Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France for not moderating his messaging app. Prosecutors say Durov was arrested and detained for failing to act against illicit content on the service, including the exchange of child sexual imagery, drug trafficking, and fraud. Now out on a $7.5 million bail, Durov, who has been a staunch proponent of free speech for years, notes that he intends to keep users’ content moderation-free, particularly since Telegram is a private instant messaging service. Critics say his arrest could serve as a cautionary signal to other tech companies and may prompt messaging platforms, like WhatsApp, and even email services, like Gmail, to consider monitoring and regulating user communications.

Zuckerberg says Biden officials pressured Meta (Facebook) to censor some COVID-related content. “In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to the Committee on the Judiciary of the US House of Representatives. In all, Facebook took down more than 20 million pieces of content related to “disinformation” in just over a year.

Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that Facebook suppressed the reach of articles reporting on the corruption allegations involving the Biden family and Burisma in the weeks leading up to the 2020 election, possibly constituting election interference. In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg explained that this action was taken after the FBI warned Facebook that the story could be Russian disinformation, though it was later confirmed that it was not.

X (Twitter) is blocked in Brazil after the tech giant ignored court orders to remove and censor accounts that the Brazilian government considered to be in violation of misinformation and hate speech. The court also froze the financial assets of another Musk-led business (Starlink). As X explained in a statement posted, they were shut down by Judge de Moraes, “simply because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents. When we attempted to defend ourselves in court, Judge de Moraes threatened our Brazilian legal representative with imprisonment. Even after she resigned, he froze all of her bank accounts.” 

The US’s top defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, has announced that their prototype system that can “detect and defeat disinformation” for the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is nearly complete.

MSNBC deceptively edited a clip to make it appear that the popular podcaster Joe Rogan was endorsing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. As Rogan explained on his podcast, “This is what MSNBC did. They took a clip of me talking about Tulsi Gabbard and they edited it up and made it look like I was saying great things about Kamala Harris.”

The federal Conservatives have vowed to stop answering to CTV reporters until the network acknowledges that they intentionally manipulated a video to misrepresent Pierre Poilievre. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called Poilievre “anti-democratic” for complaining about CTV’s manipulated video, suggesting he was undermining the media, and by that, democracy.

Court finds that Rebel News content does not qualify as “journalism” (and therefore, they are not eligible for journalism tax credits), because, according to the judge, their content is “not based on facts and didn’t include multiple perspectives.” (Yet, somehow, CTV is “journalism.”)

A 54-year-old woman in Austria has been found guilty of fatally infecting her neighbor with COVID-19 nearly three years ago. A judge sentenced the woman to four months’ of suspended imprisonment and fined her 800 euros for gross negligent homicide since she left her home after testing positive for COVID-19. According to the Austria Press Agency, the victim was a cancer patient and died of COVID-related pneumonia, with “viral DNA” tests linking the virus to both the victim and the 54-year-old woman.

Al Chatbots have a left-leaning political bias that could unknowingly influence society, new study shows. The study, out of Otago Polytechnic in New Zealand (Rozado), ran political questionnaires on 24 different AI models, including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and found that all 24 chatbots lean to the left. Rozado doesn’t suggest the bias is deliberate, but theorizes that, instead, it’s a result of the online data it is trained on.

MIT study suggests that laws are written in an incomprehensible type of legalese to convey a sense of authority. The study, published by PNAS (Martínez et al.), found that, after scanning an assortment of documents, even non-lawyers use this complicated style of legalese  (legalese with “center-embedding”) when asked to write laws. Additionally, lawyers have a greater preference for simple English when not writing laws.

An undercover reporter from Mug Club has released a viral video of Dr. Jay Varma (former senior COVID-19 public health advisor to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio) admitting to regularly attending “sex parties” and large “underground dance parties,” where, “we were all taking Molly and everybody was high” in 2021, while the city was on lockdown. Varma was also actively implementing vaccine mandates at this time. In his defense, he claimed, he “needed a way to blow off steam every now and then.”

In response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall, the Public Health Agency of Canada released startling data: Booster recipients have a noticeably higher death rate than the unvaccinated.

Pfizer deploys mobile “School of Science” to teach kids the ABCs of pandemics and vaccines. Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer is crossing the US with a mobile science “escape room”—complete with a robotic dog—to provide students in rural communities with a “science-based learning experience.” Despite Pfizer having paid billions in penalties for false claims and safety violations in recent years, students will learn and work with Pfizer employees on a pandemic tabletop exercise ending in a vaccine saving the day!

A new study found that common skin care products used by young children may increase their exposure to a hormone-disrupting chemical. The study (Bloom et al.) found phthalates, a common chemical added to skincare products to improve absorption, in the urinalysis of children who recently used child-friendly skin care products (like sunscreen).

A case of the measles in 2023, reported by the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and mainstream media as being “the state’s first measles case in four years,” has now been revealed to be vaccine-induced, according to documents released by the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN).

A study has found that “pesticides [are] potentially as bad as smoking for increased risk in certain cancers.” Frontiers (Pirchner).

A US agency has linked high fluoride exposure to lower IQ in kids. The new government report, published by the Department of Health and Human Services by their National Toxicology Program, links high fluoride exposure in drinking water containing more than 1.5mg per litre (the maximum acceptable concentration set by the government of Canada) to a lower IQ in children.

Hundreds of transgender teens under 18 have had their breasts removed as part of “gender-affirming” care in Canada, new data shows. A new analysis shows hundreds of adolescents in Canada have undergone female-to-male “top surgery”—double mastectomies—over the past five years. According to data compiled by the Canadian Institute for Health Information, since 2018, 602 youth 18 and under have received “top surgery,” with some patients as young as 14.

A child’s toy water gun is a dangerous “assault weapon,” claims OPP.  The Ontario Provincial Police have criminally charged a 58-year-old woman, Wendy Washik, with “assault with a weapon” over an incident where she accidentally struck a neighbour with water from a child’s water gun. To cap the absurdity off, after Washik’s children set up a fundraiser to cover her legal costs, GoFundMe pulled the plug on her online fundraiser because their terms of service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime.