Login
Stop Mourning the Murthy Case, Start Fighting the Censorship-Industrial Complex
When the government and Big Tech collude to censor speech online, Americans should not be at the mercy of lengthy and uncertain litigation to vindicate their rights.
After government officials like former White House advisers Rob Flaherty and Andy Slavitt repeatedly harangued platforms such as Facebook to censor Americans who contested the government’s narrative on COVID-19 vaccines, Missouri and Louisiana sued. They claimed that the practice violates the First Amendment.
Following years of litigation, the Supreme Court threw cold water on their efforts, ruling in Murthy v. Missouri that states and the individual plaintiffs lacked standing to sue the government for its actions.
A complicating factor in this litigation and other congressional investigations is that the government often disguised its censorship requests by coordinating with ostensibly “private” civil society groups to pressure tech companies to remove or shadow-ban targeted content.
Courts matter for adjudicating and protecting rights. But the entrenched relationships between Big Tech and Big Government require new policies to meaningfully check their power. It’s time for Congress and the next administration to strike at the root of the censorship-industrial complex and protect ordinary Americans.
Healthcare Companies Are Sending Your Data to Big Tech
California-based health system Kaiser Permanente recently alerted millions of people that their private information was inappropriately shared with tech giants, angering patients who weren’t aware of the practice.
A Bloomberg News analysis showed the same kinds of online trackers remain on the websites of the nation’s largest healthcare companies, often unknown to their millions of patients.
Tour De France Reintroduces Mask Mandate Amid COVID Concerns
The Tour de France has reintroduced protective measures against COVID-19, with race organization, media and guests now required to wear masks wherever they come into contact with riders and team staff on the race.
Race organizer ASO announced the protocol on Sunday morning following a number of COVID-19 cases in the peloton in recent days. Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers), Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) and Michael Mørkøv (Astana-Qazaqstan) are among the riders to have abandoned the race after contracting the virus, while Geraint Thomas (Ineos Grenadiers) remains in the Tour despite testing positive for COVID-19.
County Increases Testing, UCSD Health Workers Return to Masking as COVID Surges
The San Diego Union-Tribune reported:
UC San Diego Health became the first major local medical provider to reinstate masking requirements for employees as the county added free coronavirus testing Thursday, responding to a summer COVID-19 surge that started building steam in June.
Updates to local tracking information arrived Thursday with the amount of the virus detected in local wastewater and the percentage of positive tests performed by healthcare organizations on the rise. According to the county’s update, 15.3% of test results reported on July 6 were positive, nearly double the 8.1% positive reported on June 8.
UC San Diego Health, looking at its own numbers, took additional action, moving up a tier in its existing COVID response plan and reinstating requirements for its employees, whether they work in one of its three hospitals or in an outpatient setting, to start wearing masks when working face-to-face with patients.
Masks are not required for non-hospital employees nor for workers not delivering care. The change will be in effect for two weeks, at which point a decision will be made, based on several different measures of viral activity, about whether to increase or decrease infection-prevention measures.
Momentum Grows for Cell Phone Bans in Schools
Cell phone bans for schools are surging across the country as educators and state lawmakers look to tackle learning loss and reduce distractions, but within the movement, there are significant divisions.
New York City, Los Angeles and the state of Virginia have all moved to forbid student phones from classrooms in recent weeks, despite some parental backlash on the measures.
New York City Public Schools is looking into policies on getting rid of phones, and the Los Angeles school board approved a policy to restrict the devices, although the details of how America’s two biggest cities will get the job done have not been finalized.
Some are advocating for students not to have their phones at all throughout the school day.
AT&T Says Data From 109 Million U.S. Customer Accounts Illegally Downloaded
AT&T (T.N) said on Friday the company suffered a massive hacking incident as data from about 109 million customer accounts containing records of calls and texts from 2022 was illegally downloaded in April.
The U.S. telecom company said the FBI is investigating and at least one person has been arrested after AT&T call logs were copied from its workspace on a third-party cloud platform, in a significant breach of consumer communication records.
AT&T said the compromised data includes files containing AT&T records of calls and texts of nearly all of AT&T’s cellular and AT&T’s landline customers interacting with those cellular numbers between May and October 2022. The data does not contain the content of calls or texts or personal information such as social security numbers.
Think Tank Pushes International Alliance to Censor ‘Fake News’
The Japanese chair of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has come out with a report calling for the U.S. and Japan to team up on “combating disinformation.”
Christopher B. Johnstone also wants the two countries to engage in several censorship techniques, such as removing content (“false narratives” — regular censorship) but also a considerably more dystopian one known as “prebunking.”
That would be, suppressing narratives by revealing them as “misinformation” before they become public, thus eroding the very perception of their trustworthiness, while equating this as introducing “mental antibodies” into a population, and other outlandish language has been used in the past to justify the tactic.
