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Mother Sues TikTok After Daughter Dies Following ‘Blackout Challenge’
The mother of a 10-year-old girl alleged to have died after taking part in a viral social media challenge last December has launched a wrongful death lawsuit against TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance.
Tawainna Anderson’s daughter, Nylah, died in December after taking part in the “Blackout Challenge,” which encourages social media users to try to hold their breath until they pass out, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on Thursday.
Anderson has accused TikTok and its parent company of negligence and having a “defective design,” blaming the platform’s algorithms for exposing a young child to a dangerous challenge. TikTok’s interface automatically suggests videos to users as they scroll the app’s main feed, known as its “For You Page.”
Court Opens Way for Flood of Texas ‘Censorship’ Lawsuits
Tech platforms are facing a new reality: Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, Texans could immediately start suing giants like Meta and YouTube over content moderation decisions they don’t agree with.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed an earlier ruling that had stopped Texas from enforcing its social media law, HB 20, last week. Industry groups asked the Supreme Court Friday for an emergency stay.
The law’s supporters see it as a way to get Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media companies to stop what many on the right have long viewed as “censorship” of conservative viewpoints. Opponents point out that the law is likely to let virtually anyone challenge any content-related decision by the platforms, even though most content moderation involves blocking spam and porn and barring harassment and bullying.
HB 20, which applies to platforms with 50 million or more U.S. monthly users, bars “censorship” based on “viewpoint.” Texas passed HB 20 last September, but a federal district court judge blocked it from going into effect in December.
Louisiana Supreme Court Drops Charges Against Pastor Who Held Church During COVID Lockdown
On Friday, the Louisiana Supreme Court ruled in favor of Tony Spell, the Central pastor who continued to hold church services in defiance of restrictions Gov. John Bel Edwards imposed to stop the spread of COVID.
The justices overruled lower courts, deciding that the restrictions on gatherings at churches and the stay-home mandate imposed were unconstitutional. The court ordered the charges against Spell be dropped.
In the opinion, the court wrote, “In this criminal proceeding, we find certain provisions of two executive orders, as applied to the defendant, violate his fundamental right to exercise religion, do not survive strict scrutiny, and are thus unconstitutional.”
Judge Tosses COVID Vaccine Objections of Hanford Workers
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought by several hundred Hanford nuclear reservation and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory workers in Richland, Washington, over COVID-19 vaccine requirements.
The lawsuit was filed in November to halt enforcement of President Joe Biden’s executive orders requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for Department of Energy employees and the employees of contractors and subcontractors on federal projects, The Tri-City Herald reported.
But U.S. Judge Thomas Rice found that lawyers for the Hanford and national lab workers had not provided clear arguments nor specific information about most workers to make their case.
Rice had already refused to temporarily halt enforcement of the vaccine mandates while the lawsuit proceeded. The judge said 307 of the workers in the case had not shown they were harmed by the vaccine mandate or that a decision in their favor would redress any harm.
4 Air Force Cadets May Not Graduate Due to Vaccine Refusal
Four cadets at the Air Force Academy may not graduate or be commissioned as military officers this month because they have refused the COVID-19 vaccine, and they may be required to pay back thousands of dollars in tuition costs, according to Air Force officials.
It’s the only military academy, so far, where cadets may face such penalties. The Army and Navy said that as of now, not one of their seniors is being prevented from graduating at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, or the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, due to vaccine refusals. The graduations are in about two weeks.
Members of Congress, the military and the public have questioned if the exemption reviews by the military services have been fair. There have been multiple lawsuits filed against the mandate, mainly centering on the fact that very few service members have been granted religious exemptions from the shots.
AG: Kansas Penalized $350K for Failure to Enforce Vaccine Mandate for Healthcare Workers
The Kansas Attorney General has confirmed that the state lost nearly $350,000 due to the failure to enforce COVID-19 vaccine mandates for healthcare workers.
Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt says on Thursday, May 12, he asked the U.S. Supreme Court to again review the legality of President Joe Biden’s Administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for healthcare workers.
AG Schmidt has claimed the mandate has caused disruption in the healthcare workforce — particularly in small, rural communities.
De Blasio Urges Mayor Adams to Keep His COVID Policies on Standby: ‘You May Need Them Real Soon’
Bill de Blasio doesn’t want Mayor Adams to turn the page on his signature pandemic policies just yet.
As COVID-19 cases continue to tick up across the five boroughs, the former mayor urged his successor Friday to be ready to rapidly reimplement some of the public health restrictions he has scrapped since taking over the helm at City Hall.
As mayor, de Blasio implemented the school mask requirement and Key2NYC, which required proof of vaccination for indoor activities like dining, drinking and fitness.
Major Vaccine Bills Are Dying in the California Legislature. Here’s Why.
San Francisco Chronicle via MSN reported:
When it comes to passing legislation to mandate or urge more people to get COVID-19 vaccines, there seems to be a common refrain at the California Capitol: Maybe next year.
Lawmakers still have months left in their 2021 session, but an ambitious slate of vaccine bills proposed by Democrats is on life support. Its two cornerstone bills — one to require employers to vaccinate their workers and another to require the shot for school children regardless of whether their parents object — have been dropped.
Legislators who sponsored the bills said while each of those measures faced unique setbacks, the situation also speaks to the dwindling appetite, both among some lawmakers and the public at large, for debating coronavirus rules.
It’s a dramatic shift from just a few months ago when legislators rolled out a half-dozen major vaccine bills and Gov. Gavin Newsom boasted that California would be the first state to require the COVID vaccine in schools. At the time, lawmakers braced for what they expected would be a flood of raucous, anti-vaccine protests in Sacramento.
Kansas Governor Vetoes Republican Plan to Ban Mask Mandates
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly on Friday vetoed a bill that would prohibit government mask mandates in Kansas and curb the power of state and local health officials during outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Republican lawmakers saw the measure as protecting personal liberties, but Kelly said in her veto message that it would prevent adequate responses to outbreaks of diseases like measles, tuberculosis and even bird flu.
Big Tech Lobbyists Are Calling on the Supreme Court to Block a Texas Anti-Censorship Law, Warning It Would Open the Floodgates to Extremist Content
Two leading tech lobby groups have called on the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down a Texas anti-censorship law, according to court documents filed Friday.
Texas’ HB 20 law was reinstated on Wednesday, having been blocked by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last year. The legislation makes it illegal for social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to “block, ban, remove, de-platform, [or] demonetize” users’ accounts.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and NetChoice — which represent companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok — is contesting HB 20, warning it would encourage extremist content on the platforms.
The groups have called on the Supreme Court to block the law, warning it allows extremists to sue social media giants for censorship.
AI Can Now Predict a Person’s Race From Medical X-Rays
A key advantage of artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is its ability to find patterns that are not apparent to the human eye. An astonishing new study published in The Lancet Digital Health shows that AI can predict a person’s race based on X-ray images with a high degree of accuracy, but scientists do not know exactly how.
“The deep learning models assessed in this study showed a high ability to detect patient race using chest X-ray scans, with sustained performance on other modalities and strong external validations across datasets,” the researchers reported.
The researchers conducted a number of tests in an effort to discover how AI could achieve this. They conducted experiments in hopes of isolating the specific image features that enabled AI to predict racial identity.
We’re Publishing the Facebook Papers. Here’s How Facebook Killed News Feed Fixes Over Fear of Conservative Backlash.
Mark Zuckerberg, whose platform received $81 million for ads on behalf of the two White House contenders, defensively belittled his own creation: Within days of the results, he told a tech conference crowd it would be “pretty crazy” to assume Facebook — the world’s largest communications platform — was capable of influencing voters “in any way.” Ten months later, Zuckerberg would claim to “regret” those words.
Soon after the off-the-cuff dismissal, however, sources inside Facebook told Gizmodo that political meddling had been a major concern at the company for the better part of a year. High-level discussions over its approach to false news, disinformation and other activities aimed at manipulating voters had been routinely held, the current and former employees said, anonymously out of fear of retaliation.
Facebook asserted at the time that accusations of political bias had no influence whatsoever over its decision-making. But look no further than the leaked statements of its own moderators among its employees for evidence that it does.
Today, Gizmodo is publishing our third batch of the Facebook Papers — documents that, among other things, shine a light on the company’s reluctance to take action against known sources of misinformation.
Elon Musk Issues Warning on Twitter Algorithm as Company’s Legal Team Reaches Out
Elon Musk warned Twitter users that they are “being manipulated” and told them to turn off the platform’s algorithmic newsfeed, coming as the firm’s legal department apparently said he committed a violation of a non-disclosure agreement.
“You are being manipulated by the algorithm in ways you do not realize…Easy to switch back and forth to see the difference,” Musk wrote on Twitter. The Tesla CEO advised other users to switch to seeing the latest Twitter posts immediately by tapping the Twitter home button, tapping the stars button on the upper right of the screen, and selecting “latest tweets.”
“I am not suggesting malice in the algorithm, but rather that it is trying to guess what you might want to read and, in doing so, inadvertently manipulate/amplify your viewpoints without you realizing this is happening,” Musk continued in another post.
