Saturday, May 2, 2026

Trump move could scrap or weaken law that protects social media companies- Technology News, Firstpost

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Trump move could scrap or weaken law that protects social media companies- Technology News, Firstpost

ReutersMay 29, 2020 04:15:17 IST

By Nandita Bose and Jeff Mason

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump said he will introduce legislation that may scrap or weaken a law that has protected internet companies, including Twitter and Facebook , in an extraordinary attempt to intervene in the media. Trump signed an executive order on Thursday afternoon after attacking Twitter for tagging his tweets for the first time about unsubstantiated claims of fraud about mail-in voting with a warning prompting readers to fact-check the posts.

In addition, Trump said his administration may “remove or change” a provision of a law known as section 230 that shields social media companies from liability for content posted by their users.

Trump said U.S. Attorney General William Barr will begin drafting legislation “immediately” to regulate social media companies.

On Wednesday, Reuters reported the White House’s plan to modify Section 230 based on a copy of a draft executive order that experts said was unlikely to survive legal scrutiny.

“What I think we can say is we’re going to regulate it,” Trump said at the signing of the order.

“I’ve been called by Democrats that want to do this, so I think you could possibly have a bipartisan situation,” said Republican Trump, who is running for re-election in the Nov. 3 vote.

Facebook and Twitter did not comment on the executive order.

Trump’s remarks and the draft order, as written, attempts to circumvent Congress and the courts in directing changes to long-established interpretations of Section 230. It represents his latest attempt to use the tools of the presidency to force private companies to change policies that he believes are not favorable to him.

“In terms of presidential efforts to limit critical commentary about themselves, I think one would have to go back to the Sedition Act of 1798 – which made it illegal to say false things about the president and certain other public officials – to find an attack supposedly rooted in law by a president on any entity which comments or prints comments about public issues and public people,” said First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams.

Others like Jack Balkin, a Yale University constitutional law professor said “The president is trying to frighten, coerce, scare, cajole social media companies to leave him alone and not do what Twitter has just done to him.”

Twitter’s shares were down 4.4% on Thursday. Facebook was down 1.7 percent and Google parent Alphabet Inc was up slightly.

Trump, who uses Twitter virtually every day to promote his policies and insult his opponents, has long claimed without evidence that the site is biased in favor of Democrats. He and his supporters have leveled the same unsubstantiated charges against Facebook, which Trump’s presidential campaign uses heavily as an advertising vehicle.

On Thursday, Trump said there is nothing he would rather do than get rid of his Twitter account but he had to keep it in order to circumvent the press and get his version of events to millions of followers.

The protections of Section 230 have often been under fire for different reasons from lawmakers including Big Tech critic Senator Josh Hawley. Critics argue that they give internet companies a free pass on things like hate speech and content that supports terror organizations.

Social media companies have been under pressure from many quarters, both in the United States and other countries, to better control misinformation and harmful content on their services.

Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said on the company’s website late Wednesday that the president’s tweets “may mislead people into thinking they don’t need to register to get a ballot. Our intention is to connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves.”

On Wednesday evening, Twitter continued to add fact-checking labels and ‘manipulated media’ labels on hundreds of tweets.

Steve DelBianco, president of NetChoice, a trade group that counts Twitter, Facebook and Google among its members, said the proposed executive order “is trampling the First Amendment by threatening the fundamental free speech rights of social media platforms.”

(Reporting by Nandita Bose, David Shepardson, Alexandra Alper and Jeff Mason in Washington, Additional reporting by Elizabeth Culliford in Birmingham, England; Susan Cornwell and Susan Heavey in Washington and Karen Freifeld in New York ; Edited by Nick Zieminski and Grant McCool)

This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed.

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Cambodia’s Farmers Thrive as Coronavirus Border Closures Keep Out Crop Competition

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Cambodia’s Farmers Thrive as Coronavirus Border Closures Keep Out Crop Competition

Farmers in Cambodia’s Battambang province are some of the few people in the country to benefit from efforts to contain the coronavirus outbreak, saying they finally have a market for their crops and can earn a living now that the border of neighboring Thailand has closed due to the pandemic.

The farmers told RFA’s Khmer Service on Thursday that they no longer have to underbid competitors selling crops from Thailand, allowing them to double the price of their produce instead of being forced to take jobs as migrant workers across the border to earn a living.

Additionally, they said, middlemen now come directly to their farms to purchase crops, meaning they no longer need to transport them to the market and hope they find a buyer.

A 40-year-old farmer from Ek Phnom district named Chim Virak said that he has been able to sell corn, cucumbers, eggplants, and watermelon from his three hectares (7.5 acres) of land at top dollar, with plenty of demand.

He said he spent around U.S. $3,000 on his initial investment but expects to turn a healthy profit this year. As soon as his crops are ready, customers come to his fields to buy produce “regardless of the price,” which he said had increased from around 500 riel (U.S. $0.12) per kilogram to 1,800 riel (U.S. $0.44) most recently.

“If prices continue this way, I think our area’s farmers will be a lot wealthier within a few years,” he said, adding that in his village, “most people are growing vegetables.”

Prior to the outbreak, Chim Virak said, his cucumbers sold for between 250 and 600 riel (U.S. $0.06 and $0.15) per kilogram—if he could sell them. As of May, cucumbers were selling for 2,000 riel (U.S. $0.49) per kilogram, and he said he can sell his produce at even higher rates if he brings it to market himself.

While in previous seasons he was struggling to break even, Chim Virak said he had already made around U.S. $7,000.

“Our farms are rotating [producing different crops multiple times a year] and currently my watermelon is being harvested,” he said.

“In the past, we had to rely on middlemen to find buyers, but now I sell everything myself.”

Another farmer in Ek Phnom named Kim Kan said he had planted corn, watermelon, beans, and eggplant on two hectares (five acres) of land, spending about U.S. $300 of his own money and borrowing the same amount from a microfinance lender.

He said he is also making about twice as much as last year, with around U.S. $150 in profit.

“We are very happy that we are having such good business,” he said.

“Farmers have never seen this kind of price hike. Since the outbreak, buyers come straight to us. We don’t have any difficulty finding a market. Buyers are competing to purchase our crops.”

Thriving community

Kim Kan said said his community consists of 60 families farming on 120 hectares (300 acres) of land.

Despite their success, he said the farmers still lack an efficient water supply for their land and have spent “a lot of money” transporting water from a source about one kilometer (two-thirds of a mile) away to irrigate their crops. He and others urged the local government to build an irrigation ditch for them.

Ek Phnom district governor Mel Sophal told RFA that provincial authorities are working to build his constituents, who comprise around 160 farming families, a nine-kilometer (5.6-mile) irrigation system at a cost of around 400 million riel (U.S. $97,000).

“We want to make the area a ‘green zone,’ regardless of whether it is the dry or rainy season,” he said.

Coalition of Cambodian Farmer Community president Theng Savoeun said local farmers are thriving because the closure of the country’s borders with Thailand and Vietnam has prevented retailers from flooding the market with imported vegetables.

He urged the government to put measures into place that continue to protect farmers from the price impacts of crop imports.

Reported by RFA’s Khmer Service. Translated by Samean Yun. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.



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Biden’s Testing Strategy Sets Up a Clear Contrast With Trump on the Coronavirus

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Biden’s Testing Strategy Sets Up a Clear Contrast With Trump on the Coronavirus

WASHINGTON — Joseph R. Biden Jr. has proposed harnessing the broad powers of the federal government to step up coronavirus testing, with a public-private board overseeing test manufacturing and distribution, federal safety regulators enforcing testing at work and at least 100,000 contact tracers tracking down people exposed to the virus.

The presumptive Democratic nominee’s plan, laid out in a little-noticed Medium post, stands in stark contrast to President Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states strategy, detailed in an 81-page document released over the weekend. And it presents voters in November with a classic philosophical choice over the role they want Washington to play during the worst public health crisis in a century.

With more than 100,000 Americans already dead from the coronavirus and at least 1.7 million infected, testing has emerged as a major campaign issue. Polls show that most people want better access to testing and believe that it is the job of the federal government. Like Mr. Biden, Democrats running for Congress have seized on testing as a prime example of what they view as Mr. Trump’s incompetent response to the crisis.

In Michigan, Senator Gary Peters, an incumbent Democrat, tells viewers in a TV ad that “our workplaces need to be safe” and “that means more testing.” In Colorado, an ad for Senator Cory Gardner, an incumbent Republican, begins with footage of a news anchor saying, “Coronavirus tests are coming to Colorado from South Korea because of Senator Cory Gardner.”

In Maine, Sara Gideon, a Democrat running to unseat Senator Susan Collins, is airing an ad in which she says that “the federal government needs to expand testing, which is critical to keeping us safe.” In Washington, Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference on Tuesday to attack the Trump plan as insufficient.

“Mr. President, take responsibility,” Ms. Pelosi declared, adding, “That’s what the president of the United States is supposed to do.”

Beyond the slogans and congressional calls for a national testing strategy, Mr. Biden’s plan, laid out late last month as he struggled to grab voters’ attention, begins to flesh out what such a strategy would entail.

Harking back to the War Production Board created during World War II by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the former vice president proposed a “Pandemic Testing Board” to oversee “a nationwide campaign” to increase production of diagnostic and antibody tests, coordinate distribution, identify testing sites and people to staff them, and build laboratory capacity.

Testing, he and his advisers wrote, “is the springboard we need to help get our economy safely up and running again.”

Mr. Biden said he would do what the Obama administration did during the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 — instruct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which regulates workplace safety, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue detailed guidance for how employers should protect their workers, including testing, campaign advisers say. OSHA would enforce compliance.

Under Mr. Trump, OSHA has issued Covid-19 guidance for employers that is “advisory in nature and informational in content” and does not mention testing. The C.D.C.’s interim guidance for employers says only that companies “should not require a Covid-19 test result” or a doctor’s note to grant sick leave or to determine whether employees can return to work.

Mr. Biden would also create a federal entity: the U.S. Public Health Jobs Corps, a force of at least 100,000 people, including AmeriCorps and Peace Corps volunteers and laid off workers, to trace the contacts of those who test positive for the virus. It would also “become the permanent foundation” of a service that would address other public health priorities like the opioid epidemic.

Republicans argue in favor of a more localized response led by state governments. “With support from the federal government to ensure states are meeting goals, the state plans for testing will advance the safe opening of America,” says the Trump administration’s 81-page Covid-19 Strategic Testing Plan, prepared by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, called Mr. Biden’s idea a “typical Democratic response.”

“There’s a big difference between what’s going on in Queens, N.Y., and rural Tennessee, and the governors know best what to do,” he said, adding, “Every time you have a national problem, whether it’s education or health, the instinct of Democrats is to say, ‘Let’s solve it from Washington,’ and my instinct and that of Republicans is that this is a country that works state by state, community by community.”

Some public health experts, including those who advise the Biden campaign and some who do not, say that is a false dichotomy. The federal government could and should cooperate with and support the states, and also take a more aggressive role, they say, particularly in a chaotic environment where a global shortage has left governors — and now employers — competing for scant supplies of test kits and wondering how best to use them.

“Every university, every employer, every organization is struggling to figure out how to use testing to create a safe environment,” said David A. Kessler, a Biden campaign adviser who was the commissioner of food and drugs under Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton.

“If you’re Amazon,” he added, “you can hire people to put in place testing systems to help assure the safety of your work force, but not everyone can do that. Why are we reinventing this firm by firm, school by school, employer by employer?”

Congress required Mr. Trump to provide a national testing strategy in the $484 billion stimulus package it passed last month and required the states to submit plans to the federal government for approval. But Democrats on Capitol Hill say the strategy the Trump administration offered over the weekend falls far short of what they envisioned.

Experts say there should be two main components to a comprehensive national testing strategy: a centralized effort to acquire test kits and distribute them, and clear guidance on how to use them.

Andrew Slavitt, who was the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under President Barack Obama and has provided advice to the Trump White House during the pandemic, said one reason for the government to control the acquisition of coronavirus tests was that commercial labs were increasing their prices to as much as $140 a test.

“In this laissez-faire policy, there are scarce resources, and whoever has the scarce resources gets to charge what they want, and the states all get to bid and now the employers are bidding,” he said. “The consequences of this are to make the distribution much more costly, much more uneven.”

As for how to use the tests, Republicans say such plans are best developed state by state, community by community. But with a virus that respects no borders, Democrats insist that a national standard is essential.

“We would say, if you want to reopen a school, then you have to test so many kids per day; they have to be retested every so often,” said Representative Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, adding: “The same thing with employers. How many people have to be tested before it’s safe to go back to work? How often do they have to be retested?”

Polls show that voters tend to favor a prominent role for the federal government. In a Pew Research survey released this month, 61 percent of Americans said coronavirus testing was mostly or entirely the responsibility of the federal government, not the states.

A Fox News poll released last week found that 63 percent of registered voters viewed the “lack of available testing” as a “major problem.” Just 12 percent said it was not a problem at all. Voters said they trusted Mr. Biden to do a better job on health care than Mr. Trump by a 17-point margin and favored Mr. Biden on the handling of the pandemic by nine points over Mr. Trump.

In a CNN poll earlier in May, 57 percent of Americans said the federal government was not doing enough to address the limited availability of coronavirus testing.

“When Americans hear Trump talking about testing not being his responsibility, the takeaway is that he’s just passing the buck,” said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster.

While Mr. Trump has repeatedly said that anyone who wants a test can get one, that is not true in many parts of the country. It is true in Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, has decided that the state will pay for testing. “When in doubt, get a test,” he said on his Facebook page, adding, “Aggressive testing is key to our reopening strategy.”

And while Mr. Trump has emphasized the number of people who have been tested — more than 15 million Americans, as of Monday — experts say the more important metrics are what percentage of the population has been tested, what percentage of tests come back positive and how those tests are deployed.

“Instead of focusing on what we need to do as a country to keep ourselves and our populations and especially our vulnerable people safe, and saying let’s come up with the right testing strategy and make sure we have enough tests to implement it, we’ve just been fighting about the number of tests,” said Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.

Testing has been a confounding issue for Mr. Trump since the early days of the pandemic, when sloppy laboratory practices at the C.D.C. caused contamination that rendered the nation’s first coronavirus tests ineffective, delaying the rollout. The country never quite caught up.

Countries that had aggressive early testing campaigns — South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Germany, among others — have largely controlled their epidemics. Before the pandemic there were 12 direct flights between Taiwan and Wuhan, China, its epicenter, each week.

Mr. Trump’s travel ban “led us to believe that we had shut the barn door when there was a flood of virus coming into our country from multiple direction,” said J. Stephen Morrison, who runs a global health program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He added, “We didn’t have a testing system and we didn’t want one.”

Emily Cochrane and Thomas Kaplan contributed reporting from Washington, and Giovanni Russonello from New York.

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Cortez Masto Withdraws Consideration To Be Biden’s Running Mate

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Cortez Masto Withdraws Consideration To Be Biden’s Running Mate

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said Thursday that she’s not interested in serving as running mate to presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Cortez Masto, who in 2016 became the first Latina elected to the U.S. Senate, said in a statement that she supports the former vice president and will work tirelessly to get him elected but does not want to join the presidential ticket.



Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto says it was “an honor to be considered” for Joe Biden’s running mate.

“It is an honor to be considered as a potential running mate but I have decided to withdraw my name from consideration,” she said in a statement. “Nevada’s economy is one of the hardest hit by the current crisis and I will continue to focus on getting Nevadans the support they need to get on back on their feet.”

Cortez Masto is one of more than 10 women whose names have been suggested as possible running mates for Biden, who has committed to picking a woman.

Cortez Masto, 56, was one of the highest profile Latinas believed to be on Biden’s short list of potential running mates, and a pick that some activists have said would have helped Biden win over Hispanics whose support could be crucial to winning the presidency in November.



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Wearing a face mask at home could reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission by up to 80 percent, scientists say

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Wearing a face mask at home could reduce risk of COVID-19 transmission by up to 80 percent, scientists say

Wearing a face mask in the home could prevent the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 from spreading between family members, according to a study.

The practice worked best when the covering was worn before a person’s symptoms started to show, the authors of the paper published in the journal BMJ Global Health found. The study did not detail the types of mask worn by participants.

Mask-wearing has become more common around the world since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, as health officials hope it will prevent the virus from spreading. In early April, for instance, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) updated its COVID-19 guidance to state that people should wear masks in public when it is difficult to maintain social distancing.

According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 5.7 million COVID-19 cases have been confirmed, and 356,124 people have died. Over 2.3 million people have recovered.

In the latest study, led by Yu Wang, from the Beijing Center for Disease Prevention and Control, China, researchers say COVID-19 has mostly spread within families and those in close contact with the sick, accounting for 70 percent of cases in China.

To explore whether wearing a mask at home could prevent its transmission, researchers invited all 181 people in the Chinese capital of Beijing who had tested positive for the coronavirus as of February 21, 2020, to complete a questionnaire. They were asked about their hygiene habits and approach towards COVID-19, such as ventilating the home and cleaning. After various households were excluded or declined to participate, 335 people from 124 families, where at least one person had tested positive, were featured in the analysis.


A stock shows a father and daughter wearing face masks.
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A family was defined as people who had lived with the sick person in a house for four days before and more than 24 hours after their symptoms started showing. On average, families had four members, ranging from two to nine, and usually included children, parents, and grandparents, as is typical in China, the team said.

Standard practice in Beijing meant the sick person was hospitalized after they were diagnosed with COVID-19.

The team found that almost a quarter of family members were infected within two weeks of the sick person falling ill, at 23 percent. But if the sick person and their family members wore a mask at home before the individual developed symptoms, this was 79 percent effective in reducing transmission.

However, there seemed to be no benefit from the sick person wearing the mask after their symptoms had shown. This may be because, as revealed in past studies, the viral load appears to be highest in the two days before and first day that symptoms appear, the team said.

“The results suggest that community face mask use is likely to be the most effective inside the household during severe epidemics,” the scientists wrote.

In addition, using household disinfectants containing ethanol and chlorine were 77 percent effective in preventing the virus from spreading, they found. The risk of transmission in a household was 18 times higher if family members were in frequent daily close contact with the sick person.