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WHO Calls for Big Tech to Work With It to Censor Monkeypox ‘Misinformation’
The World Health Organization (WHO), an unelected health agency that was given sweeping censorship powers during the COVID-19 pandemic, has called for all social media platforms to work with it to “prevent and counter” monkeypox “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
During a COVID-19 press briefing, WHO Director-General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, claimed that “stigma and discrimination can be as dangerous as any virus, and can fuel the outbreak.”
The WHO’s call for a Big Tech-WHO censorship alliance that targets monkeypox misinformation is eerily similar to the censorship alliance that occurred during COVID-19 when the WHO partnered with YouTube, Facebook, Wikipedia, and others to censor or label COVID-19 misinformation.
YouTube was one of the most committed censors under this alliance and removed over 800,000 videos for contradicting the WHO.
CDC Set to Make Monkeypox a Nationally Notifiable Condition
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is set to make monkeypox a nationally notifiable condition, directing states across the country to share surveillance data, including case numbers, according to a senior administration official and two other people with knowledge of the situation.
The new designation will take effect on Aug. 1, according to a letter the agency sent to state epidemiologists on Monday.
The move, which comes more than two months after monkeypox began spreading in the United States, offers the CDC a better understanding of how far and fast the virus is spreading. Every state will have to report a confirmed or probable monkeypox case within 24 hours, the letter states.
The administration is still debating whether to declare monkeypox a public health emergency and what ways the response could be enhanced if it did. But the administration does not need to declare monkeypox a public health emergency to make it a nationally notifiable condition, the senior administration official said.
Cincinnati Federal Judge Blocks Air Force, Air National Guard Globally From Discharging Religious Vaccine Refusers
A federal judge in Cincinnati on Wednesday blocked the Biden administration for the foreseeable future from enforcing the COVID-19 vaccine mandate globally on any servicemembers in the Air Force, Space Force and Air National Guard who requested religious exemptions.
U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McFarland’s preliminary injunction stops the military from discharging or disciplining servicemembers in this local lawsuit that now has an international impact on the military and class-action status as it heads toward trial.
Judge McFarland has criticized the Air Force, writing that they sweepingly rejected each exemption request and failed to carefully consider the merits of each.
House, Senate on Collision Course Over Children’s Privacy
The Senate took a first step toward boosting protections for children and teens online Wednesday by advancing two major bipartisan bills, as I reported. But the push is set to run into obstacles in the House, where lawmakers are working on broader privacy legislation that may be tough to reconcile with the narrower Senate bills.
Together, the Senate measures would give parents greater control over their children’s online activity, ban companies from collecting the data of users 13 to 16 years old without their consent and require that companies identify and mitigate risks their products may pose to children.
The Senate Commerce Committee approved both the Kids Online Safety Act and the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, a major milestone for children’s safety advocates.
The approach stands in sharp contrast to the one taken by House lawmakers, however, who earlier this month advanced a sweeping proposal to create what would be the nation’s first comprehensive data-privacy standards for all consumers — not just children and teens.
YouTube’s Vague ‘Misinformation’ Guidelines Have Become a Political Problem
YouTube‘s misinformation guidelines are coming in for some long overdue criticism in light of a few recent episodes that exposed just how ridiculous they are.
One reason YouTube’s censorship policies haven’t received the scrutiny over censorship that other platforms have is because a large amount of content on YouTube is not political, leading it to be perceived as a less serious medium for commentary. Most elites and powerful institutions are not active on YouTube — unlike Twitter and Facebook.
As a place where the future of the news is likely migrating, YouTube’s guidelines for what it censors are emerging as a crucial battleground in the fight for access to unbiased information. YouTubers and their audiences deserve better guidelines. The gigantic, worldwide audience on YouTube deserves to be trusted with a wide range of political opinions, no matter who is right or wrong.
‘The Entire Protein Universe’: AI Predicts Shape of Nearly Every Known Protein
From today, determining the 3D shape of almost any protein known to science will be as simple as typing in a Google search.
Researchers have used AlphaFold — the revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) network — to predict the structures of some 200 million proteins from 1 million species, covering nearly every known protein on the planet.
The data dump will be freely available on a database set up by DeepMind, Google’s London-based AI company that developed AlphaFold, and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), an intergovernmental organization near Cambridge, U.K.
“Essentially you can think of it covering the entire protein universe,” DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, said at a press briefing. “We’re at the beginning of a new era of digital biology.”
Reality Crashes Down on Meta
After a decade of unprecedented growth, Meta has finally hit a wall. The tech giant told investors Wednesday that it’s planning to cut costs, slow investments and reduce headcount as it braces for what CEO Mark Zuckerberg called a “downturn” that has already begun to wreak havoc on its business.
While Meta is still massive — it now reaches more than 3.65 billion people monthly around the globe across all of its apps — its user growth and revenue growth have slowed significantly in the past few quarters.
The company on Wednesday posted its first-ever year-over-year quarterly revenue decline since it went public in 2012. That came months after it reported Facebook‘s first-ever year-over-year user drop.
Now, amid privacy changes and increased competition, the company says its strategy needs to change even as its resources become more limited.
The Fight to Save Energy by Controlling Your Thermostat (and Pool Pump)
When extreme heat settles over Central Texas, the local power company, Austin Energy, uses an unconventional tool to keep the grid from buckling: It taps into the internet to adjust the smart thermostats of 25,300 consenting customers, briefly pushing up temperatures in their homes a couple of degrees as demand on the grid peaks.
The programs are emerging as a crucial tool in stabilizing power grids under increasing risk of collapse as they confront decades of underinvestment while extreme weather pushes record demand. The grids will again be strained this week as scorching weather grips the Pacific Northwest and much of the Southeast.
Yet many power providers are slow to engage in such innovations, as a nation accustomed to cheap, abundant energy resists changing its consumption habits, and conservative lawmakers dismiss the programs as dangerous government overreach.
“It’s mind-boggling to me that we are even talking about something like this,” Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio) said at a congressional hearing last month during which lawmakers considered a proposal to mandate some new water heaters be equipped with demand response capability. “I think this is better described as ‘capability to remotely control the American people’s technology.”
FTC Files to Block Facebook-Parent Meta From Buying a VR Company
The Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday moved to block Facebook-parent Meta from acquiring virtual reality company Within, offering the clearest signal yet that the agency could take a tougher stance on Silicon Valley deals involving newer technologies.
In a complaint filed Wednesday in federal court, the FTC said Meta has the resources to build its own VR apps similar to those made by Within, the company behind the virtual fitness program Supernatural. Instead, the FTC claims that Meta (FB) is trying to buy the upstart company, which would “[dampen] future innovation and competitive rivalry.”
The agency, which is responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust laws, accused the tech giant of illegally attempting to expand its “virtual reality empire.”
Google Pushes Back Deadline for Killing off Tracking Cookies in Chrome
Google has published a revised timeline for ridding Chrome of third-party tracking cookies, the technology used to gather data on web users as they browse.
In a blog post, the company explained it will now aim to begin sunsetting the controversial technology by the “second half of 2024”, which represents a delay of at least nine months.
The decision to push back the withdrawal of cookies from its web browser was informed by feedback from industry stakeholders, Google explained, many of whom felt more time was needed to evaluate the impact of the replacement systems proposed under the company’s Privacy Sandbox initiative.
Google first announced plans to eliminate tracking cookies from Chrome back in 2020, in the face of a backlash from critics who claim the technology enables flagrant breaches of privacy.
