2025-01-30 21:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Three questions about the future of US climate tech under Trump
Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has already issued a blizzard of executive orders and memos.
Some of the moves could have major effects for climate change and climate technologies—for example, one of the first orders Trump signed signaled his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the major international climate treaty.
The road map for withdrawing from the Paris agreement is clear, but not all the effects of these orders are quite so obvious. There’s a whole lot of speculation about how far these actions reach, which ones might get overturned, and generally what comes next. Here are some of the crucial threads that I’m going to be following. Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
This quantum computer built on server racks paves the way to bigger machines
The news: A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning.
Why it matters: Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers. This contrasts with the industry’s earlier conception of a specialized chip within a supercomputer, much like a GPU. But this work is just a first step toward that vision. Read the full story.
—Sophia Chen
Vote for the 11th breakthrough
Earlier this month, we unveiled our annual list of the 10 Breakthrough Technologies for 2025, encompassing everything from promising stem-cell therapies to robots that learn quickly. Now, we’re asking you to help us choose the 11th honorary technology we should keep an eye on over the next 12 months.
Cast your vote for one of the four extra exciting breakthroughs before 1 April. Readers of The Download will be among the first to know once we announce your pick.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Trump advisers were blindsided by Elon Musk’s team’s offer to federal workers
Officials weren’t consulted about plans to induce civil service workers to resign. (WP $)
+ The radical sweeping measures are just the beginning. (Vox)
+ The email workers received cribs from Musk’s controversial Twitter memo. (Ars Technica)
+ If Musk gets his way, the US government could end up like X. (NY Mag $)
2 Meta has agreed to pay Trump $25 million
To settle the censorship lawsuit Trump brought against it back in 2021. (CNN)
+ Mark Zuckerberg predicts 2025 will be a big year for Meta’s government relations. (Insider $)+ Facebook is still focused on winning over creators to make it cool again. (The Information $)
3 How tech workers are quietly fighting the rise of MAGA
While their employers are shifting rightwards, workers are resisting. (NYT $)
4 Microsoft and Meta have defended their AI spending
DeepSeek’s success has raised serious questions about Big Tech’s AI budgets. (Reuters)
+ Zuckerberg claims not to be worried by the Chinese startup’s rapid rise. (The Verge)
+ How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Mr Beast is getting serious about buying TikTok
The YouTuber is a part of an investor group that’s secured more than $20 billion. (Bloomberg $)
6 How the US plans to use space lasers to destroy hypersonic missiles
It bears more than a passing resemblance to Ronald Reagan’s 1983 program. (FT $)
+ How to fight a war in space (and get away with it) (MIT Technology Review)
7 Waymo’s autonomous taxi service is expanding to new US cities
San Diego, Las Vegas, and Miami are on the list. (WSJ $)
+ Self-driving Tesla taxis will hit Austin’s road in June, apparently. (TechCrunch)
+ EV batteries boast an incredibly long lifespan. (IEEE Spectrum)
8 The perfect cryptographic machine is possible
It’s just a bit of a pain to build. (IEEE Spectrum)
+ Cryptography may offer a solution to the massive AI-labeling problem. (MIT Technology Review)
9 This mobile game is helping scientists identify new deep-sea species
Verifying ocean creatures can take decades, but AI and gaming speeds up the process. (Bloomberg $)
+ There’s an incredible amount of life down in the depths. (Quanta Magazine)
10 How the internet fell in love with capybaras
The world’s largest rodent is a social media sensation. (New Yorker $)
Quote of the day
“Hold the line! Don’t resign!”
—US federal workers rally together on Reddit to protest the Trump administration’s offer for them to take ‘deferred resignation’.
The big story
The race to fix space-weather forecasting before next big solar storm hits
April 2024
As the number of satellites in space grows, and as we rely on them for increasing numbers of vital tasks on Earth, the need to better predict stormy space weather is becoming more and more urgent.
Scientists have long known that solar activity can change the density of the upper atmosphere. But it’s incredibly difficult to precisely predict the sorts of density changes that a given amount of solar activity would produce.
Now, experts are working on a model of the upper atmosphere to help scientists to improve their models of how solar activity affects the environment in low Earth orbit. If they succeed, they’ll be able to keep satellites safe even amid turbulent space weather, reducing the risk of potentially catastrophic orbital collisions. Read the full story.
—Tereza Pultarova
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Happy birthday to the one and only Phil Collins—74 years young today.
+ Great news for Britain’s loneliest bat: he may have found a mate at long last. 
+ After years in the cocktail wilderness, the Black Russian is coming in from the cold.
+ Death to members clubs!
2025-01-30 19:00:00
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
Donald Trump has officially been in office for just over a week, and the new administration has hit the ground running with a blizzard of executive orders and memos.
Some of the moves could have major effects for climate change and climate technologies—for example, one of the first orders Trump signed signaled his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the major international climate treaty.
The road map for withdrawing from the Paris agreement is clear, but not all the effects of these orders are quite so obvious. There’s a whole lot of speculation about how far these actions reach, which ones might get overturned, and generally what comes next. Here are some of the crucial threads that I’m going to be following.
It’s clear that Donald Trump isn’t a fan of electric vehicles. One of the executive orders issued on his first day in office promised to eliminate the “electric vehicle (EV) mandate.”
The federal government under Biden didn’t actually have an EV mandate in place—rather, Trump is targeting national support programs, including subsidies that lower the cost of EVs for drivers and support building public chargers. But that’s just the beginning, because the executive order will go after states that have set their own rules on EVs.
While the US Environmental Protection Agency does set some rules around EVs through what are called tailpipe standards, last year California was granted a waiver that allows the state to set its own, stricter rules. The state now requires that all vehicles sold there must be zero-emissions by 2035. More than a dozen states quickly followed suit, setting a target to transition to zero-emissions vehicles within the next decade. That commitment was a major signal to automakers that there will be demand for EVs, and a lot of it, soon.
Trump appears to be coming after that waiver, and with it California’s right to set its own targets on EVs. We’ll likely see court battles over this, and experts aren’t sure how it’s going to shake out.
Wind energy was one of the most explicit targets for Trump on the campaign trail and during his first few days in office. In one memo, the new administration paused all federal permits, leases, and loans for all offshore and onshore wind projects.
This doesn’t just affect projects on federal lands or waters—nearly all wind projects typically require federal permits, so this could have a wide effect.
Even if the order is temporary or doesn’t hold up in court, it could be enough to chill investment in a sector that’s already been on shaky ground. As I reported last year, rising costs and slow timelines were already throwing offshore wind projects off track in the US. Investment has slowed since I published that story, and now, with growing political opposition, things could get even rockier.
One major question is how much this will slow down existing projects, like the Lava Ridge Wind Project in Idaho, which got the green light from the Biden administration before he left office. As one source told the Washington Post, the new administration may try to go after leases and permits that have already been issued, but “there may be insufficient authority to do so.”
In an executive order last week, the Trump administration called for a pause on handing out the funds that are legally set aside under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. That includes hundreds of billions of dollars for climate research and infrastructure.
This week, a memo from the White House called for a wider pause on federal grants and loans. This goes way beyond climate spending and could affect programs like Medicaid. There’s been chaos since that was first reported; nobody seems to agree on what exactly will be affected or how long the pause was supposed to last, and as of Tuesday evening, a federal judge had blocked that order.
In any case, all these efforts to pause, slow, or stop federal spending will be a major source of fighting going forward. As for effects on climate technology, I think the biggest question is how far the new administration can and will go to block spending that’s already been designated by Congress. There could be political consequences—most funds from the Inflation Reduction Act have gone to conservative-leaning states.
As I wrote just after the election in November, Donald Trump’s return to office means a sharp turn for the US on climate policy, and we’re seeing that start to play out very quickly. I’ll be following it all, but I’d love to hear from you. What do you most want to know more about? What questions do you have? If you work in the climate sector, how are you seeing your job affected? You can email me at [email protected], message me on Bluesky, or reach me on Signal: @casey.131.
EVs are mostly set for solid growth this year, but what happens in the US is still yet to be seen, as my colleague James Temple covered in a recent story.
The Inflation Reduction Act set aside hundreds of billions of dollars for climate spending. Here’s how the law made a difference, two years in.
For more on Trump’s first week in office, check out this news segment from Science Friday (featuring yours truly).
DeepSeek has stormed onto the AI scene. The company released a new reasoning model, called DeepSeek R1, which it claims can surpass the performance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1. The model appears to be incredibly efficient, which upends the idea that huge amounts of computing power, and energy, are needed to drive the AI revolution.
For more, check out this story on the company and its model from my colleague Caiwei Chen, and this look at what it means for the AI industry and its energy claims from James O’Donnell.
A huge surge in clean energy caused China’s carbon emissions to level off in 2024. Whether the country’s emissions peak and begin to fall for good depends on what wins in a race between clean-energy additions and growth in energy demand. (Carbon Brief)
In a bit of good news, heat pumps just keep getting hotter. The appliances outsold gas furnaces in the US last year by a bigger margin than ever. (Canary Media)
→ Here’s everything you need to know about heat pumps and how they work. (MIT Technology Review)
People are seeking refuge from floods in Kentucky’s old mountaintop mines. Decades ago, the mines were a cheap source of resources but devastated local ecosystems. Now people are moving in. (New York Times)
An Australian company just raised $20 million to use AI to search for key minerals. Earth AI has already discovered significant deposits of palladium, gold, and molybdenum. (Heatmap News)
Some research suggests a key ocean current system is slowing down, but a new study adds to the case that there’s no cause to panic … yet. The new work suggests that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, hasn’t shown long-term weakening over the past 60 years. (Washington Post)
→ Efforts to observe and understand the currents have shown they’re weirder and more unpredictable than expected. (MIT Technology Review)
Floating solar panels could be a major resource in US energy. A new report finds that federal reservoirs could hold enough floating solar to produce nearly 1,500 terawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 100 million homes each year. (Canary Media)
What sparked the LA wildfires is still a mystery, but AI is hunting for clues. Better understanding of what causes fires could be key in efforts to stop future blazes. (Grist)
2025-01-30 18:00:00
A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning.
Aurora is a “photonic” quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits—information encoded in light. In practice, this means combining and recombining laser beams on multiple chips using lenses, fibers, and other optics according to an algorithm. Xanadu’s computer is designed in such a way that the answer to an algorithm it executes corresponds to the final number of photons in each laser beam. This approach differs from one used by Google and IBM, which involves encoding information in properties of superconducting circuits.
Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller and wider than the average human. To make a useful quantum computer, “you copy and paste a thousand of these things and network them together,” says Christian Weedbrook, the CEO and founder of the company.
Ultimately, Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers. This contrasts with the industry’s earlier conception of a specialized chip within a supercomputer, much like a GPU.
But this work, which the company published last week in Nature, is just a first step toward that vision. Aurora used 35 chips to construct a total of 12 quantum bits, or qubits. Any useful applications of quantum computing proposed to date will require at least thousands of qubits, or possibly a million. By comparison, Google’s quantum computer Willow, which debuted last year, has 105 qubits (all built on a single chip), and IBM’s Condor has 1,121.
Devesh Tiwari, a quantum computing researcher at Northeastern University, describes Xanadu’s progress in an analogy with building a hotel. “They have built a room, and I’m sure they can build multiple rooms,” he says. “But I don’t know if they can build it floor by floor.”
Still, he says, the work is “very promising.”
Xanadu’s 12 qubits may seem like a paltry number next to IBM’s 1,121, but Tiwari says this doesn’t mean that quantum computers based on photonics are running behind. In his opinion, the number of qubits reflects the amount of investment more than it does the technology’s promise.
Photonic quantum computers offer several design advantages. The qubits are less sensitive to environmental noise, says Tiwari, which makes it easier to get them to retain information for longer. It is also relatively straightforward to connect photonic quantum computers via conventional fiber optics, because they already use light to encode information. Networking quantum computers together is key to the industry’s vision of a “quantum internet” where different quantum devices talk to each other. Aurora’s servers also don’t need to be kept as cool as superconducting quantum computers, says Weedbrook, so they don’t require as much cryogenic technology. The server racks operate at room temperature, although photon-counting detectors still need to be cryogenically cooled in another room.
Xanadu is not the only company pursuing photonic quantum computers; others include PsiQuantum in the US and Quandela in France. Other groups are using materials like neutral atoms and ions to construct their quantum systems.
From a technical standpoint, Tiwari suspects, no single qubit type will ever be the “winner,” but it’s likely that certain qubits will be better for specific applications. Photonic quantum computers, for example, are particularly well suited to Gaussian boson sampling, an algorithm that could be useful for quickly solving graph problems. “I really want more people to be looking at photonic quantum computers,” he says. He has studied quantum computers with multiple qubit types, including photons and superconducting qubits, and is not affiliated with a company.
Isaac Kim, a physicist at the University of California, Davis, points out that Xanadu has not demonstrated the error correction ability many experts think a quantum computer will need in order to do any useful task, given that information stored in a quantum computer is notoriously fragile.
Weedbrook, however, says Xanadu’s next goal is to improve the quality of the photons in the computer, which will ease the error correction requirements. “When you send lasers through a medium, whether it’s free space, chips, or fiber optics, not all the information makes it from the start to the finish,” he says. “So you’re actually losing light and therefore losing information.” The company is working to reduce this loss, which means fewer errors in the first place.
Xanadu aims to build a quantum data center, with thousands of servers containing a million qubits, in 2029.
2025-01-29 21:10:00
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Mice with two dads have been created using CRISPR
What’s new: Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China. The researchers used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both male and female parents. They hope to use the same approach to create primates with two dads.
Why it matters: Humans are off limits for now, but the work does help us better understand a strange biological phenomenon known as imprinting, which causes certain genes to be expressed differently depending on which parent they came from. Read the full story.
—Jessica Hamzelou
Three reasons Meta will struggle with community fact-checking
—Sarah Gilbert is research director for the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University.
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes.
The move is raising alarm bells, and rightly so. Meta has left a trail of moderation controversies in its wake, and ending professional fact-checking creates the potential for misinformation and hate to spread unchecked.
I’m a community moderator who researches community moderation. Here’s what I’ve learned about the limitations of relying on volunteers for moderation—and what Meta needs to do to succeed.
MIT Technology Review Narrated: Is this the end of animal testing?
Animal studies are notoriously bad at identifying human treatments. Around 95% of the drugs developed through animal research fail in people. But until recently there was no other option.
Now organs on chips may offer a truly viable alternative. They look remarkably prosaic: flexible polymer rectangles about the size of a thumb drive. In reality they’re triumphs of bioengineering, intricate constructions furrowed with tiny channels that are lined with living human tissues. And as they continue to be refined, they could solve one of the biggest problems in medicine today.
This is our latest story to be turned into a MIT Technology Review Narrated podcast, which
we’re publishing each week on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Just navigate to MIT Technology Review Narrated on either platform, and follow us to get all our new content as it’s released.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 DeepSeek has AI investors spooked
They’re worried they’ve wasted their money after the Chinese startup proved that powerful models can be created on a shoestring. (NYT $)
+ Its success has also shed light on how little we know about AI’s power demands. (FT $)
+ DeepSeek’s rapid rise is great news for China’s AI strategy. (WP $)
+ How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions. (MIT Technology Review)
2 OpenAI has accused DeepSeek of using its AI models to train R1
Just hours after Sam Altman claimed it was invigorating to have a new competitor. (FT $)
+ DeepSeek has been telling some people that it’s made by Microsoft. (Fast Company $)
+ Italy is investigating how the firm handles personal data in relation to GDPR. (TechCrunch)
3 Alibaba claims its new AI model surpasses DeepSeek’s
That was fast. (WSJ $)+ Here’s what sets DeepSeek apart from its competition. (NBC News)
4 RFK Jr’s niece is trying to stop him being appointed the top US health official
She’s shared private emails in which he makes false covid and vaccine claims. (STAT)
+ His cousin has also denounced him as a predator. (NY Mag $)
+ A weaker vaccine policy will lead to the resurgence of dangerous diseases. (The Atlantic $)
+ Why childhood vaccines are a public health success story. (MIT Technology Review)
5 Donald Trump has threatened new chip sanctions
In a heavy-handed attempt to force manufacturers to relocate to the US. (WP $)
6 Women seeking fertility treatment in the US are being left in the dark
Clinics don’t publicly declare how many times egg retrieval has gone wrong. (Bloomberg $)
+ Inside the strange limbo facing millions of IVF embryos. (MIT Technology Review)
7 Spotify claims that streaming has made the world value music
I’m not convinced artists will agree. (The Verge)
8 Supersonic commercial flights could be staging a comeback
More than two decades after Concorde ceased operation. (New Scientist $)
+ How rerouting planes to produce fewer contrails could help cool the planet. (MIT Technology Review)
9 LinkedIn has booted AI-generated jobseekers off its platform
Their accounts were created by a company peddling AI agents. (404 Media)
+ How one developer fought back against AI crawler bots. (Ars Technica)
10 The future of food is bacteria and algae
Mmm, delicious. (Undark)
+ Would you eat dried microbes? This company hopes so. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“I don’t have technology. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered.”
—Actor Christopher Walken isn’t a fan of modern gadgetry, he tells the Wall Street Journal.
The big story
Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business
May 2024
Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother, and they discuss his day-to-day life. But Sun’s mother died five years ago, and the person he’s talking to isn’t actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her.
There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them.
But some question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is truly a healthy way to process grief, and it’s not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
We can still have nice things
A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.)
+ Happy Chinese New Year to all those who celebrate! 
+ These robots do a passable job dancing to mark the celebration.
+ If you haven’t seen A Real Pain in the theater yet, why not?
+ Cool—archaeologists have uncovered an ancient Roman mask that may depict Medusa.
2025-01-29 18:00:00
Earlier this month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will cut back on its content moderation efforts and eliminate fact-checking in the US in favor of the more “democratic” approach that X (formerly Twitter) calls Community Notes, rolling back protections that he claimed had been developed only in response to media and government pressure.
The move is raising alarm bells, and rightly so. Meta has left a trail of moderation controversies in its wake, from overmoderating images of breastfeeding women to undermoderating hate speech in Myanmar, contributing to the genocide of Rohingya Muslims. Meanwhile, ending professional fact-checking creates the potential for misinformation and hate to spread unchecked.
Enlisting volunteers is how moderation started on the Internet, long before social media giants realized that centralized efforts were necessary. And volunteer moderation can be successful, allowing for the development of bespoke regulations aligned with the needs of particular communities. But without significant commitment and oversight from Meta, such a system cannot contend with how much content is shared across the company’s platforms, and how fast. In fact, the jury is still out on how well it works at X, which is used by 21% of Americans (Meta’s are significantly more popular—Facebook alone is used by 70% of Americans, according to Pew).
Community Notes, which started in 2021 as Birdwatch, is a community-driven moderation system on X that allows users who sign up for the program to add context to posts. Having regular users provide public fact-checking is relatively new, and so far results are mixed. For example, researchers have found that participants are more likely to challenge content they disagree with politically and that flagging content as false does not reduce engagement, but they have also found that the notes are typically accurate and can help reduce the spread of misleading posts.
I’m a community moderator who researches community moderation. Here’s what I’ve learned about the limitations of relying on volunteers for moderation—and what Meta needs to do to succeed:
There is a real risk under this style of moderation that only posts about things that a lot of people know about will get flagged in a timely manner—or at all. Consider how a post with a picture of a death cap mushroom and the caption “Tasty” might be handled under Community Notes–style moderation. If an expert in mycology doesn’t see the post, or sees it only after it’s been widely shared, it may not get flagged as “Poisonous, do not eat”—at least not until it’s too late. Topic areas that are more esoteric will be undermoderated. This could have serious impacts on both individuals (who may eat a poisonous mushroom) and society (if a falsehood spreads widely).
Crucially, X’s Community Notes aren’t visible to readers when they are first added. A note becomes visible to the wider user base only when enough contributors agree that it is accurate by voting for it. And not all votes count. If a note is rated only by people who tend to agree with each other, it won’t show up. X does not make a note visible until there’s agreement from people who have disagreed on previous ratings. This is an attempt to reduce bias, but it’s not foolproof. It still relies on people’s opinions about a note and not on actual facts. Often what’s needed is expertise.
I moderate a community on Reddit called r/AskHistorians. It’s a public history site with over 2 million members and is very strictly moderated. We see people get facts wrong all the time. Sometimes these are straightforward errors. But sometimes there is hateful content that takes experts to recognize. One time a question containing a Holocaust-denial dog whistle escaped review for hours and ended up amassing hundreds of upvotes before it was caught by an expert on our team. Hundreds of people—probably with very different voting patterns and very different opinions on a lot of topics—not only missed the problematic nature of the content but chose to promote it through upvotes. This happens with answers to questions, too. People who aren’t experts in history will upvote outdated, truthy-sounding answers that aren’t actually correct. Conversely, they will downvote good answers if they reflect viewpoints that are tough to swallow.
r/AskHistorians works because most of its moderators are expert historians. If Meta wants its Community Notes–style program to work, it should make sure that the people with the knowledge to make assessments see the posts and that expertise is accounted for in voting, especially when there’s a misalignment between common understanding and expert knowledge.
Meta’s paid content moderators review the worst of the worst—including gore, sexual abuse and exploitation, and violence. As a result, many have suffered severe trauma, leading to lawsuits and unionization efforts. When Meta cuts resources from its centralized moderation efforts, it will be increasingly up to unpaid volunteers to keep the platform safe.
Community moderators don’t have an easy job. On top of exposure to horrific content, as identifiable members of their communities, they are also often subject to harassment and abuse—something we experience daily on r/AskHistorians. However, community moderators moderate only what they can handle. For example, while I routinely manage hate speech and violent language, as a moderator of a text-based community I am rarely exposed to violent imagery. Community moderators also work as a team. If I do get exposed to something I find upsetting or if someone is being abusive, my colleagues take over and provide emotional support. I also care deeply about the community I moderate. Care for community, supportive colleagues, and self-selection all help keep volunteer moderators’ morale high(ish).
It’s unclear how Meta’s new moderation system will be structured. If volunteers choose what content they flag, will that replicate X’s problem, where partisanship affects which posts are flagged and how? It’s also unclear what kind of support the platform will provide. If volunteers are exposed to content they find upsetting, will Meta—the company that is currently being sued for damaging the mental health of its paid content moderators—provide social and psychological aid? To be successful, the company will need to ensure that volunteers have access to such resources and are able to choose the type of content they moderate (while also ensuring that this self-selection doesn’t unduly influence the notes).
Online communities can thrive when they are run by people who deeply care about them. However, volunteers can’t do it all on their own. Moderation isn’t just about making decisions on what’s “true” or “false.” It’s also about identifying and responding to other kinds of harmful content. Zuckerberg’s decision is coupled with other changes to its community standards that weaken rules around hateful content in particular. Community moderation is part of a broader ecosystem, and it becomes significantly harder to do it when that ecosystem gets poisoned by toxic content.
I started moderating r/AskHistorians in 2020 as part of a research project to learn more about the behind-the-scenes experiences of volunteer moderators. While Reddit had started addressing some of the most extreme hate on its platform by occasionally banning entire communities, many communities promoting misogyny, racism, and all other forms of bigotry were permitted to thrive and grow. As a result, my early field notes are filled with examples of extreme hate speech, as well as harassment and abuse directed at moderators. It was hard to keep up with.
But halfway through 2020, something happened. After a milquetoast statement about racism from CEO Steve Huffman, moderators on the site shut down their communities in protest. And to its credit, the platform listened. Reddit updated its community standards to explicitly prohibit hate speech and began to enforce the policy more actively. While hate is still an issue on Reddit, I see far less now than I did in 2020 and 2021. Community moderation needs robust support because volunteers can’t do it all on their own. It’s only one tool in the box.
If Meta wants to ensure that its users are safe from scams, exploitation, and manipulation in addition to hate, it cannot rely solely on community fact-checking. But keeping the user base safe isn’t what this decision aims to do. It’s a political move to curry favor with the new administration. Meta could create the perfect community fact-checking program, but because this decision is coupled with weakening its wider moderation practices, things are going to get worse for its users rather than better.
Sarah Gilbert is research director for the Citizens and Technology Lab at Cornell University.
2025-01-29 00:00:00
Mice with two fathers have been born—and have survived to adulthood—following a complex set of experiments by a team in China.
Zhi-Kun Li at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his colleagues used CRISPR to create the mice, using a novel approach to target genes that normally need to be inherited from both male and female parents. They hope to use the same approach to create primates with two dads.
Humans are off limits for now, but the work does help us better understand a strange biological phenomenon known as imprinting, which causes certain genes to be expressed differently depending on which parent they came from. For these genes, animals inherit part of a “dose” from each parent, and the two must work in harmony to create a healthy embryo. Without both doses, gene expression can go awry, and the resulting embryos can end up with abnormalities.
This is what researchers have found in previous attempts to create mice with two dads. In the 1980s, scientists in the UK tried injecting the DNA-containing nucleus of a sperm cell into a fertilized egg cell. The resulting embryos had DNA from two males (as well as a small amount of DNA from a female, in the cytoplasm of the egg).
But when these embryos were transferred to the uteruses of surrogate mouse mothers, none of them resulted in a healthy birth, seemingly because imprinted genes from both paternal and maternal genomes are needed for development.
Li and his colleagues took a different approach. The team used gene editing to knock out imprinted genes altogether.
Around 200 of a mouse’s genes are imprinted, but Li’s team focused on 20 that are known to be important for the development of the embryo.
In an attempt to create healthy mice with DNA from two male “dads,” the team undertook a complicated set of experiments. To start, the team cultured cells with sperm DNA to collect stem cells in the lab. Then they used CRISPR to disrupt the 20 imprinted genes they were targeting.
These gene-edited cells were then injected, along with other sperm cells, into egg cells that had had their own nuclei removed. The result was embryonic cells with DNA from two male mice. These cells were then injected into a type of “embryo shell” used in research, which provides the cells required to make a placenta. The resulting embryos were transferred to the uteruses of female mice.
It worked—to some degree. Some of the embryos developed into live pups, and they even survived to adulthood. The findings were published in the journal Cell Stem Cell.
“It’s exciting,” says Kotaro Sasaki, a developmental biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the work. Not only have Li and his team been able to avoid a set of imprinting defects, but their approach is the second way scientists have found to create mice using DNA from two males.
The finding builds on research by Katsuhiko Hayashi, now at Osaka University in Japan, and his colleagues. A couple of years ago, that team presented evidence that they had found a way to take cells from the tails of adult male mice and turn them into immature egg cells. These could be fertilized with sperm to create bi-paternal embryos. The mice born from those embryos can reach adulthood and have their own offspring, Hayashi has said.
Li’s team’s more complicated approach was less successful. Only a small fraction of the mice survived, for a start. The team transferred 164 gene-edited embryos, but only seven live pups were born. And those that were born weren’t entirely normal, either. They grew to be bigger than untreated mice, and their organs appeared enlarged. They didn’t live as long as normal mice, and they were infertile.
It would be unethical to do such risky research with human cells and embryos. “Editing 20 imprinted genes in humans would not be acceptable, and producing individuals who could not be healthy or viable is simply not an option,” says Li.
“There are numerous issues,” says Sasaki. For a start, a lot of the technical lab procedures the team used have not been established for human cells. But even if we had those, this approach would be dangerous—knocking out human genes could have untold health consequences.
“There’s lots and lots of hurdles,” he says. “Human applications [are] still quite far.”
Despite that, the work might shed a little more light on the mysterious phenomenon of imprinting. Previous research has shown that mice with two moms appear smaller, and live longer than expected, while the current study shows that mice with two dads are overgrown and die more quickly. Perhaps paternal imprinted genes support growth and maternal ones limit it, and animals need both to reach a healthy size, says Sasaki.
