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Social Media Fact Checkers Claim Their Work Isn’t Censorship. Here’s Why It Is.
There’s good news, and bad: first, the fact that “fact-checkers” masquerading as unbiased and accurate moderators of content — while actually unreliable and bias-prone tools of censorship — are now recognized widely enough as just that, to trigger a reaction from some prominent actors.
But then — these “fact-checkers” are reacting in order to double down on their role as something positive, and justified.
Because there are no facts to support this attitude, one of the key “fact-checkers” is hiding behind an opinion piece. But the claim is there: “Fact-checking is not censorship,” a post on Poynter wants you to believe.
According to Facebook (Meta) CEO Mark Zuckerberg, posts that get fact-checked experience a 95% drop in clicks. In other words, even if this content is not outright removed, it is made virtually invisible. That’s censorship by any other name.
Former CU School of Medicine Research Director Sues Over COVID Vaccine Mandate
A former research director at the University of Colorado School of Medicine has filed a lawsuit against the university, alleging religious discrimination after being terminated for refusing to comply with the institution’s COVID-19 vaccination policy.
Alyse Brennecke, who served as the director of clinical research in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the Division of Gynecological Oncology for six years, was fired in October 2021 amidst a dispute over the vaccine mandate. “It was jab or job,” said Brad Bergford, Brennecke’s attorney, who emphasized the alleged ultimatum faced by his client.
Despite Brennecke’s religious exemption request, the university swiftly denied it and notified Brennecke that failure to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination would result in further action, potentially leading to termination.
In a lawsuit filed on April 2, she argues the university’s denial violated rights outlined in Title VII, emphasizing that employers are required to seek accommodations for sincerely held religious beliefs.
Brennecke is seeking monetary damages for loss of pay, emotional suffering and other losses. While she is the sole plaintiff in her lawsuit, another lawsuit against the university involves at least 11 unnamed plaintiffs, including physicians, nurses and other administrative roles within the Anschutz Medical Campus.
The Future of AI Will Run on Amazon, Company CEO Says
Less than two weeks after rolling back one of its most ambitious artificial intelligence projects — a cashierless checkout technology called Just Walk Out — Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in an annual shareholder letter published Thursday that he’s confident the future of the company’s biggest breakthroughs for customers will come from generative AI.
While Amazon has widely been viewed by consumers and the market as falling behind on AI, Jassy said in his letter that he’s “optimistic that much of this world-changing AI will be built on top of AWS,” or Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing business that many of the world’s digital businesses already rely on to run.
In the letter, Jassy lays out the company’s strategy on generative AI, describing how it is less focused on building consumer-facing applications to compete directly with popular tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but on building the underlying “foundational” AI models and selling them to enterprise customers, which Jassy said already include Delta Air Lines, Siemens and Pfizer.
JP Morgan Chase Cashes In on Customer Data
The largest U.S. bank, and the world’s largest by capitalization, JP Morgan Chase, is going forward with another way to monetize their clients — by giving access to their spending data to be used for targeted ads.
One would have thought that something of the kind was already in full swing. But given the glacial speed at which giant financial institutions move when it comes to introducing any new features, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that only now, Chase is allowing businesses to make ad money directly off of the data belonging to the bank’s 80 million customers.
To make this possible, a platform called Chase Media Solutions is now available to brands who want to utilize transaction data the bank harvests from customers, to “fine-tune” campaigns, such as “personalized” offers and incentives.
House Republicans Revolt Against Spy Agency Bill, Signaling Trouble for Johnson
A small faction of House Republicans is once again blocking key legislation and posing a critical test of Speaker Mike Johnson’s ability to hold on to his gavel.
And their actions threw the House once more into chaos, as Republicans sniped among themselves and some far-right members threatened to let funding for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — a post-9/11 measure that strengthened the surveillance powers of U.S. intelligence services — expire on April 19.
Hard-liners had telegraphed that they would sink the procedural vote if the House Rules Committee did not include a change to the legislation to reshape how those services surveil malicious foreign actors, by ensuring that they don’t spy on U.S. citizens swept up in the communications-gathering without a warrant.
Privacy Talks Are Heating Up in Congress. Here’s What to Watch For.
Congressional negotiations over data privacy and children’s online safety took a notable step forward this week as House and Senate leaders unveiled bipartisan proposals and started ramping up their consideration of the measures.
Most notably, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers(R-Wash.) struck a deal on a comprehensive privacy bill, and House lawmakers unveiled a companion to the Kids Online Safety Act, raising the prospects that both could still move this Congress.
The House is scheduled to debate those and other tech measures at a hearing next week, and the Senate could soon follow suit. But just like in years past, the same pesky friction points that have bogged down talks for years may surface again.
House and Senate lawmakers for years have tussled over whether to prioritize broader privacy legislation or protections for kids, since taking up both has at times appeared unachievable.
One issue to watch: The House’s new version of the Kids Online Safety Act includes key changes that could complicate negotiations with the Senate.
DuckDuckGo Is Taking Its Privacy Fight to Data Brokers
For more than a decade, DuckDuckGo has rallied against Google’s extensive online tracking. Now the privacy-focused web search and browser company has another target in its sights: the sprawling, messy web of data brokers that collect and sell your data every single day.
Today, DuckDuckGo is launching a new browser-based tool that automatically scans data broker websites for your name and address and requests that they be removed. Gabriel Weinberg, the company’s founder and CEO, says the personal-information-removal product is the first of its kind where users don’t have to submit any of their details to the tool’s owners.
The service will make the requests for information to be removed and then continually check if new records have been added, Weinberg says. “We’ve been doing it to automate it completely end-to-end, so you don’t have to do anything.
An OpenAI Investor Says TikTok Is China’s ‘Programmable Fentanyl,’ a CCP-Controlled Tool Used to Manipulate U.S. Citizens
Billionaire and early OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla says he supports the forced divestiture of the social media platform TikTok from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance. In March, Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok in the U.S. if ByteDance didn’t sell its U.S. operations to non-Chinese owners.
“Neither I nor my firm stands to gain or lose anything on the back of this bill’s outcome, but I can see how TikTok can be weaponized by a foreign adversary,” Khosla wrote in an op-ed for the Financial Times on Tuesday.
In the op-ed, Khosla accused China of perpetuating double standards since Chinese consumers use TikTok’s Chinese variant, Douyin. And unlike TikTok, Douyin users aged 14 and below can only be on the platform for just 40 minutes a day.
“Spinach for Chinese kids, fentanyl — another chief export of China’s — for ours,” Khosla said. “Worse still, TikTok is a programmable fentanyl whose effects are under the control of the CCP.”
Morrison’s COVID Measures a ‘Grotesque Overreaction’ to a ‘Relatively Mild Pandemic,’ Tony Abbott Says
The former prime minister Tony Abbott has described the Morrison government’s COVID response as a “grotesque overreaction” to a “relatively mild pandemic”, adding he reluctantly got vaccinated because he “didn’t want anyone to have an excuse for keeping us locked up any longer than was absolutely necessary.”
Abbott, who also served as a health minister under the Howard government, clarified he was not opposed to vaccinations but used a feminist slogan — “my body, my choice” — to voice his opposition to vaccine mandates in a podcast hosted by Graham Hood, a former leader of the anti-vaccine mandate movement.
“And yet, that certainly wasn’t the approach that health authorities adopted at the time.” It is not the first time Abbott has criticized Australia’s response to the global pandemic.
