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Judge Denies RFK Jr.’s Request for Restraining Order Against Google in Censorship Suit
A federal judge on Wednesday denied a request from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to temporarily restrain Google from removing two videos of the presidential candidate as he seeks to sue the company for censorship.
U.S. District Judge Trina Thompson, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that Kennedy’s claim that the company violated his First Amendment rights is unlikely to succeed because Google is a private entity. Thompson also wrote that a restraining order was not necessary because he would not be irreparably harmed if the order was not granted.
In his suit, Kennedy claimed Google has engaged in censorship under the coercion of federal government officials. YouTube, which is owned by Google, had removed videos of Kennedy making what the company said were medical misinformation claims. The firm contends that the content violated YouTube’s policy against discussing the COVID-19 vaccines.
“We are pursuing this case on behalf of all those Americans who oppose censorship by the Government working through private companies,” Kennedy’s campaign told POLITICO in a statement. “We are prepared to continue our efforts.”
The litigation is expected to continue, with the judge setting the next hearing in the case for Nov. 7.
The Kindergarten Vaccine Exemption Rate Keeps Ticking Up
The nationwide median rate of kindergartners with vaccine exemptions nearly doubled between the school years ending in 2012 and 2022, per CDC estimates.
The big picture: While COVID-19 vaccination is not required for young children attending public school anywhere in the U.S., it appears that concerns over that shot may be fueling broader vaccine skepticism among a relatively small but growing number of parents — though that trend certainly existed before the pandemic.
While children are generally required to get a number of vaccinations before attending public school, exemptions can be given for both medical and non-medical reasons (such as religious or moral objections), depending on local rules.
By the numbers: The nationwide median kindergarten vaccine exemption rate was rising even before the COVID-19 pandemic, increasing from 1.4% in 2012 to 2.6% in 2019. Zoom in: As of 2022, Idaho (9.8%), Utah (7.4%) and Oregon (7%) had the highest median kindergarten vaccination exemption rates.
Kentucky School District Cancels Classes 2 Weeks Into Year Due to COVID, Flu and Strep Outbreaks
Less than two weeks into the school year, a Kentucky school district has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the week after nearly a fifth of the students came down with illnesses including COVID-19, strep throat and the flu.
The Lee County School district, which has just under 900 students, began classes on Aug. 9 but noticed attendance drop to about 82% on Friday, according to Superintendent Earl Ray Schuler.
The district canceled classes on Tuesday and Wednesday and will shift to remote learning on Thursday and Friday. Extracurricular activities, including sports practices and games, have been canceled through the week to allow for a deep clean of the school, Schuler said.
Mask Mandates Reemerge Amid Upturn in COVID Cases
The recent upturn in COVID-19 cases in some regions has spurred a handful of entities around the country to reinstate mask mandates, reigniting the debate over what place masking requirements have in an era of living with the coronavirus.
Earlier this week, Hollywood movie studio Lionsgate asked its employees to wear masks on certain floors of its facilities in Santa Monica in response to a few staff members testing positive for COVID-19.
Kaiser Permanente began to require staff, patients and visitors to wear masks at its facility in Santa Rosa, Calif., this week in response to a spike in cases. Upstate Medical University in New York announced a similar decision last week for two of its hospitals.
Schools like Rutgers University in New Jersey and Morris Brown College in Georgia have issued mask mandates for their respective campuses, with the Atlanta-based school reinstating masks as a two-week precautionary measure.
Driverless Cars Are Worse at Spotting Kids and Dark-Skinned People, Study Says
Driverless car systems have a bias problem, according to a new study from Kings College London. The study examined eight AI-powered pedestrian detection systems used for autonomous driving research. Researchers ran more than 8,000 images through the software and found that the self-driving car systems were nearly 20% better at detecting adult pedestrians than kids, and more than 7.5% better at detecting light-skinned pedestrians over dark-skinned ones. The AI was even worse at spotting dark-skinned people in low light and low settings, making the tech even less safe at night.
For children and people of color, crossing the street could get more dangerous in the near future. According to the researchers, a major source of the technology’s problems with kids and dark-skinned people comes from bias in the data used to train the AI, which contains more adults and light-skinned people.
Algorithms reflect the biases present in datasets and the minds of the people who create them. One common example is facial recognition software, which consistently demonstrates less accuracy with the faces of women, dark-skinned people, and Asian people, in particular. These concerns haven’t stopped the enthusiastic embrace of this kind of AI technology. Facial recognition is already responsible for putting innocent black people in jail.
You Are Not Responsible for Your Own Online Privacy
Generative AI completely obliterates the idea of individual responsibility for privacy because you can’t control these algorithms’ access to your information, or what they do with it. Tools like ChatGPT, Dall-E, and Google Bard are trained on data scraped without consent, or even notice.
At their worst, training sets suck up vast amounts of digital information and combine it into a data slurry that serves as the raw material for generative AI. As tech companies are scrambling to incorporate generative AI into every imaginable product, from search engines to games to military gadgets, it’s impossible to know where this output is going, or how it might be interpreted.
Their privacy-violating predecessors, data brokers, also scraped the web and assembled massive dossiers on individuals, but their outputs aren’t available to the average person, for free, or integrated into search engines and word processors. The widespread availability of generative AI compounds potential privacy violations and opens up more people to harmful consequences.
Breakthrough AI Implants Let Paralyzed Woman ‘Talk’ for First Time in Years
A woman who didn’t utter a word for years after a paralyzing stroke has regained the ability to speak through artificial intelligence.
The groundbreaking procedure uses an array of 253 electrodes, which were implanted in the brain of Ann Johnson, 48, and then linked to a bank of computers through a small port connection affixed to her head.
The team from the University of California, San Francisco, together with colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley, said this is the first time either speech or facial expressions have been synthesized from brain signals.
To train the AI system, Johnson had to silently “repeat” different phrases from a 1,024-word vocabulary over and over until the computer recognized the brain activity pattern associated with each sound.
