A report in the New York Post says a federal judge will decide whether President Joe Biden’s administration violated the First Amendment by censoring users on social media over topics like Covid and election security – and if so, what to do about it.

The Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana filed the lawsuit last year, alleging that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise” that pressured social-media platforms to scrub away dissenting views, including criticism of mask mandates and objections to Covid-19 vaccination.

The Louisiana judge presiding over the case — former President Trump appointee Terry A. Doughty — is considering whether to intervene in communications between the US government and top social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn, among others, court documents say.

The case is among the most potentially consequential First Amendment battles pending in the courts, testing the limits on government policing of social-media content.

According to The Washington Post, the revolution in artificial intelligence has sparked an explosion of disturbingly lifelike images showing child sexual exploitation, fuelling concerns among child-safety investigators that they will undermine efforts to find victims and combat real-world abuse.

Generative AI tools have set off what one analyst called a “predatory arms race” on paedophile forums because they can create within seconds realistic images of children performing sex acts, commonly known as child pornography.

Thousands of AI-generated child-sex images have been found on forums across the dark web, a layer of the internet visible only with special browsers, with some participants sharing detailed guides for how other paedophiles can make their own creations.

The flood of images could confound the central tracking system built to block such material from the web because it is designed only to catch known images of abuse, not detect newly generated ones. It also threatens to overwhelm law enforcement officials who work to identify victimized children and will be forced to spend time determining whether the images are real or fake.

The Seattle Times reported that there have been increasingly loud public warnings that social media is harming teenagers’ mental health – most recently from the US surgeon general – adding to many parents’ fears about what all the time spent on phones is doing to their children’s brains.

Although many scientists share the concern, there is little research to prove that social media is harmful — or to indicate which sites, apps or features are problematic. There isn’t even a shared definition of what social media is. It leaves parents, policymakers and other adults in teenagers’ lives without clear guidance on what to be worried about.

YouTube illustrates the challenge. It’s the most popular site among teenagers by far: 95 per cent use it, and almost 20 per cent say they do so “almost constantly,” Pew Research Centre found. It has all the features of social media, yet it hasn’t been included in most studies.

Experts said they would like to see research that examines specific types of social media content, and things such as how social media use in adolescence affects people in adulthood, what it does to neural pathways and how to protect youth against negative effects.

New York Post reported:  Following the release of a bombshell report detailing how the US government buys data to spy on its own citizens, privacy experts warn foreign intelligence agencies are snapping up the same information and have the potential to build detailed profiles of every American consumer.

​​Specialists are calling on the government to stop buddying up with big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Apple and instead work on a privacy law to keep its citizens safe from cyberattacks, online identity theft and fraud.

“Frankly, it’s shameful that we have not had meaningful privacy legislation to this point when … every other democracy and advanced economy in the world has something like this and the United States doesn’t,” said Neil Richards, a Koch Distinguished Professor of Law at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

The kind of data which is for sale includes geo-specific locations, spending habits and online search behaviour of US citizens and is being harvested by shadowy companies based in foreign countries, largely through cellphone apps, with little regulation or control.

The Insider’s take is that the hype around generative AI has reached a fever pitch in recent months and for good reason as the industry has the potential to add $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually, a new McKinsey report argues.

The report, which looks at the economic potential of generative AI, says it could add between $2.6 to $4.4 trillion to the global economy through “63 generative AI use cases spanning 16 business functions,” which is roughly the same amount as the UK’s GDP in 2021.

Generative AI refers to conversational AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT released in November, which impressed the world with its wide-ranging abilities including creating content, generating music and writing code.

The impact of generative AI is expected to be instrumental across all industries, especially in banking, high-tech, pharmaceuticals and medical products, and retail, McKinsey’s report says. The technology could add $200 billion to $340 billion in value to the banking industry, and $240 to $390 billion in value in retail.

A story published by the Financial Times notes that big institutional investors are increasing pressure on technology companies to take responsibility for the potential misuse of artificial intelligence as they become concerned about the liability for human rights issues linked to the software.

The Collective Impact Coalition for Digital Inclusion of 32 financial institutions representing $6.9 trillion in assets under management – including Aviva Investors, Fidelity International and HSBC Asset Management – is among those leading the push to influence technology businesses to commit to ethical AI.

Aviva Investors has held meetings with tech companies, including chipmakers, in recent months to warn them to strengthen protections on human rights risks linked to AI, including surveillance, discrimination, unauthorised facial recognition and mass lay-offs.

A Cal Poly student who was barred from attending class in person after refusing to comply with Covid-19 regulations is suing the university and local health authorities, The Tribune reports.

Elijah Behringer claimed the university and San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department officials violated his federal and state rights “under sham application of state law and authority,” according to a lawsuit filed May 23.

In his lawsuit, Behringer questioned the legitimacy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the right of organisations such as the World Health Organization to dictate state and federal health regulations. It also claimed Cal Poly failed to get informed consent from Behringer and others for the use of masks, vaccines and testing.

He skipped his enrolment in September 2021 – partially due to the Covid-19 regulations – with a plan to return in January 2022, he said. But after the university did not grant his requests for exemptions to the vaccination, testing and mask-wearing regulations, Behringer claimed in his lawsuit he was effectively “suspended” from campus, preventing him from returning to classes.

According to the Patch, a singer is suing the Los Angeles Master Chorale, alleging her requests to her employer to be tested for the coronavirus rather than take vaccinations due to religious and medical objections have been wrongfully denied.

Virenia Lind’s Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit alleges religious discrimination, failure to accommodate religious belief or observance, failure to accommodate disability and medical condition, failure to engage in an interactive process to determine a reasonable accommodation for disability and medical condition, discrimination based on disability and medical condition and failure to prevent discrimination.

Lind seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. An LAMC representative did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the suit brought Friday. Lind maintains that LAMC forced the soprano into unpaid leave status in 2021, the year the company mandated that all employees be vaccinated against the coronavirus.

• The Defender report