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‘They Don’t Want It Discussed’ — Megyn Kelly Reacts to Moderna Surveilling Her Vaccine Criticism
Political commentator Megyn Kelly has reacted to the fact that she was singled out and monitored by the large pharmaceutical corporation, Moderna, after sharing her adverse reactions to the COVID vaccine publicly.
Last year, Kelly voiced regret over her decision to get the COVID shot which, in her case, reportedly resulted in autoimmune complications. As a healthy 52-year-old woman, Kelly, in her podcast, expressed doubt over the necessity of getting vaccinated, as she contracted COVID “many times” after.
She further shared that her annual medical check-up had revealed a positive result for an autoimmune condition for the first time ever. “And she said ‘yes.’ Yes. I wasn’t the only one she’d seen that with,” Kelly noted, referring to New York’s finest rheumatologist’s reaction to her querying whether her vaccination and subsequent COVID contraction within three weeks could be linked.
Subsequently, a year later, a separate investigation conducted by Lee Fang revealed that Moderna had marked Kelly under its controversial “misinformation” reporting system.
Moderna utilized artificial intelligence to scrutinize millions of online conversations worldwide, influencing the narrative around vaccines. Internal documents revealed that the company paid special attention to prominent vaccine dissenters.
Florida Grand Jury Investigating COVID Vaccines Releases First Report
More than a year after the Florida Supreme Court granted Gov. Ron DeSantis’ request to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate “criminal or wrongful activity” related to COVID-19 vaccines, the body released its first report and said its probe is “nowhere near complete.”
Their 33-page report released late Friday said “lockdowns were not a good trade” and that “we have never had sound evidence of (masks’) effectiveness against SARS-CoV-2 transmission,” among other conclusions.
“In a way, this Grand Jury has allowed us to do something that most Americans simply do not have the time, access, or wherewithal to do: Follow the science,” the report said.
Conclusions in the report on masks contradict recommendations from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s guidance says research shows masks are effective in stopping the spread of COVID-19 and recommends as of late January that people with symptoms, people who have tested positive, and people who have been exposed to the virus should wear masks when indoors in public.
The report said the grand jury talked with doctors, scientists and professors “with a broad range of viewpoints.”
Zuck Brags About How Much of Your Facebook, Instagram Posts Will Power His AI
When you post something on Instagram or Facebook, you probably think you’re just sharing it with your friends, family, and maybe a few others. But that’s not all. Everything you’ve ever posted is being used to train Meta’s powerful AI. Mark Zuckerberg bragged about his vast library of content, which includes all your posts, reels, and comments, during Meta’s earnings call Thursday. Your social media profiles are now one of the most valuable datasets on Earth, and Meta claims it owns them.
“On Facebook and Instagram there are hundreds of billions of publicly shared images and tens of billions of public videos,” said Meta’s CEO on its earnings call last week. “We estimate [this] is greater than the Common Crawl dataset, and people share large numbers of public text posts in comments across our services as well.”
This is Meta’s next big play. Instagram and Facebook have addicted users for the last 20 years, making sure to monetize us through advertisers every step of the way. Now, they’re revisiting your old posts, your special moments, and your big life updates, and using it to create billion-dollar AI tools.
Zuckerberg’s braggadocious claim about Meta’s very large dataset comes shortly after The New York Times sued OpenAI over intellectual property. But Meta is pulling an old trick out of its playbook: extracting as much value out of Instagram and Facebook users as humanly possible, and totally owning your online self.
‘Inevitable Fire Sale’ of 23andMe to ‘Overseas PE Firm’ Could Be National Security Risk
Several years ago, DNA-testing company 23andMe began publicly trading on Nasdaq following a deal to merge with VG Acquisition Corp., a special-purpose acquisition company founded by billionaire Richard Branson. The company was pimped by Hollywood elites, such as Oprah and Lizzo, as market capitalization topped $6 billion in late 2021.
Fast forward this past week, 23andMe has lost 94% of its market cap following the November 2021 peak, and Nasdaq threatened to delist the penny stock as it closed around 69 cents per share on Friday.
Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe’s chief executive, has led the cash-burning startup that has never turned a profit. After three rounds of layoffs and a subsidiary sale, a Wall Street Journal report said the company “could run out of cash by 2025.”
A healthcare investor named Will Manidis asked this question on X: “Within months you will be able to buy genomics data from 14 million Americans for +/- $200m?” Manidis warned in the viral post: “The inevitable fire sale of this mess to an overseas PE firm is going to be a national security matter on the scale of which we haven’t seen in healthcare in years.”
A possible fire sale of 23andMe and its stockpile of millions of DNA samples of Americans is something to keep a close eye on.
Meta and Mark Zuckerberg Must Not Be Allowed to Shape the Next Era of Humanity
A combination of tech exceptionalism, brazen defiance and lots and lots of money have enabled Mark Zuckerberg’s company to accumulate vast market power over the two decades of its existence amid sclerotic antitrust oversight and “repeated and deliberate policy failures,” in the words of Daniel A Hanley of the Open Markets Institute.
In the absence of federal privacy legislation, public interest data governance and meaningful antitrust enforcement, Meta, along with Google, was able to create a new economic order built on the parasitic logic of surveillance and behavior modification in what technologist Shoshana Zuboff has aptly dubbed surveillance capitalism.
We did not vote for or acquiesce to this system. It was foisted upon us by Mark Zuckerberg’s “move fast and break things” ethos and the failure to prevent the vast consolidation of power in a handful of Big Tech firms, whose insatiable quest for “permissionless innovation” has come at great cost. Now generative AI is poised to upend labor markets and democratic institutions around the world.
If the past 20 years have taught us anything about this one-time upstart turned tech titan, it is that Meta and Zuckerberg must not be allowed to unilaterally shape the next era of humanity. As the tech world celebrates this milestone, it is time to demand accountability for the harms propagated by powerful tech companies such as Meta and break up the tech behemoth before it wreaks further havoc on individuals, society and the economy. Dismantling Meta’s digital legacy is imperative if we want to wrest back control and save democracy.
Meta Surges With Record $196 Billion Gain in Stock Market Value
Meta Platforms added $196 billion in stock market value on Friday, marking the biggest one-day gain by any company in Wall Street history after the Facebook parent declared its first dividend and posted robust results.
Meta’s (META.O) stock surged 20.3% for the session, also recording its biggest one-day percentage increase in a year and its third biggest since its 2012 Wall Street debut. Its stock market value now stands at more than $1.22 trillion.
TSA Facial Recognition Tech Is Latest Security Theater Absurdity
Get ready for more TSA follies: The agency that oversees our Kafka-esque airport experiences is set to add another layer of security theater.
This time it’s plans for a wide-scale rollout of its controversial facial recognition tech at more than 400 airports. The tech is purported to take real-time, photo-based biometric data on each traveler so it can be matched against their ID.
Color us skeptical: The Transportation Security Administration is a byword for government ineptitude. It’s accidentally published confidential guides to how passenger screening works. This is the agency we’re going to trust to run complex biometric technology correctly?
And while we generally don’t buy the “privacy concerns” here (airports are public places, after all), it’s hard to trust TSA’s vow that any info collected “will not be used for surveillance or any law enforcement purpose,” when it already got in hot water back in the Bush years for misappropriating airline passenger data and lying to Congress about it.
Mother Whose Son Died From Drugs Bought on Social Media Wants Stronger Protections for Kids
Amy Neville, whose teenage son died of fentanyl poisoning after obtaining counterfeit pills he obtained from a drug dealer on Snapchat, is calling for Snap and other social media companies to implement stronger safeguards for children on those platforms.
“These days, my life’s work is traveling the country and educating folks on social media harms and the drug crisis as it is right now, and that all stems from the fact that I lost my own child, Alexander, who was 14 years old when we lost him,” said Neville, president of the not-for-profit Alexander Neville Foundation, told FOX Business.
Neville and a group of other families who lost children to overdoses caused by drugs obtained via Snapchat filed a lawsuit against Snap, the company that operates the social media platform. She said the suit is the first of its kind and that it’s progressing to the discovery stage this month.
‘If Instagram Didn’t Exist, It Wouldn’t Have Happened’: A Mother’s Search for Her Trafficked Daughter
Robyn Cory’s daughter Kristen was 15 when she was allowed to open her own Instagram account. “We thought we’d been responsible and done everything we could to make it safe,” says Cory. Months later, Kristen disappeared from the family home after being groomed on Instagram’s direct message service by a criminal gang, who then sold her for sex on the streets of Houston.
Her daughter never recovered from her ordeal, Cory says. Kristen returned home but has since gone missing after being trafficked again. Her mother does not know if she is still alive. Cory blames the gang who trafficked her daughter for destroying her life. She also blames Instagram, which she believes played a critical role in her daughter’s sex trafficking.
“If Instagram didn’t exist, this wouldn’t have happened to my daughter,” she says. “Instagram is why it was so easy [for these people] to do this.”
“My message for other parents is: don’t let your kids have social media. Instagram needs to take measures to stop kids from signing up for accounts and to stop them from receiving messages from people they don’t know. They need to be protected.”
