Mike M. – Page 13

Can public trust in science survive a second battering?

Science, science education, syndication, trust in science / Mike M. / February 18, 2025

Public trust in science has shown a certain resiliency, but it is being tested like never before.

Public trust in science has been in the spotlight in recent years: After the US presidential election in November, one Wall Street Journal headline declared that “Science Lost America’s Trust.” Another publication called 2024 “the year of distrust in science.”

Some of that may be due to legitimate concerns: Public health officials have been criticized for their lack of transparency during critical moments, including the COVID-19 pandemic. And experts have noted the influence of political factors. For instance, the first Trump administration repeatedly undermined scientists—a trend repeating in his second term so far.

But what does the research say about where public trust in science, doctors, and health care institutions actually stands? In recent years, researchers have been increasingly looking into quantifying these sentiments. And indeed, multiple surveys and studies have reported the COVID-19 pandemic correlated with a decline in trust in the years following the initial outbreak. This decrease, though, seems to be waning as new research shows a clearer picture of trust across time. One 2024 study suggests Trump’s attacks on science during his first term did not have the significant impact many experts feared—and may have even boosted confidence among certain segments of the population.

Overall confidence in scientific institutions has slightly rebounded since the pandemic, some research suggests, with that trust remaining strong across countries. Despite the uptick, there appears to be a still widening divide particularly between political factions, with Democrats showing higher levels of trust and Republicans showing lower levels, a polarization that became more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’re seeing now, several years later, is how deep those divisions really are,” said Cary Funk, who previously led science and society research at the Pew Research Center and has written reports on public trust in science. Funk is now a senior adviser for public engagement at the Aspen Institute Science and Society Program.

Political and economic entities have weaponized certain scientific topics, such as climate change, as well as the mistrust in science to advance their own interests, said Gabriele Contessa, a philosopher of science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. In the future, that weaponization might engender mistrust related to other issues, he added. It remains to be seen what effect a second Trump term may have on confidence in science. Already, Trump issued a communications freeze on Department of Health and Human Services officials and paused federal grants, a move that was ultimately rescinded but still unleashed a flurry of chaos and confusion throughout academic circles.

“To have people like Donald Trump, who clearly do not trust reputable scientific sources and often trust instead disreputable or at least questionable scientific sources, is actually a very, very strong concern,” Contessa said.

Who will act in the public’s best interest?

In the winter of 2021, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of around 14,500 adults in the US, asking about their regard for different groups of individuals, including religious leaders, police officers, and medical scientists. The proportion of the survey takers who said they had a great deal of confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interest, the researchers found, decreased from 39 percent in November 2020 to 29 percent just one year later. In October 2023, at the lowest point since the pandemic began, only 23 percent reported a great deal of confidence in scientists. A analysis conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research reported a comparable decline: In 2018, 48 percent of respondents reported a great deal of confidence in scientists; in 2022, it was down to just 39 percent.

But years later, a new survey conducted in October 2024 suggested that the dip in trust may have been temporary. An update to the Pew survey that sought input from almost 10,000 adults in the US shows a slow recovery: Compared to the 23 percent, now 26 percent report having a great deal of confidence.

Similarly, a 2024 study examining attitudes toward scientific expertise during a 63-year period found that Trump and Republican attacks on science, in general, did not actually sway public trust when comparing responses in 2016 to those from 2020. And a recent international survey that asked nearly 72,000 individuals in 68 countries their thoughts on scientists revealed that most people trust scientists and want them to be a part of the policy making process.

“There are still lots of people who have at least a kind of soft inclination to have confidence or trust in scientists, to act in the interests of the public,” said Funk. “And so majorities of Americans, majorities even of Republicans, have that view.”

But while public trust in general seems to be resilient, that finding becomes more complex on closer inspection. Confidence can remain high and increase for some groups, while simultaneously declining in others. The same study that looked at Trump’s influence on trust during his first administration, for instance, found that some polarization grew stronger on both ends of the spectrum. “Twelve percent of USA adults became more skeptical of scientific expertise in response to Trump’s dismissal of science, but 20 percent increased their trust in scientific expertise during the same period,” the study noted. Meanwhile, the neutral middle shrank: In 2016, 76 percent reported that they had no strong opinions on their trust in science. In 2020, that plunged to 29 percent.

The COVID-19 pandemic also seems to have had a pronounced effect on that gap: Consistently, research conducted after the pandemic shows that people with conservative ideologies distrust science more than those who are left-leaning. Overall, Republicans’ confidence in science fell 23 points from 2018 to 2022, dropping by half. Another recent poll shows declining confidence, specifically in Republican individuals, in health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. This distrust was likely driven by the politicization of pandemic policies, such as masking, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns, according to commentaries from experts.

The international survey of individuals in 68 countries did not find a relationship between trust in science and political orientation. Rod Abhari, a PhD candidate at Northwestern University who studies the role of digital media on trust, told Undark this suggests that conservative skepticism toward science is not rooted in ideology but is instead a consequence of deliberate politicization by corporations and Republican pundits. “Republican politicians have successfully mobilized the conspiracy and resistance to scientists—and not just scientists, but government agencies that represent science and medicine and nutrition,” he added.

“Prior to the outbreak,” said Funk, “views of something like medical researchers, medical doctors, medical scientists, were not particularly divided by politics.”

Second time around

So, what does this research mean for a second Trump term?

One thing that experts have noticed is that rather than distrusting specific types of scientists, such as climate change researchers, conservatives have begun to lump scientists across specialties and have more distrust of scientists in general, said Funk.

Going forward, Abhari predicted, “the scope of what science is politicized will expand” beyond hot-button topics like climate change. “I think it’ll become more existential, where science funding in general will become on the chopping block,” he said in mid-January. With the recent temporary suspensions on research grant reviews and payments for researchers and talk of mass layoffs and budget cuts at the National Science Foundation, scientists are already worried about how science funding will be affected.

This weaponization of science has contributed and will continue to lead to eroding trust, said Contessa. Already, topics like the effects of gas stoves on health have been weaponized by entities with political and economic motivation like the gas production companies, he pointed out. “It shows you really any topic, anything” can be used to sow skepticism in scientists, he said.

Many experts emphasize strategies to strengthen overall trust, close the partisan gap, and avoid further politicization of science.

Christine Marizzi, who leads a science education effort in Harlem for a nonprofit organization called BioBus, highlights the need for community engagement to make science more visible and accessible to improve scientists’ credibility among communities.

Ultimately, Abhari said, scientists need to be outspoken about the politicization of science to be able to regain individuals’ trust. This “will feel uncomfortable because science has typically tried to brand itself as being apolitical, but I think it’s no longer possible,” Abhari said. “It’s sort of the political reality of the situation.”

The increasing polarization in public trust is concerning, said Funk. So “it’s an important time to be making efforts to widen trust in science.”

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

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Medical Roundup #4

Medical / Mike M. / February 18, 2025

It seems like as other things drew our attention more, medical news slowed down. The actual developments, I have no doubt, are instead speeding up – because AI.

Note that this post intentionally does not cover anything related to the new Administration, or its policies.

If you ever have to go to the hospital for any reason, suit up, or at least look good.

Life expectancy is still rising in the longest-lived countries.

Challenge trials are not in general riskier than RCTs, and dramatically on net increase health and save lives while being entirely voluntary, but that is of course all orthogonal to the concerns of bioethicists.

We now have a 100% effective practical way to prevent HIV infection.

Naloxone alone did not do much to reduce opioid deaths, but Narcan did by allowing those without training to administer the drug. This does not tell us about second-order impacts, but presumably people not dying is good.

The FDA will occasionally do something helpful… eventually… after exhausting seven years and all alternatives. In 2017 a law required the FDA to let us buy hearing aids. In 2021 they put out a rule ‘for public comment.’ In 2024 it finally happened.

China has a semi-libertarian Medial Tourism Pilot Zone in Hainan, where anything approved elsewhere is allowed, and many other restrictions are also waived. Alex Tabarrok notes this could be a model for the upside of Prospera. I say the true upside comes when you don’t need the approval at all, so long as your disclosures are clear.

So it looks like uterus transplants… work? As in the patients get to have kids.

Cate Hall reports much improved overall health from testosterone replacement therapy as a 40yo cis woman.

There’s a concierge doctor in Austin called Riverrock Medical that wrote a Bayesian calculator app for doctors.

States creating pathways for foreign doctors to practice medicine in America without redoing residency. More of this, please.

Nikhil Krishnan: I feel like the fact that residency slots aren’t expanded probably isn’t due to funding (residents seem to actually be ROI positive for hospitals since they’re cheap and can still bill) but actually due to capacity constraints of training people. This effectively seems like using other countries as our expanded capacity for resident training?

That is not quite the same as saying the residency slots cost too much, but it also is not that different. One of the costs of providing a residency slot is the training time, which requires doctor time, which is expensive, increasing staffing needs. If pricing that in still leaves profit, including accounting for transitional costs, you’d see expanded residency slots, so I presume that after taking this into account adding new slots is not actually profitable, even if current slots do okay.

Worries about what will happen to the genetic information from 23andMe. As others have noted, one of our charitably inclined billionaires should step up and buy the information to both preserve it for research in anonymized form and to protect the personal information.

Tyler Cowen reports on the book by the new head of the FDA. It seems right that Marty Makary is a pick with upsides and not downsides, but it also seems right to be unexcited for now, and on net disappointed. This was an opportunity to get a huge win, and the value was in the chance that we’d get a huge win, which is now lower (but not gone), the same way Operation Warp Speed was a civilization-level huge win. If Trump changes his mind or Makary runs into issues, I am still available for this or a number of other high-level posts, such as head of AISI.

Sarah Constantin confirms this one is legit, Nature paper, IL-11 inhibition is a 25% life extension IN MICE. I trust her on such matters.

Another claim of 25% life extension IN MICE, on a single injection, with various signs of physical rejuvenation.

Still very early, also starting to get interesting.

Caloric restriction appears to extend life only in short-lived animal models, and fail in longer-lived models. That’s highly unfortunate, since humans live a long time.

If you are terminally ill and ask how long you have the doctor will overestimate your time left, on average by a factor of five. This was mostly (63%) in cancer patients. They frame that as doctors being inaccurate.

I find it hard to believe this is not motivated. Even if the doctors consciously believe the estimates, they almost have to be offering optimistic outlooks that are ‘on purpose’ in various ways.

If they started out optimistic by a factor of five as an honest mistake and were trying to be accurate, it wouldn’t take long for them to notice their patients all keep dying way too soon, and adjusting their estimates.

Potential motivations include preventing the patient from giving up hope or seeking expensive and painful alternative treatments they doubt will do anything useful, telling them what they want to hear, avoiding the whole ‘doctor said I would die soon and here I am’ thing and so on. I do sympathize.

I also find it weird to assess a prediction for ‘accuracy’ based on the actual time of death – a prediction is over a distribution of outcomes. You can only properly judge prediction accuracy statistically.

Is there a relation to this next story, if you look at the incentives?

Pregnant woman goes into labor at 22 weeks, hospital tells her she has no hope, she drives 7 miles to another hospital she finds on facebook and now she has a healthy four year old. Comments have a lot of other ‘the doctors told us our child would never survive, but then we got a second opinion and they did anyway’ stories.

Based on my personal experience as well, in America you really, really need to be ready to advocate for yourself when dealing with pregnancy. Some doctors are wonderful, other doctors will often flat out give you misinformation or do what is convenient for them if you don’t stop them. Also don’t forget to consult Claude.

Inequality is always a function of how you take the measurement and divide the groups.

Here is an extreme example.

St. Rev. Dr. Rev: Remember that study that said 12% of the population eats 50% of the beef? And it turned out that they meant in a given 24 hour period? Eat a burger on Tuesday, suddenly you’re in the 12%. Have a salad on Wednesday, you’re in the 88%.

This is that, but for cancer. Come on, man.

“5% of people are responsible for just over half.” This is analogous to saying 5% of the people buy 50% of the houses — yes, because most people don’t buy a house every year! This should not come as a surprise!

Cremieux: 1% of people are responsible for 24% of the health spending in America and 5% of people are responsible for just over half.

I had approximately zero medical expenses until I was seventeen. Burst appendix, nearly died. From age 0 to 20, 99% of my medical expenses occurred in 5% of the years. This is normal!

It is important to generalize this mode of thinking.

Sorting people by Y, and and saying the top X% in Y have most of the Y, is typically not so meaningful.

What you want is to say that you sort people by Z in advance, and then notice that the top X% in Z then later accumulate a lot of the Y (where Z can be ‘previous amount of Y’ or something else). Then you are more likely to be measuring something useful, and smaller imbalances mean a lot more.

If you must measure top X% in Y as having most of the Y, then you have to at least ensure you are doing this over a meaningful period, and put it in sensible context.

What’s the right way to think about this cartoon?

Sometimes, yes, you will see something the world’s top scientists and doctors missed.

Far more often, you will see something that the ‘consensus’ of those scientists and doctors missed. Yes, somewhere out there one of them already had the same idea, but this fact does not, on its own, help you.

Far more often than that, you will come up with something that was not successfully communicated to your particular average doctor, who also does not share your internal experiences or interest in your case. Or where ‘the system’ follows procedures that let you down, and it is very easy to see they are not doing what is in your best interest. That should be entirely unsurprising.

Also of course sometimes the system plays the odds from its perspective, and it turns out the odds were wrong, and you may or may not have had enough information to know this any more than the system did.

So we have personal stories like this one, or this one, or this one, where a doctor got it wrong. In particular, no, you should not trust that Average Doctor got the right answer and you couldn’t possibly figure out anything they didn’t. Doctors are often hurried and overworked, mostly don’t understand probability, have an impossible amount of knowledge to keep up with, and are trying to get through the day like everyone else.

In the broader case where you actually are defying a clear consensus, and doing so in general rather than for you specifically, you should of course be more skeptical that you’re right, but if you are reading this, it’s entirely plausible.

And as always, of course, don’t forget to ask Claude.

Case that the rise in consumption of psychiatric drugs is less a story about smartphones and social media and other cultural shifts, and more a story of reduced costs and improving convenience of access (especially with remote doctor visits) increasing the place supply intersects demand, along with campaigns that lessened the stigma, which also lowers price.

Certainly this is all a key contributing factor, the inconvenience and cost considerations matter, and people let them matter more than they should.

The first question to ask would be, given this, should we make these drugs easier or harder to get? Cheaper or more expensive?

Scott Alexander did the ‘more than you wanted to know’ treatment for H5N1. He predicts a 5% chance of a pandemic from it in the next year and 50% in the next twenty under otherwise normal circumstances, with ~6% chance it’s Spanish flu level or worse if and when it happens.

It is of concern, but it isn’t that different from the background level of concern from flu pandemics anyway. We really do have a lot of pandemics in general and flu pandemics in particular.

We should be preventing and preparing for them, we are not doing much of either, and this is mostly just another example of that. My guess is that the odds are worse than that, but that the fundamental takeaway is similar.

That matches how I have been thinking about this for a while. I’ve made a deliberate decision not to cover H5N1, and all the ways in which we are repeating the mistakes of Covid-19.

If we do get a full pandemic I will feel compelled to cover it, but until then I don’t think my observations would cause people reading this to make better decisions. I essentially despair of actually changing the policy decision that matter, for any amount of attention I might reasonably direct to the subject.

WHO has a public health emergency for Monkeypox yet refuses to authorize the vaccine that stopped the last outbreak despite it having approval from the FDA and other major medical agencies. WHO really is the worst.

The reason medical progress is so slow is largely the types of people who, when they hear a woman cured her own cancer and published the results to benefit others, heroically advancing the cause of humanity at risk to only herself, warn of the dire ethical problems with that.

Often those people call themselves ‘ethicists.’ No, seriously, that is a thing, and that situation somehow rose to the level of a writeup in Nature, which calls self-experimentation an ‘ethically fraught practice.’

This high quality application to the Delenda Est club has been noted.

I strongly agree with Tyler Cowen that we do not provide enough financial incentive to those who create new drugs. Robert Sterling here explains, as well. They deserve very large rewards when they find the next Ozempic.

The question is, should the world be doing this in the form of America paying super high prices while everyone else shirks?

As in, no, price controls are bad…

…because price controls everywhere else leaves it entirely on us to subsidize drug development. And we do it in a way that limits consumer surplus, since marginal costs are low. How do we address this?

One possibility is that patent buyouts seem better than indefinite high prices. The government can borrow cheaply and assume the variance, and marginal cost is low, so we can increase efficiency twice over, and also improve distributional effects, if we can negotiate a fair price. And it helps the pharma companies, since they realize their profits faster, and can plow it back into more investment.

The other half is that we are subsidizing everyone else. This is better than not doing it, but it would be nice to get others to also pay their fair share?

One obvious brainstorm is to do a price control, but as a maximum markup over the first-world average price. We will pay, say, five times the average price elsewhere. That way, the companies can negotiate harder for higher prices? Alas, I doubt a good enough multiplier would be palatable (among other issues), so I guess not.

On the research side, we win again. We can safely pay well above the net present value of cash flows from the monopoly, because the surplus from greater production is that much higher. Meanwhile, we reduce uncertainty, and Novo Nordisk gets the payout right away, so it can do far more R&D spending with the profits, and can justify more investment on the anticipation of similar future buyout deals. It’s win-win.

The supervillains? A very large decline in innovation for medical devices after Medicare and Medicaid price cuts.

We investigate the effects of substantial Medicare price reductions in the medical device industry, which amounted to a 61% decrease over 10 years for certain device types. Analyzing over 20 years of administrative and proprietary data, we find these price cuts led to a 25% decline in new product introductions and a 75% decrease in patent filings, indicating significant reductions in innovation activity.

Manufacturers decreased market entry and increased outsourcing to foreign producers, associated with higher rates of product defects. Our calculations suggest the value of lost innovation may fully offset the direct cost savings from the price cuts. We propose that better-targeted pricing reforms could mitigate these negative effects. These findings underscore the need to balance cost containment with incentives for innovation and quality in policy design.

Several commenters at MR pointed out that these areas of the DME industry are rife with fraud and abuse, and indeed Claude noted without direct prompting that is largely what motivated the price cuts. It is not obvious that we would have wanted all this lost ‘innovation,’ as opposed to it being set up to take advantage of the government writing the checks.

Here’s an Abundance Agenda for Addiction, with a focus on development of more drugs to help alongside GLP-1s, by fixing the many ways in which our system fights against attempts to make anti-addiction medications. Advance purchase and risk sharing agreements, extended exclusivity, expedited approval, and especially ability to actually run reasonable studies would help a lot, and straight up funding wouldn’t hurt either.

The insanity that is buying health insurance in California in particular. They cap how much you can pay as a percentage of income at 8.5%, but then you get to shop around for different insurances that have different benefits and sticker prices. So there’s a middle ground where all health insurance is equally outrageously expensive, and no amount of shopping around will ever save you a dollar. I’m expecting that turns out about as well as you would expect, on so many levels.

If we want to do progressive transfers of wealth we should do them directly, not via health insurance.

Discussion about this post

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“NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE” merges Windows Phone body with budget iPhone guts

Apple, hackintosh, iphone se 3, Lumia 1020, Tech, windows phone / Mike M. / February 17, 2025

Remember the Lumia 1020? It’s back—in iPhone SE form.

The Lumia 1020 was a lot of smartphone in July 2013. It debuted with a focus “almost entirely on the phone’s massive camera,” Ars wrote at the time. That big 41-megapixel sensor jutted forth from the phone body, and Nokia reps showed off its low-light, rapid-motion camera abilities by shooting pictures of breakdancers in a dark demonstration room. The company also offered an optional camera grip—one that made it feel a lot more like a point-and-shoot camera. In a more robust review, Ars suggested the Lumia 1020 might actually make the point-and-shoot obsolete.

Front of the Lumia 1020, showing a bit of Windows Phone square grid flair. Casey Johnston

The Lumia 1020 contained yet another cutting edge concept of the day: Windows Phone, Microsoft’s color-coded, square-shaped companion to its mobile-forward Windows 8. The mobile OS never got over the users/apps, chicken/egg conundrum, and called it quits in October 2017. The end of that distant-third-place mobile OS would normally signal the end of the Lumia 1020 as a usable phone.

But there was a person named /u/OceanDepth95028 who saw beyond, and where others thought, “LOL,” this person thought, “Why not?” And this person looked at the Lumia 1020 and saw a third-generation iPhone SE inside of it. And then this person made that phone, and it booted. And the person saw that it was good, and they posted the tale to Reddit’s r/hackintosh.

“NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE” merges Windows Phone body with budget iPhone guts Read More »

Reddit mods are fighting to keep AI slop off subreddits. They could use help.

AI, Features, generative ai, reddit, Social Media, Tech / Mike M. / February 17, 2025

Mods ask Reddit for tools as generative AI gets more popular and inconspicuous.

Credit: Aurich Lawson (based on a still from Getty Images)

Like it or not, generative AI is carving out its place in the world. And some Reddit users are definitely in the “don’t like it” category. While some subreddits openly welcome AI-generated images, videos, and text, others have responded to the growing trend by banning most or all posts made with the technology.

To better understand the reasoning and obstacles associated with these bans, Ars Technica spoke with moderators of subreddits that totally or partially ban generative AI. Almost all these volunteers described moderating against generative AI as a time-consuming challenge they expect to get more difficult as time goes on. And most are hoping that Reddit will release a tool to help their efforts.

It’s hard to know how much AI-generated content is actually on Reddit, and getting an estimate would be a large undertaking. Image library Freepik has analyzed the use of AI-generated content on social media but leaves Reddit out of its research because “it would take loads of time to manually comb through thousands of threads within the platform,” spokesperson Bella Valentini told me. For its part, Reddit doesn’t publicly disclose how many Reddit posts involve generative AI use.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting that Reddit has a large problem with generative AI use. By now, many subreddits seem to have agreed on their approach to AI-generated posts, and generative AI has not superseded the real, human voices that have made Reddit popular.

Still, mods largely agree that generative AI will likely get more popular on Reddit over the next few years, making generative AI modding increasingly important to both moderators and general users. Generative AI’s rising popularity has also had implications for Reddit the company, which in 2024 started licensing Reddit posts to train the large language models (LLMs) powering generative AI.

(Note: All the moderators I spoke with for this story requested that I use their Reddit usernames instead of their real names due to privacy concerns.)

No generative AI allowed

When it comes to anti-generative AI rules, numerous subreddits have zero-tolerance policies, while others permit posts that use generative AI if it’s combined with human elements or is executed very well. These rules task mods with identifying posts using generative AI and determining if they fit the criteria to be permitted on the subreddit.

Many subreddits have rules against posts made with generative AI because their mod teams or members consider such posts “low effort” or believe AI is counterintuitive to the subreddit’s mission of providing real human expertise and creations.

“At a basic level, generative AI removes the human element from the Internet; if we allowed it, then it would undermine the very point of r/AskHistorians, which is engagement with experts,” the mods of r/AskHistorians told me in a collective statement.

The subreddit’s goal is to provide historical information, and its mods think generative AI could make information shared on the subreddit less accurate. “[Generative AI] is likely to hallucinate facts, generate non-existent references, or otherwise provide misleading content,” the mods said. “Someone getting answers from an LLM can’t respond to follow-ups because they aren’t an expert. We have built a reputation as a reliable source of historical information, and the use of [generative AI], especially without oversight, puts that at risk.”

Similarly, Halaku, a mod of r/wheeloftime, told me that the subreddit’s mods banned generative AI because “we focus on genuine discussion.” Halaku believes AI content can’t facilitate “organic, genuine discussion” and “can drown out actual artwork being done by actual artists.”

The r/lego subreddit banned AI-generated art because it caused confusion in online fan communities and retail stores selling Lego products, r/lego mod Mescad said. “People would see AI-generated art that looked like Lego on [I]nstagram or [F]acebook and then go into the store to ask to buy it,” they explained. “We decided that our community’s dedication to authentic Lego products doesn’t include AI-generated art.”

Not all of Reddit is against generative AI, of course. Subreddits dedicated to the technology exist, and some general subreddits permit the use of generative AI in some or all forms.

“When it comes to bans, I would rather focus on hate speech, Nazi salutes, and things that actually harm the subreddits,” said 3rdusernameiveused, who moderates r/consoom and r/TeamBuilder25, which don’t ban generative AI. “AI art does not do that… If I was going to ban [something] for ‘moral’ reasons, it probably won’t be AI art.”

“Overwhelmingly low-effort slop”

Some generative AI bans are reflective of concerns that people are not being properly compensated for the content they create, which is then fed into LLM training.

Mod Mathgeek007 told me that r/DeadlockTheGame bans generative AI because its members consider it “a form of uncredited theft,” adding:

You aren’t allowed to sell/advertise the workers of others, and AI in a sense is using patterns derived from the work of others to create mockeries. I’d personally have less of an issue with it if the artists involved were credited and compensated—and there are some niche AI tools that do this.

Other moderators simply think generative AI reduces the quality of a subreddit’s content.

“It often just doesn’t look good… the art can often look subpar,” Mathgeek007 said.

Similarly, r/videos bans most AI-generated content because, according to its announcement, the videos are “annoying” and “just bad video” 99 percent of the time. In an online interview, r/videos mod Abrownn told me:

It’s overwhelmingly low-effort slop thrown together simply for views/ad revenue. The creators rarely care enough to put real effort into post-generation [or] editing of the content [and] rarely have coherent narratives [in] the videos, etc. It seems like they just throw the generated content into a video, export it, and call it a day.

An r/fakemon mod told me, “I can’t think of anything more low-effort in terms of art creation than just typing words and having it generated for you.”

Some moderators say generative AI helps people spam unwanted content on a subreddit, including posts that are irrelevant to the subreddit and posts that attack users.

“[Generative AI] content is almost entirely posted for purely self promotional/monetary reasons, and we as mods on Reddit are constantly dealing with abusive users just spamming their content without regard for the rules,” Abrownn said.

A moderator of the r/wallpaper subreddit, which permits generative AI, disagrees. The mod told me that generative AI “provides new routes for novel content” in the subreddit and questioned concerns about generative AI stealing from human artists or offering lower-quality work, saying those problems aren’t unique to generative AI:

Even in our community, we observe human-generated content that is subjectively low quality (poor camera/[P]hotoshopping skills, low-resolution source material, intentional “shitposting”). It can be argued that AI-generated content amplifies this behavior, but our experience (which we haven’t quantified) is that the rate of such behavior (whether human-generated or AI-generated content) has not changed much within our own community.

But we’re not a very active community—[about] 13 posts per day … so it very well could be a “frog in boiling water” situation.

Generative AI “wastes our time”

Many mods are confident in their ability to effectively identify posts that use generative AI. A bigger problem is how much time it takes to identify these posts and remove them.

The r/AskHistorians mods, for example, noted that all bans on the subreddit (including bans unrelated to AI) have “an appeals process,” and “making these assessments and reviewing AI appeals means we’re spending a considerable amount of time on something we didn’t have to worry about a few years ago.”

They added:

Frankly, the biggest challenge with [generative AI] usage is that it wastes our time. The time spent evaluating responses for AI use, responding to AI evangelists who try to flood our subreddit with inaccurate slop and then argue with us in modmail, [direct messages that message a subreddits’ mod team], and discussing edge cases could better be spent on other subreddit projects, like our podcast, newsletter, and AMAs, … providing feedback to users, or moderating input from users who intend to positively contribute to the community.

Several other mods I spoke with agree. Mathgeek007, for example, named “fighting AI bros” as a common obstacle. And for r/wheeloftime moderator Halaku, the biggest challenge in moderating against generative AI is “a generational one.”

“Some of the current generation don’t have a problem with it being AI because content is content, and [they think] we’re being elitist by arguing otherwise, and they want to argue about it,” they said.

A couple of mods noted that it’s less time-consuming to moderate subreddits that ban generative AI than it is to moderate those that allow posts using generative AI, depending on the context.

“On subreddits where we allowed AI, I often take a bit longer time to actually go into each post where I feel like… it’s been AI-generated to actually look at it and make a decision,” explained N3DSdude, a mod of several subreddits with rules against generative AI, including r/DeadlockTheGame.

MyarinTime, a moderator for r/lewdgames, which allows generative AI images, highlighted the challenges of identifying human-prompted generative AI content versus AI-generated content prompted by a bot:

When the AI bomb started, most of those bots started using AI content to work around our filters. Most of those bots started showing some random AI render, so it looks like you’re actually talking about a game when you’re not. There’s no way to know when those posts are legit games unless [you check] them one by one. I honestly believe it would be easier if we kick any post with [AI-]generated image… instead of checking if a button was pressed by a human or not.

Mods expect things to get worse

Most mods told me it’s pretty easy for them to detect posts made with generative AI, pointing to the distinct tone and favored phrases of AI-generated text. A few said that AI-generated video is harder to spot but still detectable. But as generative AI gets more advanced, moderators are expecting their work to get harder.

In a joint statement, r/dune mods Blue_Three and Herbalhippie said, “AI used to have a problem making hands—i.e., too many fingers, etc.—but as time goes on, this is less and less of an issue.”

R/videos’ Abrownn also wonders how easy it will be to detect AI-generated Reddit content “as AI tools advance and content becomes more lifelike.”

Mathgeek007 added:

AI is becoming tougher to spot and is being propagated at a larger rate. When AI style becomes normalized, it becomes tougher to fight. I expect generative AI to get significantly worse—until it becomes indistinguishable from ordinary art.

Moderators currently use various methods to fight generative AI, but they’re not perfect. r/AskHistorians mods, for example, use “AI detectors, which are unreliable, problematic, and sometimes require paid subscriptions, as well as our own ability to detect AI through experience and expertise,” while N3DSdude pointed to tools like Quid and GPTZero.

To manage current and future work around blocking generative AI, most of the mods I spoke with said they’d like Reddit to release a proprietary tool to help them.

“I’ve yet to see a reliable tool that can detect AI-generated video content,” Aabrown said. “Even if we did have such a tool, we’d be putting hundreds of hours of content through the tool daily, which would get rather expensive rather quickly. And we’re unpaid volunteer moderators, so we will be outgunned shortly when it comes to detecting this type of content at scale. We can only hope that Reddit will offer us a tool at some point in the near future that can help deal with this issue.”

A Reddit spokesperson told me that the company is evaluating what such a tool could look like. But Reddit doesn’t have a rule banning generative AI overall, and the spokesperson said the company doesn’t want to release a tool that would hinder expression or creativity.

For now, Reddit seems content to rely on moderators to remove AI-generated content when appropriate. Reddit’s spokesperson added:

Our moderation approach helps ensure that content on Reddit is curated by real humans. Moderators are quick to remove content that doesn’t follow community rules, including harmful or irrelevant AI-generated content—we don’t see this changing in the near future.

Making a generative AI Reddit tool wouldn’t be easy

Reddit is handling the evolving concerns around generative AI as it has handled other content issues, including by leveraging AI and machine learning tools. Reddit’s spokesperson said that this includes testing tools that can identify AI-generated media, such as images of politicians.

But making a proprietary tool that allows moderators to detect AI-generated posts won’t be easy, if it happens at all. The current tools for detecting generative AI are limited in their capabilities, and as generative AI advances, Reddit would need to provide tools that are more advanced than the AI-detecting tools that are currently available.

That would require a good deal of technical resources and would also likely present notable economic challenges for the social media platform, which only became profitable last year. And as noted by r/videos moderator Abrownn, tools for detecting AI-generated video still have a long way to go, making a Reddit-specific system especially challenging to create.

But even with a hypothetical Reddit tool, moderators would still have their work cut out for them. And because Reddit’s popularity is largely due to its content from real humans, that work is important.

Since Reddit’s inception, that has meant relying on moderators, which Reddit has said it intends to keep doing. As r/dune mods Blue_Three and herbalhippie put it, it’s in Reddit’s “best interest that much/most content remains organic in nature.” After all, Reddit’s profitability has a lot to do with how much AI companies are willing to pay to access Reddit data. That value would likely decline if Reddit posts became largely AI-generated themselves.

But providing the technology to ensure that generative AI isn’t abused on Reddit would be a large challege. For now, volunteer laborers will continue to bear the brunt of generative AI moderation.

Advance Publications, which owns Ars Technica parent Condé Nast, is the largest shareholder of Reddit.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

Reddit mods are fighting to keep AI slop off subreddits. They could use help. Read More »

How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal

gaming / Mike M. / February 15, 2025

Investigators decompiled the game to search through 2.2 billion random dungeon seeds.

The word Debunk radiating flames against a demonic background Credit: Aurich Lawson

For years, Maciej “Groobo” Maselewski stood as the undisputed champion of Diablo speedrunning. His 3-minute, 12-second Sorcerer run looked all but unbeatable thanks to a combination of powerful (and allowable) glitch exploits along with what seemed like some unbelievable luck in the game’s randomly generated dungeon.

But when a team of other speedrunners started trying and failing to replicate that luck using outside software and analysis tools, the story behind Groobo’s run began to fall apart. As the inconsistencies in the run started to mount, that team would conduct an automated search through billions of legitimate Diablo dungeons to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Groobo’s game couldn’t have taken place in any of them.

“We just had a lot of curiosity and resentment that drove us to dig even deeper,” team member Staphen told Ars Technica of their investigation. “Betrayal might be another way to describe it,” team member AJenbo added. “To find out that this had been done illegitimately… and the person had both gotten and taken a lot of praise for their achievement.”

If we have unearned luck

If you have any familiarity with Diablo or speedrunning, watching Groobo’s run feels like watching someone win the lottery. First, there’s the dungeon itself, which features a sequence of stairways that appear just steps from each other, forming a quick and enemy-free path down to the dungeon’s deeper levels. Then there’s Groobo’s lucky find of Naj’s Puzzler on level 9, a unique item that enables the teleporting necessary for many of the run’s late-game maneuvers.

Groobo’s 3: 12 Diablo speedrun, as submitted to Speed Demos Archive in 2009

“It seemed very unusual that we would have so many levels with the upstairs and the downstairs right next to each other,” Allan “DwangoAC” Cecil told Ars Technica. “We wanted to find some way of replicating this.”

When Cecil and a team of tool-assisted speedrun (TAS) authors started that search process in earnest last February, they said they used Groobo’s run as a baseline to try to improve from. While Groobo ostensibly had to rely on his own human luck in prepping his run, the TAS runners could use techniques and tools from outside the game to replicate Groobo’s run (or something very similar) every time.

To find an RNG seed that could do just that, the TAS team created a custom-built map generation tool by reverse-engineering a disassembled Diablo executable. That tool can take any of the game’s billions of possible random seeds and quickly determine the map layout, item distribution, and quest placement available in the generated save file. A scanner built on top of that tool can then quickly look through those generated dungeons for ones that might be optimal for speedrunning.

“We were working on finding the best seed for our TAS, and we were trying to identify the seed from Groobo’s run, both to validate that our scanner works and to potentially straight-up use it for the run,” Stephan said of the effort. “We naturally had a lot of trouble finding [that seed] because it doesn’t exist.”

A thorough search

In their effort to find Groobo’s storied run (or at least one that resembled it), the TAS team conducted a distributed search across the game’s roughly 2.2 billion valid RNG seeds. Each of these seeds represents a different specific second on the system clock when a Diablo save file is created, ranging from between January 1, 1970, and December 31, 2038 (the only valid dates accepted by the game).

After comparing each of those billions of those RNG dungeons to a re-creation of the dungeon seen in Groobo’s run, the team couldn’t find a single example containing the crucial level 9 Naj’s Puzzler drop. After that, the team started searching through “impossible” seeds, which could only be created by using save modification tools to force a creation date after the year 2038.

The team eventually found dungeons matching Naj’s Puzzler drop in Groobo’s video, using seeds associated with the years 2056 and 2074.

After an exhaustive search, the TAS team couldn’t find a dungeon with Naj’s Puzzler dropped in the place Groobo’s run said it should be. Credit: Analysis of Groobo’s Diablo WR Speedrun

The early presumption that Groobo’s run was legitimate ended up costing the team weeks of work. “It was baffling when we couldn’t find [the early Naj’s Puzzler] in any of the searches we did,” Cecil said. “We were always worried that the scanner might have bugs in it,” Staphen added.

The TAS team’s thorough search also showed troubling inconsistencies in the other dungeon levels shown in Groobo’s run. “Normally you would only need to identify a single level to replicate a run since all the other levels are generated from the same seed,” AJenbo told Ars. But the levels seen in Groobo’s run came from multiple different seeds, which would require splicing footage from multiple different playthrough of different dungeons. That’s a big no-no even in a so-called “segmented” run, which is still supposed to contain segments from a single unmodified save file.

“At that point we also wanted to figure out how manipulated the run was,” AJenbo said. “Was it a legit run except for [dungeon level] 9? Was it three good runs combined? In the end we only found two levels that had come from the same run so at least 13 (probably 15) runs were spliced into one video, which is a lot for a game with just 16 levels.”

The evidence piles up

After Groobo’s dungeon generation problems came to light, other inconsistencies in his run started to become apparent. Some of these are relatively easy to spot with the naked eye once you know what you’re looking for.

For instance, the “1996–2001” copyright date seen on the title screen in Groobo’s video is inconsistent with the v1.00 shown on the initial menu screen, suggesting Groobo’s run was spliced together from runs on multiple different versions of the game. Items acquired early in the run also disappear from the inventory later on with no apparent explanation.

This copyright date doesn’t line up with the “V1.00” seen later on the menu screen in Groobo’s run. Credit: Analysis of Groobo’s Diablo WR Speedrun

Even months after the investigation first started, new inconsistencies are still coming to light. Groobo’s final fight against Diablo, for instance, required just 19 fireballs to take him out. While that’s technically possible with perfect luck for the level 12 Sorcerer seen in the footage, the TAS team found that the specific damage dealt and boss behavior only matched when they attempted the same attacks using a level 26 Sorcerer.

After the TAS team compiled their many findings into a lengthy document, Groobo defended his submission in a discussion with Cecil (screenshots of which were viewed by Ars Technica). “My run is a segmented/spliced run,” Groobo said. “It always has been and it was never passed off as anything else, nor was it part of any competition or leaderboards. The Speed Demos Archive [SDA] page states that outright.” Indeed, an archived version of Groobo’s record-setting Speed Demos Archive submission does say directly that it’s made up of “27 segments appended to one file.”

But simply splitting a run into segments doesn’t explain away all of the problems the TAS team found. Getting Naj’s Puzzler on dungeon level 9, for instance, still requires outside modification of a save file, which is specifically prohibited by longstanding Speed Demos Archive rules that “manually editing/adding/removing game files is generally not allowed.” Groobo’s apparent splicing of multiple game versions and differently seeded save files also seems to go against SDA rules, which say that “there obviously needs to be continuity between segments in terms of inventory, experience points or whatever is applicable for the individual game.”

After being presented with the TAS team’s evidence, SDA wrote that “it has been determined that Groobo’s run very likely does not stem from only legitimate techniques, and as such, has itself been banished barring new developments.” But Groobo’s record is still listed as the “Fastest completion of an RPG videogame” by Guinness World Records, which has not offered a substantive response to the team’s findings (Guinness has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).

A recent Diablo speedrun on a confirmed legitimate dungeon seed.

This might seem like a pretty petty issue to spend weeks of time and attention debunking. But at a recent presentation attended by Ars, Cecil said he was motivated to pursue it because “it did harm. Groobo’s alleged cheating in 2009 completely stopped interest in speedrunning this category [of Diablo]. No one tried, no one could.”

Because of Groobo’s previously unknown modifications to make an impossible-to-beat run, “this big running community just stopped trying to run this game in that category,” Cecil said. “For more than a decade, this had a chilling impact on that community.” With Groobo’s run out of the way, though, new runners are setting new records on confirmed legitimate RNG seeds, and with the aid of TAS tools.

In the end, Cecil said he hopes the evidence regarding Groobo’s run will make people look more carefully at other record submissions. “Groobo had created a number of well-respected … speedruns,” he said. “[People thought] there wasn’t any good reason to doubt him. In other words, there was bias in familiarity. This was a familiar character. Why would they cheat?”

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

How Diablo hackers uncovered a speedrun scandal Read More »

DOGE’s .gov site lampooned as coders quickly realize it can be edited by anyone

department of government efficiency, doge, Donald Trump, elon musk, Policy / Mike M. / February 15, 2025

“An official website of the United States government,” reads small text atop the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) website that Elon Musk’s team started populating this week with information on agency cuts.

But you apparently don’t have to work in government to push updates to the site. A couple of prankster web developers told 404 Media that they separately discovered how “insecure” the DOGE site was, seemingly pulling from a “database that can be edited by anyone.”

One coder couldn’t resist and pushed two updates that, as of this writing, remained on the DOGE site. “This is a joke of a .gov site,” one read. “THESE ‘EXPERTS’ LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN,” read another.

404 Media spoke to two other developers who suggested that the DOGE site is not running on government servers. Instead, it seems to be running on a Cloudflare Pages site and is relying on a database that “can be and has been written to by third parties and will show up on the live website,” the developers told 404 Media.

Archived versions of the DOGE site show that it was basically blank before Tuesday. That’s when Musk held a DOGE press conference in the Oval Office, promising that DOGE is “actually trying to be as transparent as possible.” At that time, Musk claimed that DOGE was being “maximally transparent” by posting about “all” actions to X (Musk’s social media platform) and to the DOGE website. (Wired deemed the DOGE site “one big X ad” because it primarily seems to exist to point to Musk’s social media platform.)

According to 404 Media, after Musk made that statement, his team rushed to build out the DOGE website, mirroring X posts from the DOGE account and compiling stats on the federal workforce.

But in rushing, DOGE appears to have skipped security steps that are expected of government websites. That pattern is troubling some federal workers, as DOGE has already been dinged by workers concerned by Musk’s team seizing access to sensitive government information and sharing it in ways deemed less secure. For example, last week, Department of Education officials raised alarms about DOGE employees using personal emails viewed as less secure than government email addresses, seemingly in violation of security protocols. These personal emails also seemed to shroud the true identities of DOGE staffers, whereas other government employees must use their full names in official communications.

DOGE’s .gov site lampooned as coders quickly realize it can be edited by anyone Read More »

Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says

reddit, Social Media, Tech / Mike M. / February 15, 2025

Reddit is planning to introduce a paywall this year, CEO Steve Huffman said during a videotaped Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on Thursday.

Huffman previously showed interest in potentially introducing a new type of subreddit with “exclusive content or private areas” that Reddit users would pay to access.

When asked this week about plans for some Redditors to create “content that only paid members can see,” Huffman said:

It’s a work in progress right now, so that one’s coming… We’re working on it as we speak.

When asked about “new, key features that you plan to roll out for Reddit in 2025,” Huffman responded, in part: “Paid subreddits, yes.”

Reddit’s paywall would ostensibly only apply to certain new subreddit types, not any subreddits currently available. In August, Huffman said that even with paywalled content, free Reddit would “continue to exist and grow and thrive.”

A critical aspect of any potential plan to make Reddit users pay to access subreddit content is determining how related Reddit users will be compensated. Reddit may have a harder time getting volunteer moderators to wrangle discussions on paid-for subreddits—if it uses volunteer mods at all. Balancing paid and free content would also be necessary to avoid polarizing much of Reddit’s current user base.

Reddit has had paid-for premium versions of community features before, like r/Lounge, a subreddit that only people with Reddit Gold, which you have to buy with real money, can access.

Reddit would also need to consider how it might compensate people for user-generated content that people pay to access, as Reddit’s business is largely built on free, user-generated content. The Reddit Contributor Program, launched in September 2023, could be a foundation; it lets users “earn money for their qualifying contributions to the Reddit community, including awards and karma, collectible avatars, and developer apps,” according to Reddit. Reddit says it pays up to $0.01 per 1 Gold received, depending on how much karma the user has earned over the past year. For someone to pay out, they need at least 1,000 Gold, which is equivalent to $10.

Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says Read More »

Louisiana officially ends mass vaccinations as RFK Jr. comes to power

COVID-19, flu, health, Louisiana, robert f kennedy jr, vaccination / Mike M. / February 14, 2025

“Rather than instructing individuals to receive any and all vaccines, LDH staff should communicate data regarding the reduced risk of disease, hospitalization, and death associated with a vaccine and encourage individuals to discuss considerations for vaccination with their healthcare provider,” he wrote.

“Ripped in half”

Susan Hassig, an infectious disease epidemiologist and professor emerita at Tulane University’s School of Public Health, told the Times-Picayune that this is problematic advice. Many people don’t have primary care providers. “They go to an urgent care or a clinic,” Hassig said. “In Louisiana, they go to the emergency room.”

The memo lands amid widespread fear that Kennedy’s appointment will lead to further erosion of America’s trust in vaccination and its vaccination rates. Already, rates of routine childhood vaccination in kindergartners across the nation have slipped into the range of 92 percent, woefully below the 95 percent threshold to prevent onward disease spread. Exemptions from school vaccination requirements are at an all-time high.

Further, the country is also in the midst of the worst flu season in 15 years. The percent of doctor’s visits for influenza-like illnesses (a standard metric for flu season) hit 7.8 percent this week, a high not seen since the 2009–2010 season amid the emergence of the H1N1 swine flu. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there have been at least 29 million illnesses, 370,000 hospitalizations, and 16,000 deaths from flu so far this season. This week, 11 children died of flu, bringing the 2024–2025 pediatric death toll to 68.

Among the recent deaths was a healthy 9-year-old girl in North Carolina, who died from flu complications on January 29. “I literally feel like my heart has been ripped in half,” her mother told WRAL News.

Seasonal flu shots significantly reduce the risk of death, particularly in children.

Louisiana officially ends mass vaccinations as RFK Jr. comes to power Read More »

Apple teases launch for “the newest member of the family” on February 19

Apple, IPhone / Mike M. / February 13, 2025

Big news for people who prefer their product announcements to be pre-announced: Apple CEO Tim Cook says that the company has something brewing for Wednesday, February 19. Cook referred to “the newest member of the family,” suggesting a launch event focused on a single product rather than multiple refreshes throughout its product lineup.

Most rumors point to the “family” being the iPhone and the “newest member” being an updated version of the entry-level iPhone SE. Last refreshed in March of 2022 with the guts of late 2021’s iPhone 13, the SE is the only iPhone in Apple’s lineup that still ships with large display bezels and a Home button. And it’s one of just three models (along with the iPhone 14 and 14 Plus) to still include a Lightning port.

Previous reporting has suggested that the next-generation iPhone SE could replace both the current SE and the iPhone 14 series in the iPhone lineup, since the new phone is expected to ship with an iPhone 14-style design with an edge-to-edge display and a notch cutout. The old SE and the 14 series have already been discontinued in the EU, where new phones are all required to use a USB-C port.

Apple does have other products it could announce alongside (or instead of) a new entry-level iPhone, if it wanted to. Rumors and references in macOS have all pointed to an early 2025 launch for new M4 MacBook Airs, and the rumor mill also thinks that a new Apple TV box, new HomePod products, and even new AirTags could all come at some point in 2025. High-end Mac desktops like the Mac Studio and Mac Pro are also long overdue for an update, though we reportedly won’t see those refreshes until closer to the middle of the year.

Apple teases launch for “the newest member of the family” on February 19 Read More »

“A sicker America”: Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary

anti-vaccine, Confirmation, conspiracy theories, Department of Health and Human Services, health, Health Secretary, infectious diseases, robert f kennedy jr, Senate, Trump, vaccination / Mike M. / February 13, 2025

The US Senate on Thursday confirmed the long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The vote was largely along party lines, with a tally of 52 to 48. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.), a polio survivor and steadfast supporter of vaccines, voted against the confirmation, the only Republican to do so.

Before the vote, Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D–N.Y.) claimed that if there had been a secret ballot today, most Republicans would have voted against Kennedy. “But sadly, and unfortunately for America, Republicans are being strong-armed by Donald Trump and will end up holding their nose and voting to confirm Mr. Kennedy… What a travesty,” Schumer said.

Senator Mike Crapo (R–Idaho) shot back, supporting Kennedy’s nomination and chastising his colleagues for their continued “attacks” on Kennedy. “He has made it very clear that he will support safe vaccinations and just wants to see that the research on them is done and done well,” Crapo said, seemingly not acknowledging the vast wealth of high-quality research that has already been done on vaccine safety and efficacy.

As the top health official for the Trump administration, Kennedy says he will focus on improving nutrition and reducing chronic diseases, in part by cracking down on food additives, processed foods, and the influence of food and drug makers on federal agencies. Prior to his confirmation, he campaigned on the slogan “Make America Healthy Again,” aka MAHA, which he has moved to trademark.

Anti-vaccine advocacy

While his stated goals have drawn support and praise from some lawmakers and health advocates, his confirmation has been highly controversial because he is one of the most prominent and influential anti-vaccine advocates in the country. He has worked for decades to erode trust in safe, life-saving vaccinations as the head of the anti-vaccine organization he founded, Children’s Health Defense, and spread misinformation and conspiracy theories. Upon seeking the confirmation, he transferred his trademark application to an LLC managed by Del Bigtree, another prominent anti-vaccine advocate who has spread conspiracy theories.

“A sicker America”: Senate confirms Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary Read More »

“Largest data breach in US history”: Three more lawsuits try to stop DOGE

elon musk, Policy, us doge service / Mike M. / February 12, 2025

DOGE and Musk face three more lawsuits over “brazen ransacking” of private data.

People hold signs at a “Save the Civil Service” rally hosted by the American Federation of Government Employees outside the US Capitol on February 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. Credit: Getty Images | Kent Nishimura

The US DOGE Service’s access to the private data of ordinary Americans and federal employees is being challenged in several lawsuits filed this week.

Three new complaints seek court orders that would stop the data access and require the deletion of unlawfully accessed data. Two of the complaints also seek financial damages for individuals whose data was accessed.

The US DOGE Service, Elon Musk, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and OPM Acting Director Charles Ezell were named as defendants in one suit filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“The Privacy Act [of 1974] makes it unlawful for OPM Defendants to hand over access to OPM’s millions of personnel records to DOGE Defendants, who lack a lawful and legitimate need for such access,” the lawsuit said. “No exception to the Privacy Act covers DOGE Defendants’ access to records held by OPM. OPM Defendants’ action granting DOGE Defendants full, continuing, and ongoing access to OPM’s systems and files for an unspecified period means that tens of millions of federal-government employees, retirees, contractors, job applicants, and impacted family members and other third parties have no assurance that their information will receive the protection that federal law affords.”

The lawsuit names Musk as a defendant “in his capacity as director of the US Doge Temporary Service,” which was created by President Trump and has a mandate lasting until July 4, 2026. The temporary organization is separate from the US DOGE Service, which used to be called the US Digital Service. DOGE, of course, is a reference to the popular meme involving a Shiba Inu and in the government context stands for the Department of Government Efficiency.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO; the Association of Administrative Law Judges; and individuals who are current or former government workers. The legal team representing the plaintiffs includes lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the State Democracy Defenders Fund, and two law firms.

Data access for “Musk and a cadre of loyalists”

Another lawsuit filed Monday in US District Court for the District of Maryland said that DOGE gained access to records of both government employees and people outside of government:

For example, Defendants Treasury Department and Secretary of the Treasury [Scott] Bessent have improperly disclosed to DOGE representatives the contents of the Federal Disbursement System, which is the government’s mechanism for sending payments it owes to individual Americans (as well as other payees). That system contains records relating to every American who receives (among other things) a tax refund, social security benefit, veterans pay, or a federal salary. To facilitate these payments, the system maintains highly sensitive information about millions of Americans, including Social Security numbers, date of birth, bank account information, and home addresses.

The lawsuit in Maryland was filed by the American Federation of Teachers, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, the National Federation of Federal Employees, and six individuals. In addition to the Treasury Department and Bessent, defendants include OPM, Ezell, the Department of Education, and Acting Secretary of Education Denise Carter.

“Defendants are permitting Elon Musk and a cadre of loyalists imported from his private companies to help themselves to the personal information of millions of Americans, in violation of [the Privacy Act’s] legal requirements,” the lawsuit said.

Yet another lawsuit was filed Monday in federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and one unnamed resident of the district (“Doe 1”) who is a federal government employee. The EPIC lawsuit’s defendants include OPM, Ezell, the US Treasury Department, Bessent, the US DOGE Service, and the US Doge Service Temporary Organization.

“This action arises from the largest and most consequential data breach in US history, currently ongoing at the US Department of the Treasury and US Office of Personnel Management. This unprecedented breach of privacy and security implicates the personal information of tens of millions of people, including nearly all federal employees and millions of members of the American public,” the lawsuit said, alleging that defendants “have allowed the unlawful misuse of critical data systems housed in OPM and the Treasury Department, endangering plaintiffs and millions of other Americans.”

This includes tax return information, the lawsuit said. In late January, a longtime Treasury Department official announced his retirement shortly after a clash with DOGE over access to the Fiscal Service payment system that collects and disburses trillions of dollars.

The EPIC lawsuit described this incident and alleged that “basic security failures have resulted in the unlawful disclosure of personal data—including Social Security numbers and tax information—belonging to tens of millions of individuals stored in Bureau of Fiscal Service systems and the unlawful disclosure of personal data belonging to millions of federal employees stored in Enterprise Human Resources Integration.”

Musk may or may not be acting US DOGE administrator

The EFF and EPIC lawsuits both list the “Acting US DOGE Administrator” as a defendant, indicating that it is not clear who holds this position. But the EPIC lawsuit says that Musk “is either the Acting USDS Administrator or otherwise exercising substantial authority within USDS.”

We sent inquiries about the lawsuits to DOGE, the White House, OPM, Treasury Department, Education Department, and Department of Justice. OPM and the Education Department declined to comment. We will update this article if we get any comments about the lawsuits.

This week’s lawsuits add to the mounting litigation over DOGE and Musk’s access to government records. Last week, a federal judge approved an order that temporarily blocks DOGE access to Treasury payment systems and records until there’s a ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction. The Department of Education was also sued Friday by a California student association over DOGE’s access to student financial aid and loan data.

EFF: “Brazen ransacking” of Americans’ data

The EFF said on its website that the “brazen ransacking of Americans’ sensitive data is unheard of in scale. With our co-counsel Lex Lumina, State Democracy Defenders Fund, and the Chandra Law Firm, we represent current and former federal employees whose privacy has been violated. We are asking the court for a temporary restraining order to immediately cease this dangerous and illegal intrusion. This massive trove of information includes private demographic data and work histories of essentially all current and former federal employees and contractors as well as federal job applicants.”

The EFF said the OPM database is one of the largest collections of employee data in the US, given that the federal government is the nation’s largest employer.

“In addition to personally identifiable information such as names, Social Security numbers, and demographics, it includes work experience, union activities, salaries, performance, and demotions; health information like life insurance and health benefits; financial information like death benefit designations and savings programs; and classified information [in] nondisclosure agreements. It holds records for millions of federal workers and millions more Americans who have applied for federal jobs,” the EFF said.

The EFF said “DOGE’s unchecked access puts the safety of all federal employees at risk of everything from privacy violations to political pressure to blackmail to targeted attacks,” adding that Musk last year “publicly disclosed the names of specific government employees whose jobs he claimed he would cut before he had access to the system.”

A Washington Post report last week said that some federal “officials have raised concerns that DOGE associates appeared to violate security protocols by using private email addresses or not disclosing their identities on government calls.”

The individual plaintiffs in the EFF’s lawsuit include federal employee Vanessa Barrow, a New York resident who works at the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “As a federal employee since September 2008, Ms. Barrow’s sensitive personal and employment information was included in the OPM records that Defendants disclosed and continue to disclose,” the lawsuit said.

Seeking financial damages

The lawsuit has two other named plaintiffs who are former federal employees, and 100 Doe plaintiffs who are current and former employees or contractors of the US government. Plaintiffs, including members of the unions that are part of the lawsuit, are entitled to financial payments because they “have sustained and will continue to sustain actual damages and pecuniary losses directly traceable to Defendants’ violations,” the lawsuit said.

The separate lawsuit filed by EPIC in Virginia said that case’s single Doe plaintiff is entitled to statutory damages of $1,000 per each act of unauthorized inspection and disclosure, and punitive damages “because the Treasury Department and DOGE’s unlawful disclosure of their confidential return information was either willful or a result of gross negligence.”

“Taxpayers have a private right of action to seek damages under 26 U.S.C. § 7431 for the knowing or negligent unauthorized inspection or disclosure of returns or return information in violation of 26 U.S.C. § 6103,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit filed in the District of Maryland by unions and several individuals said the “plaintiffs include veterans who receive benefit payments as provided by law, current and former federal employees whose confidential employment files reside in the Office of Personnel Management’s system, and teachers, first responders, and health care workers whose pathway to careers in public service included relying on student loans to fund their own educations.”

All of these plaintiffs had personal data “improperly disclosed to DOGE representatives in a manner completely divorced from the legitimate purposes for which it was maintained and in violation of their privacy rights,” the lawsuit said. The plaintiffs are said to be “concerned that the breach may well result in serious personal, social, and economic harm, from being targeted for harassment and threats to doxxing, swatting, and identity theft.”

Military veterans worried about data access

Plaintiff Donald Martinez of Colorado served in Iraq for the Army and now receives Social Security disability insurance and other government benefits. “Especially because of his previous military service in a geographically sensitive area and involvement in high-level negotiations because of which he received death threats from terrorists, Plaintiff Martinez is worried that unauthorized access and disclosure of his personal information held within the federal government will compromise his personal safety and security,” the lawsuit said.

Plaintiff Christopher Purdy of Georgia served in the Army National Guard and was deployed to Iraq and currently leads a nonprofit advocacy group. Purdy is “very worried that Musk and DOGE may use their unauthorized access to his personal information to stop his VA disability payments, a major source of income in his household,” the lawsuit said.

The Trump executive order establishing DOGE said its goal was “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity.” It said that US agencies must give DOGE “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, software systems, and IT systems.”

An incident this week may add to concerns about Musk’s understanding of government systems. On Monday, he criticized a user on X for stating that the US government uses SQL.

“This retard thinks the government uses SQL,” Musk wrote. The federal government is in fact a heavy user of SQL in multiple forms, including Microsoft SQL server and MySQL Enterprise Edition for Governments.

Musk’s comment came in a discussion of another post in which Musk claimed without evidence that a lack of de-duplication in the Social Security database “enables MASSIVE FRAUD!!” because “you can have the same SSN many times over.” The comment that earned Musk’s rebuke was, “TIL Elon has never used SQL.”

Jon is a Senior IT Reporter for Ars Technica. He covers the telecom industry, Federal Communications Commission rulemakings, broadband consumer affairs, court cases, and government regulation of the tech industry.

“Largest data breach in US history”: Three more lawsuits try to stop DOGE Read More »

Nine unvaccinated people hospitalized as Texas measles outbreak doubles

gaines county, health, Infectious disease, measles, MMR, outbreak, texas, vaccination, vaccines / Mike M. / February 12, 2025

In an interview with Ars Technica last week, Zach Holbrooks, the executive director of the South Plains Public Health District (SPPHD), which includes Gaines, said that the area has a large religious community that has expressed vaccine hesitancy.

Additional cases likely

Pockets of the county have yet lower vaccination rates than the county-wide averages suggest. For instance, one independent public school district in Loop, in the northeast corner of Gaines, had a vaccination rate of 46 percent in the 2023–2024 school year.

Measles is one of the most infectious diseases known. The measles virus spreads through the air and can linger in the airspace of a room for up to two hours after an infected person has left. Ninety percent of unvaccinated people who are exposed will fall ill with the disease, which is marked by a very high fever and a telltale rash. Typically, 1 in 5 unvaccinated people with measles in the US end up hospitalized, and 1 in 20 develop pneumonia. Between 1 to 3 in 1,000 die of the infection. In rare cases, it can cause a fatal disease of the central nervous system called Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis later in life. Measles can also wipe out immune responses to other infections (a phenomenon known as immune amnesia), making people vulnerable to other infectious diseases.

“Due to the highly contagious nature of this disease, additional cases are likely to occur in Gaines County and the surrounding communities,” the state health department said.

While Gaines is remarkable for its low vaccination rate, vaccination coverage nationwide has slipped in recent years as vaccine misinformation and hesitancy have taken root. Overall, vaccination rates among US kindergartners have fallen from 95 percent in the 2019–2020 school year into the 92 percent range in the 2023–2024 school year. Vaccine exemptions, meanwhile, have hit an all-time high. Health experts expect to see more vaccine-preventable outbreaks, like the one in Gaines, as the trend continues.

Nine unvaccinated people hospitalized as Texas measles outbreak doubles Read More »

Author name: Mike M.