Being Blue at PSU

By Deepa Kadidahl To End the Pandemic, We Must Champion Vaccine Equality With the lifting of the mask mandate at Penn State, it feels for us as though COVID is over. Unsurprisingly, this is far from true. Today, COVID is particularly plaguing low-income countries due to unequal distribution of vaccines. Peru, for example, had only vaccinated 30% of its population by September of last year. At one point, they also suffered from the highest COVID death rate in the world, with the virus having killed 200,000 of its 32 millions citizens (Al Jazeera). Countries in Africa are also victims of vaccine inequality. By the end of last year, only 8% of the continent’s entire population had been vaccinated (Amnesty International). Even when vaccines were shipped from the West to African countries, there were many instances of the vaccines being close to their expiration date (Amnesty International). These countries lacked the infrastructure to distribute the vaccines in time, leading to their dispo...

By Tim Klaum In colloquial terms, filter bubbles are the algorithms that run our social media accounts, deciding which news to push, which accounts we see more often, and which posts get left in the dust of our timelines. At first glance, I must admit, I thought filters were a great thing. I saw it as a way to get curated content, so you know you’re seeing what you like and ignoring what you don’t. Unfortunately, that isn’t the reality we live in today, and I don’t think we ever will. For a long time now, I’ve frequently seen news come across my feed that links back to the same few sources, even though I wasn’t following any of them. At first, I thought it must just be a coincidence. However, upon further investigation, Twitter was actually pushing me news from accounts that I had interacted with in the past, regardless of whether or not I actually followed the accounts. I was fine with it because I hadn’t realized what that meant for my news, but soon after that, I came to the conclus...