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Zuckerberg Admits That Censoring True Information for the Establishment Undermined Trust
In an interview with the Lex Fridman Podcast, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, dived into the convoluted waters of content censorship and its consequences during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Establishment Pressures: In the early days of the pandemic, Zuckerberg recalls how the “establishment” was scrambling and gave platforms, like Meta, mixed signals. He elaborated, “Just take some of the stuff around COVID earlier on in the pandemic, where there were real health implications, but there hadn’t been time to fully vet a bunch of the scientific assumptions, and, unfortunately, I think a lot of the establishment on that kind of waffled on a bunch of facts.”
Looking Back: The Meta CEO expressed concern about the establishment pushing platforms to enforce and censor information, which, upon reflection, “ended up being more debatable or true.”
Credibility at Stake: The hasty calls for censorship based on unsteady data played a role in shaking the foundations of trust in the scientific community. “It really undermines trust,” Zuckerberg pointed out.
White House Mandates Masks, Distancing for Unvaccinated — Despite Emergency’s End
The White House ended the national emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic weeks ago but is still mandating masking and social distancing for the unvaccinated at its events, according to a report.
Earlier this week, the White House Office of Legislative Affairs sent an invitation to members of Congress to attend “College Athlete Day,” a celebration honoring the NCAA men’s and women’s national championship teams.
The invite notes that while lawmakers will not have to take a COVID test, they will have to mask up and be socially distant if they are unvaccinated, according to Fox News, which obtained one of the emails.
‘I Have Kids That Legitimately Cannot Read’: Inside a Kansas School That Was Devastated by COVID Lockdown
Exiting from the pandemic, the assumption might be that Bekah Noel’s students should be among the least scathed. The tiny, 900-student school system in Columbus pivoted to remote learning briefly in March 2020 before going back in person that fall, initially without masks. While some U.S. students spent a year or more learning online, pandemic school in rural Kansas was as normal as it got.
But the upheaval still took a toll. Students and teachers got sick, social distancing made it hard to teach kids in small groups, and the pace of teaching ground to a crawl. Three years later, Noel has more third graders than ever who are reading below grade level. That’s the true elephant in the room.
“I have kids,” Noel said midway through the year, “that legitimately cannot read.”
Across the country, federal data show, the disruptions wrought by the pandemic were accompanied by widespread learning setbacks, even in states that saw students return quickly to in-person learning. Among those showing the largest learning losses are this year’s crop of third graders, who were in kindergarten when the pandemic hit, a foundational year for learning to read.
Novak Djokovic Wins French Open, Becomes All-Time Leader in Grand Slam Titles Despite COVID Vaccine Mandates Keeping Him out of Two Tournaments
Novak Djokovic won the French Open on Sunday defeating Casper Ruud in straight sets in the final match. For Djokovic, he now owns 23 career Grand Slam titles, one more than Rafael Nadal for most among men’s tennis players. Of course, Djokovic made headlines with his refusal to receive the COVID vaccine.
Thanks to his vaccine stance, Australia and the United States denied him entry into their countries in 2022. Because of that, Djokovic did not compete in either the Australian Open or U.S. Open last year.
Despite being left out of those two tournaments, he managed to break Nadal’s record to become the winningest men’s player in Grand Slam history.
How the Government Justifies Its Social-Media Censorship
The Wall Street Journal reported:
The organization I lead, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, represents plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s campaign to censor speech on social media. For years, officials at the White House, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies have pressured tech companies to suppress “misinformation.”
Much of the targeted speech doesn’t deserve that Orwellian label. Some of the speech is truthful, and some are simply opinions that dissent from the government’s viewpoint. Yet even actual misinformation — with a few exceptions such as commercial fraud and defamation — is fully protected by the First Amendment. The government makes no claim that the speech it seeks to suppress is unprotected.
So how does it defend its actions? On May 3, the Justice Department filed a 297-page argument that reveals how so many officials could suppress speech with so little fear of violating the Constitution. The root of the problem is judicial negligence.
The court thereby gives the government leverage to extort censorship from dominant social-media platforms. The White House and members of Congress have explicitly threatened to reconsider Section 230’s privileges if social-media platforms don’t escalate their censorship in line with government expectations. Against this background threat, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and other agencies can get companies to suppress vast amounts of speech.
Republicans Hone Tough Questions for CDC’s Walensky as Democrats Dissent
The congressional panel investigating the U.S. government’s coronavirus response is set to hold its highest-profile hearing next week, with Republicans preparing a barrage of questions about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decisions, even as Democrats bristle at the panel’s focus and call for a new direction.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky is scheduled Tuesday to sit for questions from some of the agency’s fiercest critics in Congress, such as Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), in what is likely to be her final appearance on Capitol Hill as head of the nation’s premier public health agency ahead of her resignation this month.
The panel’s GOP leaders in recent weeks held hearings addressing school closures, vaccine mandates and other pandemic-era policies that they contend were poorly executed, and lawmakers said takeaways from those hearings will shape their questions to Walensky.
AI’s Hidden Toll on Our Brains
Experts warn that distinguishing what’s real from what’s not will impose a significant mental and cognitive burden on people in the AI era.
Why it matters: Misinformation has already fueled significant social problems, ranging from polarization to vaccine skepticism. AI-generated content risks intensifying those issues and making it more difficult for people to make sense of the world around them.
Driving the news: Experts are raising alarms about the mental health risks and the emotional burden of navigating an information ecosystem driven by AI that’s likely to feature even more misinformation, identity theft and fraud.
But, but, but: Similar concerns about misinformation and the difficulty of telling fact from fiction emerged with the advent of the web in the ’90s and again with the rise of social media.
Ohio Senate GOP Wants to Ban Collegiate Vaccine Mandates in the State Budget
In a revival of pandemic-era vaccine brawls, the Ohio Senate GOP proposed a plan that would essentially strip colleges of their ability to require vaccination as a term of enrollment.
Senators included the idea in their latest draft of the two-year state budget, released this week. The bill would technically still allow colleges to impose vaccine mandates but would force them to grant exemptions for students’ religious convictions or “reasons of conscience” — a catchall term.
Those reasons for declining a vaccine are to be “determined solely by the student,” according to the analysis of the bill from the Legislative Service Commission.
GOP lawmakers in the previous General Assembly introduced an array of bills aimed at outlawing vaccination mandates in public spaces or from employers and governments. Some passed one of the two chambers, though almost all of them failed to become law.
EU and WHO Planning for Introduction Digital Vaccine Passports
The European Union and World Health Organization met in Geneva last week to discuss how to combat any future pandemics, after the COVID-19 debacle.
Almost every corner of the world came to a standstill in 2020 when COVID-19 forced the majority of countries into nationwide lockdowns, restricting people to the number of times they could go outside and interact with others. However, once the vaccination was rolled out, restrictions were eased and people could mix with so many people from another household once again, but beneath the surface, it wasn’t as simple as that.
This is because people were required to have a COVID-19 vaccine passport to show they had been jabbed and this also applied to going on holidays abroad and getting into certain pubs and restaurants, which caused forms of controversy.
These didn’t last long and soon enough people and businesses grew tired of how time-consuming it was to scan barcodes for every person that entered the premises, however, some may have to get used to this once again if another pandemic breaks out.
Canadians’ Trust in Government and Science Waned Since COVID: Federal Report
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused Canadians to have an “increased distrust of government and science,” according to a report by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC).
The report, based on questionnaires with 2,088 Canadians and 16 focus groups nationwide, noted that less than one quarter (22%) of those surveyed said they were more likely to trust federal agencies since the pandemic.
“In the discussion around how their trust in information sources had been affected by their pandemic experience, there were few who indicated their trust in any source had increased and many who indicated having lost trust,” said the PHAC report, titled “The Impact of the Pandemic Experience on Future Vaccine-Related Intentions And Behavior.”
OpenAI, DeepMind Will Open Up Models to U.K. Government
Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic have agreed to open up their AI models to the U.K. government for research and safety purposes, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced at London Tech Week on Monday.
The priority access will be granted in order “to help build better evaluations and help us better understand the opportunities and risks of these systems,” Sunak said.
The announcement came in a speech that championed the promise of AI to transform areas such as education and healthcare and heralded the U.K.’s potential as an “island of innovation.”
The lynchpin of these plans is a global summit on AI safety that will be held in the U.K. in the fall, first reported by POLITICO. Sunak likened the summit to an AI-version of UN COP climate change conferences.
