A spokesperson for Twitter defended the company’s decision to censor a bombshell story from the New York Post about Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son Hunter. The company is citing its policy on “hacked materials” as the reason why it decided to limit its users’ ability to share the story, but it is not clear that any hacking was involved in procuring the trove of emails at all.
Conservative commentator Jack Posobiec was locked out of his Twitter account on Wednesday evening after he shared a meme based on the bombshell New York Post report about Joe and Hunter Biden that was widely censored by Facebook and Twitter throughout the day.
The University of California system spent over $800,000 on legal fees during a court battle with a student-led satirical newspaper that came under fire in 2016 when it mocked “safe spaces.” The ACLU filed a lawsuit in 2016 against the University of California over its decision to strip the student newspaper of its university funding. This week, public records revealed that the university spent far more on fighting its students in court than it would have spent if it had simply funded the paper.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) is applied too broadly to social media companies in a recent letter. The law, which was passed at the beginning of the dot-com era, allows internet companies to avoid liability for content that has been posted by users on their platform. According to Thomas, “many courts have construed the law broadly to confer sweeping immunity on some of the largest companies in the world.”
Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, who was widely celebrated for his 2009 landing of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River, argued this week that Boeing should do more to in
Deans at the law schools at Harvard, Yale, New York University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford all declined an invitation to comment from the College Fix on the chaos surrounding Supreme Court nominations.
A 23-year-old student at Ohio State University died during a shooting near campus on Sunday morning. An 18-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, was arrested at the scene and charged with murder. The shooting reportedly occurred after a dispute at an off-campus party.
The Mathematical Association of America recently released a statement in which it pushed back against President Donald Trump’s recent executive to curtail the teaching of critical race theory. The association argued that mathematics contains “human biases” that can only be corrected by promoting critical race theory and other radical doctrines developed on college campuses over the past two decades to math educators and students.
The Department of Education announced this week that it is investigating the University of Pittsburgh over its treatment of Professor Norman Wang, who was demoted from his position at the university hospital after he criticized affirmative action. The Department of Education claims that the university could lose its federal funding if it continues to violate Title VI by discriminating against applicants during its admissions process.
Recently released court documents reveal that Google is sharing data on search keywords with police departments. According to the documents, police departments are able to obtain data from Google on every individual who has searched for a specific keyword. If the allegations are true, police departments are using IP addresses provided by Google to connect users to specific crimes. However, privacy experts believe the practice violates the Fourth Amendment.
The DOJ filed a lawsuit against Yale University on Thursday over charges that the university’s admissions office unlawfully discriminates against Asian and white applicants. Yale receives about $600 million in federal funding each year and holds an endowment of $30 billion.
Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has fired a professor over a discussion he held with students about the use of offensive language. Students complained to administrators after Professor Gary Shank used a racial slur during the discussion about inappropriate language.
A Florida high school principal fired for refusing to admit that the Holocaust is a historical fact was rehired by Spanish River High School in Boca Raton this week based on a 4-3 vote by the school board. Principal William Latson was fired last year after he told a parent that “not everyone believes the Holocaust happened.” Latson will also receive $152,000 in back pay as part of the agreement.
NYU announced this week that it will not comply with guidelines set by the state of New York that urge academic institutions to suspend in-person classes if 100 people test positive for coronavirus. Although New York University crossed the threshold at its Washington Square campus, NYU has decided to continue with in-person classes, justifying the move with its low overall positive test rate of 0.5 percent.
A recently published study revealed that only three college students have been hospitalized out of 70,000 positive coronavirus cases at 50 major universities. The New York Times, there have been approximately 130,000 positive coronavirus cases on American campuses since the pandemic began in March. Despite this, no students have yet to die directly as a result of their contraction of the virus.
Syracuse University announced this week that it will pause most in-person campus activities after a small spike in positive coronavirus tests amongst the student body. The spike occurred after several students tested positive after attending an off-campus party last week.
Facebook Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer claimed this week that the company’s revenue model is “under assault” after Apple announced changes that will limit the data that companies like Facebook can collect from smartphone users. The new feature, which will be built into a future update of iOS, will offer users the option to block tracking when opening an application.
Grand Valley State University Professor Joel Wendland-Liu came under fire this week over his decision to contribute an anti-Trump column titled “Trump’s White Death Cult” to a newspaper owned by China’s communist party. In the column, Wendland-Liu makes the case that supporters of the President tolerate “white supremacy,” and “Neo-Nazi militias.”
Professors at America’s colleges and universities took to social media over the weekend to celebrate President Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis. A few even suggested that they laughed after learning of the President’s misfortune.
The attorney for a Fordham University student that was disciplined by administrators over a photo he posted to Instagram alleged in a recent court filing that the University has undisclosed ties to foreign nations, including China. Over the past several months, reports have revealed that many top universities and colleges have accepted multi-million donations from foreign governments.
Los Alamos National Laboratory Researcher Turab Lookman was sentenced to probation this month over his failure to disclose ties to the Chinese government. Lookman was a researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, a joint project between Texas A&M University and the University of California system, but participated in China’s “Thousand Talents” program, a scheme to steal research from universities and government-funded programs in the West.
Florida State University announced this week that it is canceling spring break this year as part of a calendar restructuring effort designed to limit the spread of coronavirus on campus.
This week, Seattle’s city council passed an ordinance that will require Uber and Lyft to pay their drivers a minimum hourly wage of $16. Lyft has already pushed back at the new policy, claiming that it may force them to lay off 4,000 drivers in Seattle alone.
An administrator at USC recently defended the university’s decision to investigate a professor over his use of the Chinese word for “um” during an online lecture. Professor Greg Patton was placed on leave after students complained that a Chinese word used by Patton sounded like an English-language racial slur. According to the university, using a common Chinese word during a discussion of cross-cultural communication is a “polarizing example.”
Confidential personal data was compromised by hackers that targeted the Clark County School District in Clark County, Nevada, last week. A cybersecurity firm claims that the hackers publicly released all of the documents they gained access to after the district refused to pay the ransom. The compromised data includes the social security numbers of district employees.
CLAIM: During Tuesday night’s presidential debate, Democratic nominee Joe Biden said that American educators do not teach students to “hate” the United States. VERDICT: FALSE
Democrat presidential nominee Joe Biden told President Donald Trump to “shut up” several times during Tuesday night’s debate at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, the first of three matchups between the two.
The Georgia Institute of Technology settled a lawsuit with the Students for Life group this week over the university’s refusal to fund an event with Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As a result of the lawsuit, the university has revised its policies to ensure that funding for student groups will be awarded in a “viewpoint-neutral” manner.
Emergency 911 services in 14 states went down temporarily on Monday, putting lives at risk. Some argue that the outages, which lasted for up to an hour, were caused by technical issues at Microsoft, which provides communications products used by emergency service departments. Others believe that the shutdown was caused by an issue with an emergency telephone service called Intrado.
Students at the College of Eastern Idaho, a community college located in Idaho Falls, are required to take a course that teaches them about their privilege. One student in the course claims that he was shamed by his professor when he disputed the legitimacy of “white privilege.”
Universal Health Services, a major hospital system with over 400 locations, faced a cyberattack over the weekend that shut down its internal records system. Doctors and nurses have been forced to use paper and pen to record patient records since the attack began. Cybersecurity analysts believe that the attack could be the largest medical cyberattack in the nation’s history.
Cal State Long Beach shut down its in-person classes this week after five students tested positive for coronavirus. The campus was operating in a reduced capacity prior to the shutdown as part of a broad mitigation effort by the California State University system. Only 1,000 students are living on campus this fall.
San Francisco State University President Lynn Mahoney has defended students that invited airplane hijacker Leila Khaled to speak on campus. Mahoney said that students were “deeply” wounded by Zoom’s decision to shut down a livestream of the event. In a statement, Zoom said that it was forced to shut down the event after learning of Khaled’s affiliation with a terrorist organization.
Columbia University announced this week that it is working with Amazon to create a research center for the development of AI technology. The center, which will be based in New York City, will operate for the next five years on a $5 million donation from Amazon.
In interviews with Campus Reform this week, students pushed back against President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court of the United States. The problem? President Trump had not selected a replacement at the time of the interviews.
This week, YouTube and Zoom pulled the plug on a livestream event hosted by San Francisco State University featuring Leila Khaled, an activist that is best known for her participation in two airplane hijackings that took place in the 1970s. SFSU President Lynn Mahoney argued that that Zoom’s decision to “silence” Khaled is “deeply wounding” to members of the university community.
The student newspaper at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reportedly fired a student this week after he submitted a column in which he pushed back against calls to “defund the police.” Student Tripp Grebe was swiftly removed from his role as a columnist at the paper after the Young America’s Foundation (YAF) questioned the university’s administration over the paper’s refusal to publish the column.
A recent audit conducted by the state of California revealed that the University of California accepted at least 64 students due to their connections to university staff or donors over more qualified applicants. The majority of the applicants chosen for their connections were found at UC Berkeley, which the state auditors accused of failing to “establish a campus culture that values commitment to an admissions process based on fairness and applicants’ merits and achievements.”
Administrators at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, have refused to condemn a professor that said he is prepared to file a disciplinary report on freshman Nick Sandmann, the Covington Catholic student that found himself at the center of a national media scandal after an encounter with a Native American protester in Washington D.C. in January 2019.
A new startup is paying freelance workers to help landlords around the country evict tenants that are behind on their rent. The company has faced criticism from media outlets and social media users this week, many of which have suggested that the company’s operations are unethical.
