Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions.

That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board in its consideration of a case involving an Instagram post about prescription drugs during pregnancy and childbirth. The case touches upon a topic we’ve been documenting for some time; last year we collected stories from individuals who had experienced censorship of reproductive health information on various platforms. Meta in particular stood out: Its moderation systems routinely fail to distinguish between prohibited drug transactions and legitimate discussion of medications, including educational information and people's firsthand experiences with healthcare.

Through our Stop Censoring Abortion project, EFF collected nearly 100 submissions from healthcare providers, clinics, educators, advocates, researchers, and others whose reproductive health content had been removed or suppressed by social media platforms. What we found was alarming: systemic over-enforcement, confusing policies, arbitrary takedowns, sudden account bans, de-ranking, and appeals that too often went nowhere.

Talking About Medication Isn't the Same as Selling It

In almost every case we reviewed, the censored posts and accounts did not actually violate the platforms' stated rules. Meta frequently cited its Restricted Goods and Services policy, which prohibits attempts to buy, sell, trade, donate, gift, or request pharmaceutical drugs. But the content EFF documented overwhelmingly consisted of factual or educational information—not attempts to sell or distribute drugs.

The consequences were significant. For example, the Miscarriage+Abortion Hotline had its Instagram account restricted and posts removed even though it was providing information about legally obtaining medication rather than offering pharmaceuticals for sale. Red River Women's Clinic and the RISE reproductive health research center at Emory University had accounts locked after posting about mifepristone.

Other users reported having their content quietly de-ranked or “shadowbanned,” limiting its reach without giving them meaningful notice or recourse. We believe educational content and people's experiences involving reproductive healthcare and medication should not be suppressed in this way.

And when Meta gets these decisions wrong, the appeals process too often fails to fix them. In several cases EFF documented, accounts were restored only after journalists drew attention to the problem or someone with a personal connection inside Meta intervened. A moderation system shouldn't require knowing the right person to get an erroneous decision reversed.

Meta Can—and Must—Do Better

Our submission calls on Meta to make five changes—the same five changes we asked for last year.

First, Meta should publish clear, understandable policies so users can know what content is permitted and what might result in removal, downranking, or account suspension. Second, those rules must be enforced consistently and fairly. Third, Meta must provide meaningful explanations for enforcement decisions, including what rule was violated and how users can appeal. Fourth, users need a functional appeals system that doesn't depend on insider access.

Finally, Meta should expand human review. Reproductive healthcare is precisely the sort of nuanced and context-dependent subject that automated moderation systems struggle to understand. As our research shows, automated systems can mistake education for drug sales, misinterpret terminology, overlook cultural and political context, and even classify legitimate advocacy as dangerous content. Human moderators should therefore play a greater role when automated systems flag sensitive healthcare information or political expression.

Meta has chosen to allow discussion of reproductive healthcare, including abortion, on its platforms. That commitment means little if its moderation systems nevertheless prevent people from accessing or sharing that information.

At a moment when reproductive rights are under attack around the world, the stakes are particularly high. Restricting access to essential healthcare information can have profound consequences, especially for people who already face barriers to reproductive care.

Users deserve a system in which rules aren't applied arbitrarily, appeals actually work, and vital health information isn't silenced because an automated system failed to understand its context. Meta can—and must—do better.

You can read our comment in full below.

This is good:

Post-quantum cryptography is now one pip-install away for the entire Python ecosystem. With funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency, we implemented support for ML-KEM, the NIST-standard key-establishment primitive, and ML-DSA, the NIST-standard digital-signature primitive, in pyca/cryptography.

Remember, the reason to do this now is because there’s no emergency. And because you will make your systems crypto agile, which is always a good idea.

Some environmentalists are looking to rebuild a cordial relationship with Gov. Kathy Hochul as they look for alignment after a bitter fight over the state’s climate law.

Cameron Hamilton's arrival Monday as FEMA's first permanent administrator in Donald Trump's second term portends changes to disaster aid.

The California governor made his first public remarks detailing his priorities for this year on the issue.

The agency said it reached an agreement with groups affected by billions of dollars in frozen funds. Money will not flow while the case goes through the appeals process.

Gov. Spencer Cox has drawn support across the political spectrum for "Operation Gigawatt” as his state tries to plan for surging power demand.

Dry seasons have become a fixture of European farming. The EU’s crisis tools still treat them as a surprise.

The Maldives has championed itself as a country fighting its vulnerability to climate change, but the government has said sacrifices must be made at times in favor of development.

The Bureau of Reclamation said that water from Glen Canyon Dam would not be released “due to significant hydropower generation concerns under already strained system conditions."

Heavy rains have created a risk of severe flooding in Zhejiang province, and authorities have warned of severe landslide risks.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02735-5

Author Correction: Enduring impacts of El Niño on life expectancy in past and future climates

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02724-8

The authors quantify the global emergence of hourly heat extremes (HHEs), highlighting exposure overlooked by daily metrics. HHEs will increase fourfold by the end of the century under high emissions, with low- and middle-income countries, as well as successive generations, facing disproportionate exposure.

In the last decade, scientists have shown that fusion energy can work, as a physical process. Next question: Can it work economically? 

A study co-authored by MIT professors Dennis Whyte and Andrew W. Lo proposes a framework for understanding what’s needed to make fusion energy commercially viable in the marketplace. The method considers the physical inputs needed to sustain controlled fusion energy production, as well as the cost of building power plants that can compete in energy markets.

“It’s all the things that come along with finding, allocating, and spending money at this scale,” says Whyte, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and a key driver of the field’s progress, who co-authored the paper. “This is critical to what we do. We should look at the economics. If we want this technology to actually be meaningful in the world economy, we have to start getting straight with ourselves about these topics.” 

The goal of the paper, Whyte says, is to create “this framework, where are all the economics are clear, and then we understand what it would mean” for any fusion energy power plant. 

Fusion energy harnesses the reaction that powers the stars: the fusion of light nuclei. It is often referred to as “plasma fusion,” as the fusion reactions generate fuel in a plasma state, often confined by magnets or initiated by powerful lasers. Whyte says the goal is to generate abundant energy while also offering society attractive safety, licensing, and siting options.

In 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, one of the U.S. national labs, achieved a reaction with positive energy gain. Venture funding has also poured into the field in recent years, although there are still many challenges regarding the construction of viable commercial fusion energy.

“It’s challenging to reduce complex scientific and engineering requirements to economic consequences,” Lo says. “But if we don’t do that, we’re not going to get the funding we need to achieve the impact we want.”

The open-access publication, “Criteria for the economic viability of fusion power plants,” appears online in the Journal of Fusion Energy. The authors are Whyte, who is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering and a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT; Lo, who is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor and a professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Rachel Bielajew, an analyst with Rutherford Energy Ventures and a researcher at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Maria Hancock and Riley Moeykens of Rutherford Energy Ventures; and Guinevere Shaw of Rutherford Energy Ventures and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Whyte is a former head of MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a former director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff firm that is one of the leaders in the fusion industry. Whyte and Lo also co-founded Rutherford Energy Ventures, a consultancy and investment advisory firm, which is working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build a consortium for new fusion research. 

10 parameters, any power plant

The framework Whyte and Lo propose in the paper has 10 parameters for evaluating the economic viability of a fusion energy power plant. Some of these are scientific and physical, dealing with the energy consumed and produced in a given plant. Most of the parameters are in the realm of engineering and economics, such as the costs of plant construction.

A key inspiration for the framework is the so-called Lawson Criterion, derived in the 1950s, which describes the combinations of temperature, plasma density, and energy confinement time that can produce net energy from the plasma due to fusion, regardless of its absolute power or volume. Specifically it calculates a “plasma Q,” which is the ratio of fusion power produced to the external power required to sustain the plasma.

“The Lawson Criterion describes the scientific success of energy gain from fusion plasmas, while our framework generally describes economic Q, which is the ratio of capital gained to that expended,” Whyte explains.

The parameters in the framework describe engineering features of the fusion power plant such as power density, the efficiency of converting fusion power into an economic product, and the durability of components used in the energy conversion, in addition to costing and market parameters that assess the expenses and returns from invested capital. Or, as Whyte puts it, the framework is centered on what it takes to achieve a net-positive economic return, “but applied to practical power plant design.” In parallel to plasma Q, the economic Q described in the framework must be greater than 1 for basic viability.

Researchers have tried a variety of methods for generating and containing fusion energy. The paper’s framework, Whyte emphasizes, is “completely agnostic to whatever fusion concept you use, because the physical reality of fusion is that you expend money to build the capability to produce fusion power.” And the parameters do not depend on the size of any reactor being built; the framework is set up so that any inputs can be scaled to a given project or power output. 

“It doesn’t matter whether the fusion power plant is a small or large, the bottom line is: In both cases you better have money coming out that exceeds the money going in, otherwise it’s not going to be around for very long,” Lo says. 

One source of motivation for the paper, Whyte and Lo say, is to underscore the importance of accounting for all costs in fusion research as rigorously as possible. While researchers will be highly aware of the costs of basic experiments, estimating the costs of a fusion reactor is a somewhat different matter, but something leaders in the field have to be increasingly oriented around.

Fixing a missing link

That is certainly the case, the authors note, as new rounds of funding enter the fusion energy industry. Just last week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems obtained a new billion-dollar round of funding support from investors; it hopes to open its first working power plant in the 2030s, in the state of Virginia. 

Lo acknowledges that there will be uncertainties and challenging decisions involved in the development of the very first commercial fusion reactor. If successful, though, the industry might follow the path of learning by doing that has been common in energy and other industries, helping plants become more economical over time. 

“This pattern of learning by doing exists in all deep technology sectors,” says Lo, noting that sequencing a human genome is a million times cheaper right now than it was about 25 years ago. “We’re going to see the same thing, but maybe not to the same degree, in fusion energy.”

Lo has long worked to develop ways for scientific research to gain financial support in biotechnology — and is launching a new MIT Sloan educational program, called CATAPULT, to provide more tools for people in any field of study to translate their research advances into products. 

When it comes to fusion, Lo says, “It’s pretty clear that economic viability is something we can start assessing now.” And while there might be thousands of particular decisions involved in building a commercial fusion plant, the authors think they have an overall approach that will let people quantify all that work. 

“When you’ve got a framework to evaluate it in a quantitative way, it tells you about the literal worth of making a particular design decision. That seems to me at this moment of fusion development absolutely critical, and what we’ve been missing,” Whyte says.

Nice video of the Arctic bobtail squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Through data brokers, ICE is buying the information you provided to open a credit card.

A fight over USDA immigration and diversity policies held up $15 million in wildfire-prevention grants for an area in Washington state that’s now burning.

Occidental Petroleum's project in West Texas was supposed to start in late 2024. Scientists say carbon removal is essential to slowing climate change.

The half-dozen lawmakers will lead the conversation on shaping the Assembly’s priorities on the issue.

The confirmation of Cameron Hamilton, nominee to lead FEMA, means he'll be in place for peak hurricane season.