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NIH Ban on Animal Testing Comments Violates Speech Rules, Court Says
When the National Institutes of Health (NIH) put filters on the comment sections of its Facebook and Instagram posts, to restrict “off-topic” messages by the public on matters such as animal testing, it violated the First Amendment’s guarantee of a right to free speech, the federal appeals court in Washington has ruled.
The case arose when animal rights activists repeatedly posted comments challenging NIH programs which tested drugs or medical procedures on animals. The NIH used keyword filters to automatically block all comments containing words such as “animals,” “cruelty,” “monkeys,” “testing” and “torture.”
But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said the NIH had not articulated “some sensible basis for distinguishing what [comments] may come in from what must stay out,” and its lack of sensitivity to the context of public comments “reinforces its unreasonableness.”
The ruling issued this week creates more new law in the area of how restrictive government entities can be when running a social media page. But the law could change again if the government appeals the case and the Supreme Court rules differently.
The Teens Lobbying Against the Kids Online Safety Act
Even before 86 senators voted to close debate on the bill, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was all but certain to pass in the Senate — KOSA had 70 cosponsors, after all.
Still, more than 300 high school students met with lawmakers and their staff last Thursday, urging them to vote “no” on legislation putatively written to make the internet safer for them.
By the end of the day, a cloture motion had passed, and in the following week, the bill passed out of the Senate with a staggering 91 votes in favor.
Lawmakers think that teens “don’t know what’s best for us,” said Damarius Cantie, a rising senior from Michigan. “But I think a lot of times, we do.”
KOSA and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) would impose new responsibilities on tech platforms accessed by minors. They are the first major internet protections for kids to pass the Senate in over two decades.
NBC Uses Monitors to Track the Heart Rates of Nervous Olympic Parents
Getting uniquely up close and personal, NBC on Sunday broadcast data from a heart-rate monitor strapped to Henry Rivera, father of 16-year-old American gymnast Hezly Rivera, during her uneven-bars routine at the women’s gymnastics qualifying event.
The network, which aired NASCAR drivers’ heart rates last year as they zoomed around the track, is expected to cut in with other parents’ heart rates during upcoming events.
What will the readouts show? “When the body is scared or nervous, it prepares for actions with a number of things, and a rise in heart rate is one,” said Jamie Burr, a cardiac physiologist at the University of Guelph in Canada.
Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned off by Products That Use AI
Researchers have found that including the words “artificial intelligence” (AI) in product marketing is a major turn-off for consumers, suggesting a growing backlash and disillusionment with the tech — and that startups trying to cram “AI” into their product are actually making a grave error.
As detailed in a new study published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing & Management, researchers presented 1,000 respondents with questions and descriptions of products.
Surprisingly — or perhaps not, depending on your perspective — they found that products described as using AI were consistently less popular.
Bird Flu Cases Are Going Undetected, New Study Suggests
A new study lends weight to fears that more livestock workers have gotten the bird flu than has been reported.
“I am very confident there are more people being infected than we know about,” said Gregory Gray, MD, MPH, the infectious disease researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch who led the study, posted online at medRxivopens and under review to be published in a leading infectious disease journal. “Largely, that’s because our surveillance has been so poor.”
As bird flu cases go underreported, health officials risk being slow to notice if the virus were to become more contagious. A large surge of infections outside of farmworker communities would trigger the government’s flu surveillance system, but by then it might be too late to contain.
“We need to figure out what we can do to stop this thing,” Gray said. “It is not just going away.”
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bases decisions on its surveillance. For example, the agency has bird flu vaccines on hand but has decided against offering them to farmworkers, citing a low number of cases.
