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Jim Jordan Subpoenas FBI Agent Who Flagged Tweets
Congressman Jim Jordan, acting as the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has formally summoned FBI agent Elvis Chan via a subpoena, demanding he come forth and share information about the FBI’s active involvement in online censorship.
This move comes amidst escalating concerns around freedom of speech, and as a potentially significant case regarding the same issue is hovering on the doorstep of the Supreme Court.
Accusations lobbied by Jordan point towards potential intimidation and collaboration between the Executive Branch and larger corporate bodies in order to suppress speech. Chan, who served as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force liaison to companies like Facebook and Twitter, was expected to cooperate with Jordan, but his refusal to appear without having either his personal or an FBI lawyer present paved the way for the issuance of the subpoena.
The landmark case, Missouri v. Biden, might soon find itself under the Supreme Court’s scrutiny. It encapsulates the contention by Missouri and Louisiana against the federal government’s alleged influence on social media platforms to remove certain content, particularly that related to COVID-19.
Judge Blocks California Law Meant to Increase Online Safety for Kids
A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked an online child protection law in California and said it probably violates the Constitution.
Under the law, known as the California Age-Appropriate Design Code, digital platforms would have to vet their products before public release to see whether those offerings could harm kids and teens. The law also requires platforms to enable stronger data privacy protections by default for younger users.
U.S. District Court Judge Beth Labson Freeman granted a request Monday by the tech trade group NetChoice for a preliminary injunction against the measure, writing that the law probably violates the First Amendment and does “not pass constitutional muster.”
The initial ruling deals a massive blow to state lawmakers, who passed the law with broad bipartisan support last year, and to children’s safety advocates, who touted the measure as one of the strongest children’s online safety laws in the United States. Lawmakers in several other states have since pushed to replicate the standards, modeled after regulations in the United Kingdom.
Screen Time Is Contributing to Chronic Sleep Deprivation in Tweens and Teens — a Pediatric Sleep Expert Explains
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported:
A growing body of research is finding strong links between sleep, mental health and screen time in teens and tweens — the term for pre-adolescent children around the ages of 10 to 12. Amid an unprecedented mental health crisis in which some 42% of adolescents in the U.S. are suffering from mental health issues, teens are also getting too little sleep.
And it is a vicious cycle: Both a lack of sleep and the heightened activity involved in the consumption of social media and video games before bedtime can exacerbate or even trigger anxiety and depression that warrant intervention.
I am the lead physician of the sleep center at Seattle Children’s Hospital, where I study various pediatric sleep disorders. Our team of physicians and providers routinely observe firsthand the negative effects of excessive screen time, and particularly social media, both of which affect not only sleep, but also the physical and mental health of our patients.
Studies across the world in over 120,000 youth ages 6 to 18 who engage in any sort of social media have repeatedly shown worsened quality and decreased quantity of sleep. This is happening across the globe, not just in the U.S.
Google and the Department of Defense Are Building an AI-Powered Microscope to Help Doctors Spot Cancer
Dr. Nadeem Zafar is a pathologist, the kind of doctor who carries out clinical lab tests on bodily fluids and tissues to diagnose conditions like cancer. It’s a specialty that often operates behind the scenes, but it’s a crucial backbone of medical care.
Late last year, Zafar’s colleague consulted with him about a prostate cancer case. It was clear that the patient had cancer, but the two doctors disagreed about how severe it was. Zafar believed the cancer was more aggressive than his colleague did.
Zafar turned to his microscope — a canonically beloved tool in pathology that the doctors rely on to help make their diagnoses. But the device is no ordinary microscope. It’s an artificial intelligence-powered microscope built by Google and the U.S. Department of Defense.
The AI-powered tool is called an Augmented Reality Microscope, or ARM, and Google and the Department of Defense have been quietly working on it for years. The technology is still in its early days and is not actively being used to help diagnose patients yet, but initial research is promising, and officials say it could prove to be a useful tool for pathologists without easy access to a second opinion.
Google Bard Update Reveals a More Powerful AI — but It Might Scare Privacy Purists
Google has built a new model for Bard which it is calling the most capable iteration of the AI yet. Google provided an update on the new version of Bard which it calls “more intuitive, imaginative and responsive than ever before,” offering greater levels of quality and accuracy in the chatbot’s responses.
That includes giving Bard the ability to get its hooks into your emails in Gmail, and data in Google Drive and Docs, meaning you can get the AI to find info across your various files, or indeed summarize a piece of content if needed.
Bard will also be able to pull data in real-time as needed from Google Maps, Google’s travel features (hotels and flights), and YouTube, all of which will be extensions that are enabled by default (you can disable them if you wish, but they’re switched on by default in the new Bard).
Some other stuff will set some alarm bells ringing for folks, particularly the more privacy-conscious out there. Do you really want Bard’s tendrils snaking into every corner of your Google Drive, Docs, and Gmail? Doesn’t that sound like the beginning of a scenario of a nightmarish overreach from the AI?
Digital Second Amendment Unveiled: Anti-Woke AI Bot Equips Users With ‘Newest Weapons of Digital Age’
Mainstream AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft‘s Bing, and Google‘s Bard attempt to sound neutral or refuse to answer provocative questions because their AI trainers and corporate funders are ‘woke’ and embrace government censorship. Many folks complained earlier this year about left-leaning biased answers from these woke AI bots.
“The danger of training AI to be woke — in other words, lie — is deadly,” Elon Musk posted on X in December after another user asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a version of ChatGPT with the “woke settings” turned “off.” This led Musk to tweet earlier this year about creating his own uncensored chatbot that is free of corporate or governmental control.
Musk likely kicked off the counter bot (anti-woke bot) movement. The first of its kind, GatGPT, free of safety filters and woke guardrails, has been released by Defense Distributed, the company that pioneered the first 3D-printed firearm over a decade ago.
The team that built GatGPT, led by Cody Wilson, contends AI safety is a pretext for censorship and political control. They have declared a “[[Digital Second Amendment]]” that pledges to protect and distribute “the newest weapons of the digital age, not just to defend ourselves against corporate and government depredation, but to defend our civic identity and humanity.”
Elon Musk’s New X Pricing Plan Would Mean Free Speech Isn’t Quite Free
Billionaire CEO Elon Musk said Monday he plans to introduce a monthly fee to use his social media platform X, previously known as Twitter.
The new subscription payment to access X would be smaller than the $8 fee currently charged for X Premium, Musk said during a live-streamed event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The topic of their discussion was artificial intelligence, and Musk’s comments on X’s pricing plan came after Netanyahu mentioned the problem of bot accounts that amplify hate speech.
“The single most important reason we’re moving to have a small monthly payment for use of the X system is it’s the only way I can think of to combat vast armies of bots,” Musk replied, according to Axios.
Musk explained that a subscription fee would make it more difficult for people to create bot accounts because each account would need to register a new credit card.
