Login
Their Kids Died After Buying Drugs on Snapchat. Now the Parents Are Suing
Hanh Badger was working from home on the morning of June 17, 2021. She went to the kitchen to grab a second cup of coffee and noticed her daughter’s bedroom door was still shut. Badger found Brooke, 17, pale and motionless in bed.
In the ensuing days, Badger’s husband and son were able to gain access to Brooke’s computer and, with it, her Snapchat account. They found screenshots of what looked like a menu of narcotics, and conversations with a drug dealer showing Brooke had purchased what she believed to be Roxicet, a prescription medication containing acetaminophen and oxycodone typically prescribed for pain relief. Instead, the substance was a counterfeit pill that held a lethal dose of fentanyl.
Across the U.S., young people are dying from fentanyl in record numbers, even as overall drug use is on the decline. Nationally, the number of opioid overdose deaths for people 24 and under nearly doubled from 2019-2021. And according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the number of overdoses attributed to synthetic opioids like fentanyl dwarfs that of any other substance.
In California, where Brooke lived, fentanyl-related overdose deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds surged by nearly 800% between 2018 and 2021, according to data from the California Overdose Surveillance Dashboard. Many are young victims poisoned by counterfeit pills that have been pressed to look like legitimate prescription drugs, but that are laced with fentanyl, an opioid that is deadly even in granular quantities. Typically, those teenagers acquired what they believed to be Percocet, Xanax or other pharmaceuticals online through social media.
In their grief, victims’ parents are motivated to end this crisis to prevent another family’s suffering while also giving meaning to their loss. Many have launched awareness campaigns, founded educational programs and advocated for legislative change. And now, some parents are taking to the civil courts, targeting the tech giants whose platforms facilitated their children’s purchases of pills that killed them.
With New Declaration, Luminaries Warn That Online Censorship Is Destroying Freedom
Since the COVID pandemic, authoritarians in the U.S. and around the world have cynically used claims of “disinformation” to censor ordinary people and stifle dissent about everything from the efficacy of masks and vaccines to the war in Ukraine, the Middle East situation, and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Whatever your political bent, this new form of speech control is a threat to you. Only by debating freely in a rapidly fragmenting world can we resolve differences without resorting to violence.
To that end, a group of 136 academics, historians and journalists from the left, right and center of the political spectrum have come together to warn President Biden that this rapidly growing censorship regime “undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.” In their “Westminster Declaration,” released Wednesday, the international group points out that the best way to combat actual disinformation is with free speech.
The eclectic group that has signed the declaration to fight censorship includes Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, U.K. biologist Richard Dawkins, NYU social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, Julian Assange, the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, actor Tim Robbins, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, economist Glenn Loury, filmmaker Oliver Stone, whistleblower Edward Snowden, British comedian John Cleese, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, British journalist Matt Ridley, Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, Harvard professor of medicine Martin Kulldorf, Australian journalist Adam Creighton, French science journalist Xavier Azalbert and German filmmaker Robert Cibis.
AI Is Becoming More Powerful — but Also More Secretive
When OpenAI published details of the stunningly capable AI language model GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT, in March, its researchers filled 100 pages. They also left out a few important details — like anything substantial about how it was actually built or how it works.
That was no accidental oversight, of course. OpenAI and other big companies are keen to keep the workings of their most prized algorithms shrouded in mystery, in part out of fear the technology might be misused but also from worries about giving competitors a leg up.
A study released by researchers at Stanford University this week shows just how deep — and potentially dangerous — the secrecy is around GPT-4 and other cutting-edge AI systems. Some AI researchers I’ve spoken to say that we are in the midst of a fundamental shift in the way AI is pursued. They fear it’s one that makes the field less likely to produce scientific advances, provides less accountability, and reduces reliability and safety.
Threads ‘Temporarily’ Blocking COVID-Related Search Terms
Threads search is blocking terms like “COVID,” “vaccines,” “long COVID,” and others, but it is reportedly only temporary according to Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri. This comes a week after he said the app would not “amplify news.”
When Thread users input COVID-related search terms for news articles or other information, the platform blocks any information from pulling up, barring a link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. The Washington Post first reported on the move back in September, and Threads’ parent company, Meta, acknowledged that it is intentionally blocking the search terms.
Mosseri posted on Threads Monday that the company doesn’t have a timeline for when it will reverse the block but says the move is temporary and being worked on. He pointed to the war in Israel and Gaza, saying responsibly managing that content takes precedence and is “the biggest safety focus right now.” It could take weeks or months to reverse the block, according to Mosseri.
Threads entered the fray as an alternative to X, formerly called Twitter, back in July. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg promoted Threads as going back to the basics saying, “The vision for Threads is to create an option and friendly public space for conversation.”
Millions More 23andMe Records Leaked Online
Another database belonging to genetic testing website 23andMe has allegedly been published on a dark net forum, just days after an initial leak was revealed.
An individual going by the alias Golem published a database on BreachForums containing sensitive information on four million users.
Subsequent TechCrunch investigations confirmed that at least some of the data published matched known and public information. Roughly two weeks ago, Golem announced stealing sensitive user data from 23andMe, claiming to have done so by means of credential stuffing.
The database Golem posted most recently contains records on four million users, reports said. The hacker said the data includes information on British individuals, including some of the “wealthiest people living in the U.S. and Western Europe.” A company spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company is aware of the news and is currently “reviewing the data to determine if it is legitimate.”
Zuckerberg and Chan Announce a New York Biohub to Build Disease-Fighting Cellular Machines
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, pediatrician and philanthropist Priscilla Chan, announced on Wednesday plans to invest $250 million over 10 years to establish a new “biohub” in New York City focused on building a new class of cellular machines that can surveil the body and snuff out disease.
The new initiative, publicly revealed at the 2023 STAT Summit and previewed exclusively to STAT, is the latest program from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, or CZI, a company the couple founded in 2015 to help cure, prevent, or manage all disease by 2100. It joins the original San Francisco Biohub founded in 2016 and a Chicago Biohub founded earlier this year.
The initial biohub in CZI’s network was diffuse in ambition but developed tools for analyzing large troves of data, particularly from single-cell sequencing, and did direct work on infectious diseases. For the new hubs, CZI solicited specific grand challenges to be achieved in 10 to 15 years. The Chicago researchers will try to use tiny devices to decode the secrets of inflammatory disease — such as how immune cells malfunction to wreak havoc.
The new hub, consisting of researchers at Yale, Columbia, and Rockefeller, will essentially attempt the opposite: decode precisely how immune cells successfully sense and snuff out cellular fires, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, in hopes of engineering cells that can detect and eventually treat conflagrations the immune system can’t see or can’t put out.
If everything goes right, it would eventually amount to an internal lab-built police, fire, and medical corps to stamp out disease before symptoms appear.
Shasta County Appoints Public Health Officer Who Fought COVID Vaccine Mandates
The Shasta County Board of Supervisors has appointed an outspoken critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates to be the county’s new public health officer.
The hiring of Redding family physician James Mu comes 17 months after the board fired its previous public health officer, Karen Ramstrom, whom supervisors had criticized for following state mandates requiring masks and vaccinations during the pandemic.
“I would like to follow evidence-based policy. However, if there are medical dogma that are not good for the population in our county, then I will question and even challenge them,” said Mu, who also opposed vaccines and masks for children, after the supervisors voted to hire him Tuesday night.
Mu was one of 12 Shasta County physicians who, in February 2022, publicly signed an “Open Letter on COVID-19” that decried vaccine mandates, the testing of asymptomatic people and “the physical, psychological, and social impacts of mask and vaccine mandates on children.” The letter touted the benefits of natural immunity and promoted the use of “early treatments” to prevent the disease.
Amazon Will Start Testing Drones That Will Drop Prescriptions on Your Doorstep, Literally
Amazon will soon make prescription drugs fall from the sky when the e-commerce giant becomes the latest company to test drone deliveries for medications.
The company said Wednesday that customers in College Station, Texas, can now get prescriptions delivered by a drone within an hour of placing their order.
Amazon says customers will be able to choose from more than 500 medications, a list that includes common treatments for conditions like the flu or pneumonia, but not controlled substances.
