVID-19.”
