As we said last year, the U.S. Supreme Court has taken an unusually active interest in internet free speech issues over the past couple years.

All five pending cases at the end of last year, covering three issues, were decided this year, with varying degrees of First Amendment guidance for internet users and online platforms. We posted some takeaways from these recent cases.

We additionally filed an amicus brief in a new case before the Supreme Court challenging the Texas age verification law.

Public Officials Censoring Comments on Government Social Media Pages

Cases: O’Connor-Ratcliff v. Garnier and Lindke v. Freed – DECIDED

The Supreme Court considered a pair of cases related to whether government officials who use social media may block individuals or delete their comments because the government disagrees with their views. The threshold question in these cases was what test must be used to determine whether a government official’s social media page is largely private and therefore not subject to First Amendment limitations, or is largely used for governmental purposes and thus subject to the prohibition on viewpoint discrimination and potentially other speech restrictions.

The Supreme Court crafted a two-part fact-intensive test to determine if a government official’s speech on social media counts as “state action” under the First Amendment. The test includes two required elements: 1) the official “possessed actual authority to speak” on the government’s behalf, and 2) the official “purported to exercise that authority when he spoke on social media.” As we explained, the court’s opinion isn’t as generous to internet users as we asked for in our amicus brief, but it does provide guidance to individuals seeking to vindicate their free speech rights against government officials who delete their comments or block them outright.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision, the Lindke case was remanded back to the Sixth Circuit. We filed an amicus brief in the Sixth Circuit to guide the appellate court in applying the new test. The court then issued an opinion in which it remanded the case back to the district court to allow the plaintiff to conduct additional factual development in light of the Supreme Court's new state action test. The Sixth Circuit also importantly held in relation to the first element that “a grant of actual authority to speak on the state’s behalf need not mention social media as the method of speaking,” which we had argued in our amicus brief.

Government Mandates for Platforms to Carry Certain Online Speech

Cases: NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice – DECIDED  

The Supreme Court considered whether laws in Florida and Texas violated the First Amendment because they allow those states to dictate when social media sites may not apply standard editorial practices to user posts. As we argued in our amicus brief urging the court to strike down both laws, allowing social media sites to be free from government interference in their content moderation ultimately benefits internet users. When platforms have First Amendment rights to curate the user-generated content they publish, they can create distinct forums that accommodate diverse viewpoints, interests, and beliefs.

In a win for free speech, the Supreme Court held that social media platforms have a First Amendment right to curate the third-party speech they select for and recommend to their users, and the government’s ability to dictate those processes is extremely limited. However, the court declined to strike down either law—instead it sent both cases back to the lower courts to determine whether each law could be wholly invalidated rather than challenged only with respect to specific applications of each law to specific functions. The court also made it clear that laws that do not target the editorial process, such as competition laws, would not be subject to the same rigorous First Amendment standards, a position EFF has consistently urged.

Government Coercion in Social Media Content Moderation

Case: Murthy v. Missouri – DECIDED

The Supreme Court considered the limits on government involvement in social media platforms’ enforcement of their policies. The First Amendment prohibits the government from directly or indirectly forcing a publisher to censor another’s speech (often called “jawboning”). But the court had not previously applied this principle to government communications with social media sites about user posts. In our amicus brief, we urged the court to recognize that there are both circumstances where government involvement in platforms’ policy enforcement decisions is permissible and those where it is impermissible.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court did not answer the important First Amendment question before it—how does one distinguish permissible from impermissible government communications with social media platforms about the speech they publish? Rather, it dismissed the cases on “standing” because none of the plaintiffs had presented sufficient facts to show that the government did in the past or would in the future coerce a social media platform to take down, deamplify, or otherwise obscure any of the plaintiffs’ specific social media posts. Thus, while the Supreme Court did not tell us more about coercion, it did remind us that it is very hard to win lawsuits alleging coercion. 

However, we do know a little more about the line between permissible government persuasion and impermissible coercion from a different jawboning case, outside the social media context, that the Supreme Court also decided this year: NRA v. Vullo. In that case, the National Rifle Association alleged that the New York state agency that oversees the insurance industry threatened insurance companies with enforcement actions if they continued to offer coverage to the NRA. The Supreme Court endorsed a multi-factored test that many of the lower courts had adopted to answer the ultimate question in jawboning cases: did the plaintiff “plausibly allege conduct that, viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress the plaintiff ’s speech?” Those factors are: 1) word choice and tone, 2) the existence of regulatory authority (that is, the ability of the government speaker to actually carry out the threat), 3) whether the speech was perceived as a threat, and 4) whether the speech refers to adverse consequences.

Some Takeaways From These Three Sets of Cases

The O’Connor-Ratcliffe and Lindke cases about social media blocking looked at the government’s role as a social media user. The NetChoice cases about content moderation looked at government’s role as a regulator of social media platforms. And the Murthy case about jawboning looked at the government’s mixed role as a regulator and user.

Three key takeaways emerged from these three sets of cases (across five total cases):

First, internet users have a First Amendment right to speak on social media—whether by posting or commenting—and that right may be infringed when the government seeks to interfere with content moderation, but it will not be infringed by the independent decisions of the platforms themselves.

Second, the Supreme Court recognized that social media platforms routinely moderate users’ speech: they decide which posts each user sees and when and how they see it, they decide to amplify and recommend some posts and obscure others, and they are often guided in this process by their own community standards or similar editorial policies. The court moved beyond the idea that content moderation is largely passive and indifferent.

Third, the cases confirm that traditional First Amendment rules apply to social media. Thus, when government controls the comments section of a social media page, it has the same First Amendment obligations to those who wish to speak in those spaces as it does in offline spaces it controls, such as parks, public auditoriums, or city council meetings. And online platforms that edit and curate user speech according to their editorial standards have the same First Amendment rights as others who express themselves by selecting the speech of others, including art galleries, booksellers, newsstands, parade organizers, and editorial page editors.

Government-Mandated Age Verification

Case: Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton – PENDING

Last but not least, we filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to strike down HB 1181, a Texas law that unconstitutionally restricts adults’ access to sexual content online by requiring them to verify their age (see our Year in Review post on age verification). Under HB 1181, passed in 2023, any website that Texas decides is composed of one-third or more of “sexual material harmful to minors” must collect age-verifying personal information from all visitors. We argued that the law places undue burdens on adults seeking to access lawful online speech. First, the law forces adults to submit personal information over the internet to access entire websites, not just specific sexual materials. Second, compliance with the law requires websites to retain this information, exposing their users to a variety of anonymity, privacy, and security risks not present when briefly flashing an ID card to a cashier, for example. Third, while sharing many of the same burdens as document-based age verification, newer technologies like “age estimation” introduce their own problems—and are unlikely to satisfy the requirements of HB 1181 anyway. The court’s decision could have major consequences for the freedom of adults to safely and anonymously access protected speech online.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

People’s ability to speak online, share ideas, and advocate for change are enabled by the countless online services that host everyone’s views.

Despite the central role these online services play in our digital lives, lawmakers and courts spent the last year trying to undermine a key U.S. law, Section 230, that enables services to host our speech. EFF was there to fight back on behalf of all internet users.

Section 230 (47 U.S.C. § 230) is not an accident. Congress passed the law in 1996 because it recognized that for users’ speech to flourish online, services that hosted their speech needed to be protected from legal claims based on any particular user’s speech. The law embodies the principle that everyone, including the services themselves, should be responsible for their own speech, but not the speech of others. This critical but limited legal protection reflects a careful balance by Congress, which at the time recognized that promoting more user speech outweighed the harm caused by any individual’s unlawful speech.

EFF helps thwart effort to repeal Section 230

Members of Congress introduced a bill in May this year that would have repealed Section 230 in 18 months, on the theory that the deadline would motivate lawmakers to come up with a different legal framework in the meantime. Yet the lawmakers behind the effort provided no concrete alternatives to Section 230, nor did they identify any specific parts of the law they believed needed to be changed. Instead, the lawmakers were motivated by their and the public’s justifiable dissatisfaction with the largest online services.

As we wrote at the time, repealing Section 230 would be a disaster for internet users and the small, niche online services that make up the diverse forums and communities that host speech about nearly every interest, religious and political persuasion, and topic. Section 230 protects bloggers, anyone who forwards an email, and anyone who reposts or otherwise recirculates the posts of other users. The law also protects moderators who remove or curate other users’ posts.

Moreover, repealing Section 230 would not have hurt the biggest online services, given that they have astronomical amounts of money and resources to handle the deluge of legal claims that would be filed. Instead, repealing Section 230 would have solidified the dominance of the largest online services. That’s why Facebook has long ran a campaign urging Congress to weaken Section 230 – a cynical effort to use the law to cement its dominance.

Thankfully, the bill did not advance, in part because internet users wrote to members of Congress objecting to the proposal. We hope lawmakers in 2025 put their energy toward ending Big Tech’s dominance by enacting a meaningful and comprehensive consumer data privacy law, or pass laws that enable greater interoperability and competition between social media services. Those efforts will go a long way toward ending Big Tech’s dominance without harming users’ online speech.

EFF stands up for users’ speech in courts

Congress was not the only government branch that sought to undermine Section 230 in the past year. Two different courts issued rulings this year that will jeopardize people’s ability to read other people’s posts and make use of basic features of online services that benefit all users.

In Anderson v. TikTok, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a deeply confused opinion, ruling that Section 230 does not apply to the automated system TikTok uses to recommend content to users. The court reasoned that because online services have a First Amendment right to decide how to present their users’ speech, TikTok’s decisions to recommend certain content reflects its own speech and thus Section 230’s protections do not apply.

We filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of TikTok’s request for the full court to rehear the case, arguing that the decision was wrong on both the First Amendment and Section 230. We also pointed out how the ruling would have far-reaching implications for users’ online speech. The court unfortunately denied TikTok’s rehearing request, and we are waiting to see whether the service will ask the Supreme Court to review the case.

In Neville v. Snap, Inc., a California trial court refused to apply Section 230 in a lawsuit that claims basic features of the service, such as disappearing messages, “Stories,” and the ability to befriend mutual acquaintances, amounted to defectively designed products. The trial court’s ruling departs from a long line of other court decisions that ruled that these claims essentially try to plead around Section 230 by claiming that the features are the problem, rather than the illegal content that users created with a service’s features.

We filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of Snap’s effort to get a California appellate court to overturn the trial court’s decision, arguing that the ruling threatens the ability for all internet users to rely on basic features of a given service. Because if a platform faces liability for a feature that some might misuse to cause harm, the platform is unlikely to offer that feature to users, despite the fact that the majority of people using the feature for legal and expressive purposes. Unfortunately, the appellate court denied Snap’s petition in December, meaning the case continues before the trial court.

EFF supports effort to empower users to customize their online experiences

While lawmakers and courts are often focused on Section 230’s protections for online services, relatively little attention has been paid to another provision in the law that protects those who make tools that allow users to customize their experiences online. Yet Congress included this protection precisely because it wanted to encourage the development of software that people can use to filter out certain content they’d rather not see or otherwise change how they interact with others online.

That is precisely the goal of a tool being developed by Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known as Unfollow Everything 2.0. The browser extension would allow Facebook users to automate their ability to unfollow friends, groups, or pages, thereby limiting the content they see in their News Feed.

Zuckerman filed a lawsuit against Facebook seeking a court ruling that Unfollow Everything 2.0 was immune from legal claims from Facebook under Section 230(c)(2)(B). EFF filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support, arguing that Section 230’s user-empowerment tool immunity is unique and incentivizes the development of beneficial tools for users, including traditional content filtering, tailoring content on social media to a user’s preferences, and blocking unwanted digital trackers to protect a user’s privacy.

The district court hearing the case unfortunately dismissed the case, but its ruling did not reach the merits of whether Section 230 protected Unfollow Everything 2.0. The court gave Zuckerman an opportunity to re-file the case, and we will continue to support his efforts to build user-empowering tools.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

A judge has found that NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware, has violated the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by hacking WhatsApp in order to spy on people using it.

Jon Penney and I wrote a legal paper on the case.

From a new Institute-wide effort aimed at addressing climate change to a collaborative that brings together MIT researchers and local hospitals to advance health and medicine, a Nobel prize win for two economists examining economic disparities and a roller-skating rink that brought some free fun to Kendall Square this summer, MIT faculty, researchers, students, alumni, and staff brought their trademark inventiveness and curiosity-driven spirit to the news. Below please enjoy a sampling of some of the uplifting news moments MIT affiliates enjoyed over the past year.

Kornbluth cheers for MIT to tackle climate change
Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights how MIT President Sally Kornbluth is “determined to harness MIT’s considerable brainpower to tackle” climate change.
Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT's “high-impact” initiative 
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative is a new effort designed to “spur high-impact discoveries and health solutions through interdisciplinary projects across engineering, science, AI, economics, business, policy, design, and the humanities.” 
Full story via Boston Business Journal

A fireside chat with President Sally Kornbluth
President Sally Kornbluth speaks with undergraduate student Emiko Pope about her personal interests, passions, and life at MIT. Sally “is proud of MIT and how it can provide real solutions to society’s problems,” writes Pope. “She loves that you can get a daily fix of science because you are surrounded by such amazing people and endeavors.”
Full story via MIT Admissions 

Nobel economics prize goes to three economists who found that freer societies are more likely to prosper
Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and Professor Simon Johnson have been honored with the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in memory of Alfred Nobel for their work demonstrating “the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity.”
Full story via Associated Press

MIT to cover full tuition for undergrads from households making below $200,000
“We really want to send a message that coming to school at MIT is affordable and that cost should not stand in the way of a student applying,” says Stuart Schmill, dean of admissions and student financial services.
Full story via WBUR

MIT adds another architectural standout to its collection
The new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is described as “the most exciting work of academic architecture in Greater Boston in a generation.” 
Full story via The Boston Globe

Free roller skating rink open all summer long in Cambridge 
WBZ NewsRadio’s Emma Friedman visits Rollerama, a free, outdoor pop-up roller skating rink that was “all about bringing the community together and having fun in the space.”
Full story via WBZ News Radio

Three actions extraordinary people take to achieve what seems impossible, from the co-founder of Moderna
“I’m utterly unreasonable and an eternal optimist," said Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 during his commencement address at MIT, adding that to tackle improbable challenges having "a special kind of optimism" can help.
Full story via NBC Boston 

Applying AI

How AI could transform medical research treatment
Professor Regina Barzilay discusses how artificial intelligence could enable health care providers to understand and treat diseases in new ways. 
Full story via Babbage, a podcast from The Economist

What are sperm whales saying? Researchers find a complex “alphabet”
Using machine learning, MIT researchers have discovered that sperm whales use “a bigger lexicon of sound patterns” that indicates a far more complex communication style than previously thought.
Full story via NPR

“SuperLimbs” could help astronauts recover from falls
Researchers at MIT have developed a “set of wearable robotic limbs to help astronauts recover from falls.”
Full story via CNN

Tiny batteries for tiny robots that could deliver drugs inside our bodies
Professor Michael Strano delves into his team’s work developing tiny batteries that could be used to power cell-sized robots.
Full story via Somewhere on Earth

Origami and computers? Yes, origami and computers.
“We get stuck on a science problem and that inspires a new sculpture, or we get stuck trying to build a sculpture and that leads to new science,” says Professor Erik Demaine of his work combining the art of origami with computer science.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Creating climate impact

This map shows where the shift to clean energy will most affect jobs
MIT researchers have developed a new map detailing how the shift to clean energy could impact jobs around the country.
Full story via Fast Company

Climate change in New England may scorch summer fun, study finds 
Inspired by his daily walks, Professor Elfatih Eltahir and his colleagues have developed a new way to measure how climate change is likely to impact the number of days when it is comfortable to be outdoors. 
Full story via WBUR

Solving problems with Susan Solomon
Professor Susan Solomon speaks about her latest book “Solvable: How We Healed the Earth, and How We Can Do it Again.”
Full story via The New York Times

MIT ice flow study takes “big” step towards understanding sea level rise, scientists say
MIT scientists have developed a new model to analyze movements across the Antarctic Ice Sheet, “a critical step in understanding the potential speed and severity of sea level rise.”
Full story via Boston Globe

Meet the MIT professor with eight climate startups and $2.5 billion in funding
Professor Yet-Ming Chiang has used his materials science research to “build an array of companies in areas like batteries, green cement and critical minerals that could really help mitigate the climate crisis.” 
Full story via Forbes

Hacking health

A bionic leg controlled by the brain
New Yorker reporter Rivka Galchen visits the lab of Professor Hugh Herr to learn more about his work aimed at the “merging of body and machine.”
Full story via The New Yorker

From inflatable balloons to vibrating pills, scientists are getting creative with weight loss
Professor Giovanni Traverso speaks about his work developing weight loss treatments that don’t involve surgery or pharmaceuticals.
Full story via GBH

MIT scientists want to create a “Lyme Block” with proteins found in your sweat
MIT researchers have discovered a protein found in human sweat that holds antimicrobial properties and can “inhibit the growth of the bacteria that causes Lyme disease.”
Full story via NECN

Wearable breast cancer monitor could help women screen themselves
Professor Canan Dagdeviren delves into her work developing wearable ultrasound devices that could help screen for early-stage breast cancer, monitor kidney health, and detect other cancers deep within the body.
Full story via CNN

The surprising cause of fasting’s regenerative powers
A study by MIT researchers explores the potential health benefits and consequences of fasting.
Full story via Nature

Spooky and surprising space

Planet as light as cotton candy surprises astronomers
Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered an exoplanet that “is 50% larger than Jupiter and as fluffy as cotton candy.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

Two black holes are giving the cosmos a fright
Researchers at MIT have discovered a “black-hole triple, the first known instance of a three-body system that includes a black hole, which is not supposed to be part of the mix.”
Full story via New York Times

Astronomers use wobbly star stuff to measure a supermassive black hole’s spin
MIT astronomers have found a new way to measure how fast a black hole spins, observing the aftermath of a black hole tidal disruption event with a telescope aboard the International Space Station.
Full story via Popular Science

Are some of the oldest stars in the universe right under our noses?
Researchers at MIT have discovered “three of the oldest stars in the universe lurking right outside the Milky Way.”
Full story via Mashable

Waves of methane are crashing on the coasts of Saturn’s bizarre moon Titan
New research by MIT geologists finds waves of methane on Titan likely eroded and shaped the moon’s coastlines.
Full story via Gizmodo

Mastering materials

A vibrating curtain of silk can stifle noise pollution
Researchers at MIT have created a noise-blocking sheet of silkworm silk that could “greatly streamline the pursuit of silence.”
Full story via Scientific American

This is how drinking a nice cold beer can help remove lead from drinking water
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new technique that removes lead from water using repurposed beer yeast. 
Full story via Boston 25 News

Some metals actually grow more resilient when hot
A new study by MIT engineers finds that heating metals can sometimes make them stronger, a “surprising phenomenon [that] could lead to a better understanding of important industrial processes and make for tougher aircraft.”
Full story via New Scientist

The human experience

The economist who figured out what makes workers tick
Wall Street Journal reporter Justin Lahart spotlights the work of Professor David Autor, an economist whose “thinking helped change our understanding of the American labor market.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

If a bot relationship feels real, should we care that it's not?
Professor Sherry Turkle discusses her research on human relationships with AI chatbots.
Full story via NPR

AI should be a tool, not a curse, for the future of work
The MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative is a new effort aimed at analyzing the forces that are eroding job quality for non-college workers and identifying ways to move the economy onto a more equitable trajectory.
Full story via The New York Times

Phenomenal physics

Physicists captured images of heat’s “second sound.” What?
MIT scientists have captured images of heat moving through a superfluid, a phenomenon that “may explain how heat moves through certain rare materials on Earth and deep in space.” 
Full story via Gizmodo

Think you understand evaporation? Think again, says MIT
Researchers at MIT have discovered that “light in the visible spectrum is enough to knock water molecules loose at the surface where it meets air and send them floating away.”
Full story via New Atlas 

Scientists shrunk the gap between atoms to an astounding 50 nanometers
MIT physicists have “successfully placed two dysprosium atoms only 50 nanometers apart — 10 times closer than previous studies — using ‘optical tweezers.’” 
Full story via Popular Mechanics

Making art and music

Composing for 37 Years at MIT
A celebration in Killian Hall featured recent works composed by Professor Peter Child and honored the musician as he prepares to retire after 37 years of teaching and composing at MIT.
Full story via The Boston Musical Intelligencer

MIT puts finishing touches on new music hub
The new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building will serve as a “hub for music instruction and performance” for MIT’s 30 on-campus ensembles and more than 1,500 students enrolled in music classes each academic year.
Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT art lending program puts contemporary works in dorm rooms
The MIT Student Lending Art Program allows undergraduate and graduate students to bring home original works of art from the List Visual Arts Center for the academic year.
Full story via WBUR

Michael John Gorman named new director of MIT Museum
Michael John Gorman, “a museum professional who has created and run several organizations devoted to science and the arts,” has been named the next director of the MIT Museum.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Engineering impact

A Greek-Indian friendship driven by innovation
Dean Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, and Pavlos-Petros Sotiriadis PhD ’02 discuss MIT’s unique approach to entrepreneurship, the future of AI, and the importance of mentorship.
Full story via Kathimerini

Metabolizing new synthetic pathways
“The potential to educate, encourage, and support the next generation of scientists and engineers in an educational setting gives me a chance to amplify my impact far beyond what I could ever personally do as an individual,” says Professor Kristala Prather, head of MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering.
Full story via Nature

MIT’s biggest contributions of the past 25 years? They aren’t what you think.
Boston Globe columnist Scott Kirsner spotlights Professor Mitchel Resnick, Professor Neil Gershenfeld, and the late Professor Emeritus Woodie Flowers and their work developing programs that “get kids excited about, and more proficient in, STEM.”
Full story via The Boston Globe 

Barrier breaker shapes aerospace engineering’s future
Professor Wesley Harris has “not only advanced the field of aerospace engineering but has also paved the way for future generations to soar.”
Full story via IEEE Spectrum

Amos Winter: MIT professor, racecar driver, and super tifosi
Lecturer Amy Carleton profiles Professor Amos Winter PhD ’11, a mechanical engineer driven by his Formula 1 passion to find “elegant engineering solutions to perennial problems.”
Full story via Esses Magazine

New documentary features African students at MIT and their journey far from home
Arthur Musah ’04, MEng ’05 and Philip Abel ’15 discuss Musah’s documentary, “Brief Tender Light,” which follows the life of four African-born students on their personal and academic experiences at MIT.
Full story via GBH

Putting pen to paper

Strong universities make for a strong United States
President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif cautions against treating universities “like the enemy,” pointing out that “without strong research universities and the scientific and technological advances they discover and invent, the United States could not possibly keep up with China.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

To compete with China on AI, we need a lot more power
Professor Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, makes the case that the United States should not only be building more efficient AI software and better computer chips, but also creating “interstate-type corridors to transmit sufficient, reliable power to our data centers.”
Full story via The Washington Post

“Digital twins” give Olympic swimmers a boost
“Today the advent of sensor technology has turned this idea into a reality in which mathematics and physics produce useful information so that coaches can ‘precision-train’ 2024 Olympic hopefuls,” writes master’s student Jerry Lu. “The results have been enormously successful.”
Full story via Scientific American

The miracle weight-loss drug is also a major budgetary threat
Professor Jonathan Gruber, MIT Innovation Fellow Brian Deese and Stanford doctoral student Ryan Cummings explore the health benefits of new weight-loss drugs and the risk they pose to American taxpayers.
Full story via The New York Times

What if we never find dark matter?
“Although we can’t say exactly when or even whether we’ll find dark matter, we know that the universe is filled with it,” writes Professor Tracy Slatyer. “We’re optimistic that the next years of our quest will lead us to a deeper understanding of what it is.”
Full story via Scientific American

The year 2024 saw MIT moving forward on a number of new initiatives, including the launch of President Sally Kornbluth’s signature Climate Project at MIT, as well as two other major MIT collaborative projects, one focused around human-centered disciplines and another around the life sciences. The Institute also announced free tuition for all admitted students with family incomes below $200,000; honored commitments to ensure support for diverse voices; and opened a flurry of new buildings and spaces across campus. Here are some of the top stories from around the MIT community this year.

Climate Project takes flight

In February, President Kornbluth announced the sweeping Climate Project at MIT, a major campus-wide effort to solve critical climate problems with all possible speed. The project focuses MIT’s strengths on six broad climate-related areas where progress is urgently needed, and mission directors were selected for those areas in July. “The Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization,” Kornbluth said at a liftoff event in September. “It’s designed to focus the Institute’s talent and resources so that we can achieve much more, faster, in terms of real-world impact, from mitigation to adaptation.”

MIT Collaboratives

In the fall, Kornbluth announced two additional all-Institute collaborative efforts, designed to foster and support new alliances that will take on compelling global problems. The MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) aims to bring together scholars in the humanities, arts, and social sciences with colleagues across the Institute as a way to amplify MIT’s impact on challenges like climate change, artificial intelligence, pandemics, poverty, democracy, and more. Meanwhile, the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) will draw on MIT’s strengths in life sciences and other fields, including AI and chemical and biological engineering, to accelerate progress in improving patient care. Additional MIT collaborative projects are expected to follow in the months ahead.

Increased financial aid

MIT announced in November that undergraduates with family income below $200,000 —  a figure that applies to 80 percent of American households — can expect to attend MIT tuition-free starting next fall, thanks to newly expanded financial aid. In addition, families with income below $100,000 can expect to pay nothing at all toward the full cost of their students’ MIT education, which includes tuition as well as housing, dining, fees, and an allowance for books and personal expenses. President Kornbluth called the new cost structure, which will be paid for by MIT’s endowment, “an inter-generational gift from past MIT students to the students of today and tomorrow.”

Encouraging community dialogue

The Institute hosted a series of “Dialogues Across Difference,” guest lectures and campus conversations encouraging community members to speak openly and honestly about freedom of expression, race, meritocracy, and the intersections and potential conflicts among these issues. Invited speakers’ expertise helped cultivate civil discourse, critical thinking, and empathy among members of the community, and served as a platform for public discussions related to Standing Together Against Hate; the MIT Values Statement; the Strategic Action Plan for Belonging, Achievement, and Composition; the Faculty Statement on Free Expression; and other ongoing campus initiatives and debates.

Commencement

At Commencement, biotechnology leader Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 urged the MIT Class of 2024 to “accept impossible missions” for the betterment of the world. Afeyan is chair and co-founder of the biotechnology firm Moderna, whose groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccine has been distributed to billions of people in over 70 countries.

President Kornbluth lauded the Class of 2024 for being “a community that runs on an irrepressible combination of curiosity and creativity and drive. A community in which everyone you meet has something important to teach you. A community in which people expect excellence of themselves — and take great care of one another.”

Nobels and other top accolades

In October, Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor, and Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship, won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, along with James Robinson of the University of Chicago, for their work on the relationship between economic growth and political institutions. MIT Department of Biology alumnus Victor Ambros ’75, PhD ’79 also shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Gary Ruvkun, who completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute alongside Ambros in the 1980s. The two were honored for their discovery of MicroRNA. Earlier this month, the new laureates received their prizes in Stockholm during Nobel Week.

Earlier in the year, professors Nancy Kanwisher, Robert Langer, and Sara Seager were awarded prestigious Kavli Prizes, for their outstanding advances in the fields of neuroscience, nanoscience, and astrophysics, respectively.

Miguel Zenón, assistant professor of jazz, won a Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album of the year.

At MIT, professor of physics John Joannopoulos won this year’s Killian Award, the Institute’s highest faculty honor.

New and refreshed spaces

Quite a few new buildings opened, partially or in full, across the MIT campus this year. In the spring, the airy Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building, a new addition to the recently refurbished Green Building, was dedicated. The gleaming new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing building also opened its doors and hosted a naming ceremony.

The new home of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard University opened in the heart of Kendall Square in June, while the new Graduate Junction housing complex on Vassar Street opened over the summer.

And earlier this fall, the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building opened for a selection of classes and will be fully operational in February 2025.

Student honors and awards

As is often the case, MIT undergraduates earned an impressive number of prestigious awards. In 2024, exceptional students were honored with Rhodes, Marshall, Fulbright, and Schwarzman scholarships, among many others.

For the fourth year in a row, MIT students earned all five top spots at the Putnam Mathematical Competition. And the women’s cross country team won a national championship for the first time.

Administrative transitions

A number of administrative leaders took on new roles in 2024. Ian Waitz was named vice president for research; Anantha Chandrakasan took on the new role of MIT chief innovation and strategy officer in addition to his existing role as dean of engineering; Melissa Choi was named director of MIT Lincoln Laboratory; Dimitris Bertsimas was named vice provost for open learning; Duane Boning was named vice provost for international activities; William Green was named director of the MIT Energy Initiative; Alison Badgett was named director of the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center; and Michael John Gorman was named director of the MIT Museum.

Remembering those we lost

Among MIT community members who died this year were Arvind, Hale Van Dorn Bradt, John Buttrick, Jonathan Byrnes, Jerome Connor, Owen Cote, Ralph Gakenheimer, Casey Harrington, James Harris, Ken Johnson, David Lanning, Francis Fan Lee, Mathieu Le Provost, John Little, Chasity Nunez, Elise O’Hara, Mary-Lou Pardue, Igor Paul, Edward Roberts, Peter Schiller, John Vander Sande, Bernhardt Wuensch, Richard Wiesman, and Cynthia Griffin Wolff.

In case you missed it…

Additional top stories from around the Institute in 2024 include a roundup of new books by faculty and staff, a look at unique license plates of MIT community members, our near-total view of a solar eclipse on campus, and the announcement of a roller rink in Kendall Square.

MIT’s research community had another year full of scientific and technological advances in 2024. To celebrate the achievements of the past twelve months, MIT News highlights some of our most popular stories from this year. We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories.

• 3-D printing with liquid metal: Researchers developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Their technique involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.
   
• Tamper-proof ID tags: Engineers developed a tag that can reveal with near-perfect accuracy whether an item is real or fake. The key is in the glue that sticks the tag to the item. The team uses terahertz waves to authenticate items by recognizing a unique pattern of microscopic metal particles mixed into the glue.
   
• Chatting with the future you: Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. The project is aimed at reducing anxiety and guiding young people to make better choices.
   
• Converting CO2 into useful products: Engineers at MIT designed a new electrode that boosts the efficiency of electrochemical reactions to turn carbon dioxide into ethylene and other products.
   
• Generative AI for databases: Researchers built GenSQL, a new generative AI tool that makes it easier for database users to perform complicated statistical analyses of tabular data without the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. The tool could help users make predictions, detect anomalies, guess missing values, fix errors, and more.
   
• Reversing autoimmune-induced hair loss: A new microneedle patch delivers immune-regulating molecules to the scalp. The treatment teaches T cells not to attack hair follicles, promoting hair regrowth and offering a promising solution for individuals affected by alopecia areata and other autoimmune skin diseases.
   
• Inside the LLM black box: Researchers demonstrated a technique that can be used to probe a large language model to see what it knows about new subjects. The technique showed the models use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge.
   
• Sound-suppressing silk: An interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed a silk fabric, barely thicker than a human hair, that can suppress unwanted noise and reduce noise transmission in a large room.
   
• Working out for your nervous system: Researchers found that when muscles work out, they help neurons to grow as well. The findings suggest that biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves.
   
• Finding AI’s world model lacking: Researchers found that despite its impressive output, generative AI models don’t have a coherent understanding of the world. Large language models don't form true models of the world and its rules, and can thus fail unexpectedly on similar tasks.

The Justice Department has published the criminal complaint against Dmitry Khoroshev, for building and maintaining the LockBit ransomware.

Over two choreographed move-in days in August, more than 600 residents unloaded their boxes and belongings into their new homes in Graduate Junction, located at 269 and 299 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With smiling ambassadors standing by to assist, residents were welcomed into a new MIT-affiliated housing option that offers the convenience of on-campus licensing terms, pricing, and location, as well as the experienced building development and management of American Campus Communities (ACC).

With the building occupied and residents settled, the staff has turned their attention to creating connections between new community members and celebrating the years of a collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff to plan and create a building that expands student choice, enhances neighborhood amenities, and meets sustainability goals. 

Gathering recently for a celebratory block party, residents and their families, staff, and project team members convened in the main lounge space of building W87 to mingle and enjoy the new community. Children twirled around while project managers, architects, staff from MIT and ACC, and residents reflected on the partnership-driven work to bring the new building to fruition. With 351 units, including studios, one-, two-, and four-bedroom apartments, the building added a total of 675 new graduate housing beds and marked the final step in exceeding the Institute’s commitment made in 2017 to add 950 new graduate beds.

The management staff has also planned several other events to help residents feel more connected to their neighbors, including a farmers market in the central plaza, fall crafting workshops, and coffee breaks. “Graduate Junction isn’t just a place to live — it’s a community,” says Kendra Lowery, American Campus Communities’ general manager of Graduate Junction. “Our staff is dedicated to helping residents feel at home, whether through move-in support, building connections with neighbors, or hosting events that celebrate the unique MIT community.” 

Partnership adds a new option for students

Following a careful study of student housing preferences, the Graduate Housing Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — helped inform the design that includes unit styles and amenities that fit the needs of MIT graduate students in an increasingly expensive regional housing market.

“Innovative places struggle to build housing fast enough, which limits who can access them. Building housing keeps our campus’s innovation culture open to all students. Additionally, new housing for students reduces price pressure on the rest of the Cambridge community,” says Nick Allen, a member of the working group and a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He noted the involvement of students from the outset: “A whole generation of graduate students has worked with MIT to match Grad Junction to the biggest gaps in the local housing market.” For example, the building adds affordable four-bed, two-bath apartments, expanded options for private rooms, and new family housing.

Neighborhood feel with sustainability in mind

The location of the residence further enhances the residential feel of West Campus and forms additional connections between the MIT community and neighboring Cambridgeport. Situated on West Campus next to Simmons Hall and across from Westgate Apartments, the new buildings frame a central, publicly accessible plaza and green space. The plaza is a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the newly reopened pedestrian railroad crossing enhances connections between the residences and the surrounding Cambridgeport neighborhood.

Striving for the LEED v4 Multifamily Midrise Platinum certification, the new residence reflects a commitment to energy efficiency through an innovative design approach. The building has efficient heating and cooling systems and a strategy that reclaims heat from the building’s exhaust to pre-condition incoming ventilation air. The building’s envelope and roofing were designed with a strong focus on thermal performance and its materials were chosen to reduce the project’s climate impact. This resulted in an 11 percent reduction of the whole building’s carbon footprint from the construction, transportation, and installation of materials. In addition, the development teams installed an 11,000 kilowatt-hour solar array and green roof plantings.

EFF’s attorneys, activists, and technologists were media rockstars in 2024, informing the public about important issues that affect privacy, free speech, and innovation for people around the world. 

Perhaps the single most exciting media hit for EFF in 2024 was “Secrets in Your Data,” the NOVA PBS documentary episode exploring “what happens to all the data we’re shedding and explores the latest efforts to maximize benefits – without compromising personal privacy.” EFFers Hayley Tsukayama, Eva Galperin, and Cory Doctorow were among those interviewed.

One big-splash story in January demonstrated just how in-demand EFF can be when news breaks. Amazon’s Ring home doorbell unit announced that it would disable its Request For Assistance tool, the program that had let police seek footage from users on a voluntary basis – an issue on which EFF, and Matthew Guariglia in particular, have done extensive work. Matthew was quoted in Bloomberg, the Associated Press, CNN, The Washington Post, The Verge, The Guardian, TechCrunch, WIRED, Ars Technica, The Register, TechSpot, The Focus, American Wire News, and the Los Angeles Business Journal. The Bloomberg, AP, and CNN stories in turn were picked up by scores of media outlets across the country and around the world. Matthew also did interviews with local television stations in New York City, Oklahoma City, Allentown, PA, San Antonio, TX and Norfolk, VA. Matthew and Jason Kelley were quoted in Reason, and EFF was cited in reports by the New York Times, Engadget, The Messenger, the Washington Examiner, Silicon UK, Inc., the Daily Mail (UK), AfroTech, and KFSN ABC30 in Fresno, CA, as well as in an editorial in the Times Union of Albany, NY.

Other big stories for us this year – with similar numbers of EFF media mentions – included congressional debates over banning TikTok and censoring the internet in the name of protecting children, state age verification laws, Google’s backpedaling on its Privacy Sandbox promises, the Supreme Court’s Netchoice and Murthy rulings, the arrest of Telegram’s CEO, and X’s tangles with Australia and Brazil.

EFF is often cited in tech-oriented media, with 34 mentions this year in Ars Technica, 32 mentions in The Register, 23 mentions in WIRED, 23 mentions in The Verge, 20 mentions in TechCrunch, 10 mentions in The Record from Recorded Future, nine mentions in 404 Media, and six mentions in Gizmodo. We’re also all over the legal media, with 29 mentions in Law360 and 15 mentions in Bloomberg Law. 

But we’re also a big presence in major U.S. mainstream outlets, cited 38 times this year in the Washington Post, 11 times in the New York Times, 11 times in NBC News, 10 times in the Associated Press, 10 times in Reuters, 10 times in USA Today, and nine times in CNN. And we’re being heard by international audiences, with mentions in outlets including Germany’s Heise and Deutsche Welle, Canada’s Globe & Mail and Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald and Australian Broadcasting Corp., the United Kingdom’s Telegraph and Silicon UK, and many more. 

We’re being heard in local communities too. For example, we talked about the rapid encroachment of police surveillance with media outlets in Sarasota, FL; the San Francisco Bay Area; Baton Rouge, LA; Columbus, OH; Grand Rapids, MI; San Diego, CA; Wichita, KS; Buffalo, NY; Seattle, WA; Chicago, IL;  Nashville, TN; and Sacramento, CA, among other localities. 

EFFers also spoke their minds directly in op-eds placed far and wide, including: 

• Street Sheet, Feb. 15: “No on E: Endangering Accountability and Privacy” (Nash Sheard) 
• 48 Hills, Feb. 27: “San Franciscans know a lot about tech. That’s why they should vote No on E” (Jason Kelley and Matthew Guariglia) 
• AllAfrica, March 8: “Rihanna, FIFA, Guinness, Marvel, Nike - All Could Be Banned in Ghana” (Daly Barnett, Paige Collings, and Dave Maass) 
• The Advocate, May 13: “Why I'm protecting privacy in our connected world” (Erica Portnoy) 
• Teen Vogue, June 19: “The Section 230 Sunset Act Would Cut Off Young People’s Access to Online Communities” (Jason Kelley) 
• UOL, Aug. 5: “ONU pode fechar pacto global de vigilância arbitrária; o que fará o Brasil?” (Veridiana Alimonti and Michel Roberto de Souza) 
• Byline Times, Aug. 16, “Keir Starmer Wants Police to Expand Use of Facial Recognition Technology Across UK – He Should Ban it Altogether” (Paige Collings) 
• Slate, Aug. 22, “Expanded Police Surveillance Will Get Us ‘Broken Windows’ on Steroids” (Matthew Guariglia) 
• Just Security, Aug. 27: “The UN Cybercrime Convention: Analyzing the Risks to Human Rights and Global Privacy” (Katitza Rodriguez) 
• Context, Sept. 17: “X ban in Brazil: Disdainful defiance meets tough enforcement” (Veridiana Alimonti) 
• AZ Central/ Arizona Republic, Sept. 19: “Police drones could silently video your backyard. That's a problem” (Hannah Zhao) 
• Salon, Oct. 3: “Congress knew banning TikTok was a First Amendment problem. It did so anyway” (Brendan Gilligan) 
• Deseret News, Nov. 30: “Opinion: Students’ tech skills should be nurtured, not punished” (Bill Budington and Alexis Hancock) 

And if you’re seeking some informative listening during the holidays, EFFers joined a slew of podcasts in 2024, including: 

• National Constitution Center’s We the People, Jan. 25: “Unpacking the Supreme Court’s Tech Term” (David Greene) 
• What the Hack? with Adam Levin, Feb. 6: “EFF’s Eva Galperin Is Not the Pope of Fighting Stalkerware (But She Is)” 
• WSJ’s The Future of Everything, Feb. 9: “How Face Scans and Fingerprints Could Become Your Work Badge” (Hayley Tsukayama) 
• Fighting Dark Patterns, Feb. 14: “Dark Patterns and Digital Freedom Today. A conversation with Cindy Cohn.” 
• 2600’s Off the Hook, Feb. 21: episode on Appin’s efforts to intimidate journalists and media outlets from reporting on the company’s alleged hacking history (David Greene and Cooper Quintin) 
• CISO Series’ Defense in Depth, Feb. 22: “When Is Data an Asset and When Is It a Liability?” (F. Mario Trujillo) 
• KCRW’s Scheer Intelligence, March 15: “The banning of TikTok is an attack on the free market” (David Greene) 
• Inside Job Boards and Recruitment Marketplaces, March 22: “Is Glassdoor now violating user privacy and anonymity?” (Aaron Mackey) 
• Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons, April 15: “Protecting Kids Online” (Joe Mullin) 
• Future Nonprofit, May 7: “Empowerment in Action: Nash Sheard - Building a Strong Bond for Change and Collaboration” 
• Mindplex Podcast, May 17: “Is the TikTok Ban Unconstitutional?” (David Greene) 
• Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature, Aug. 8: “None of Your Business: Claiming Our Digital Privacy Rights, Reclaiming Democracy” (Cindy Cohn) 
• m/Oppenheim Nonprofit Report, Aug. 27: “Digital Privacy with Electronic Frontier Foundation” (Cindy Cohn) 
• malwarebytes' Lock and Code, Sept. 9: “What the arrest of Telegram's CEO means, with Eva Galperin” 
• Financial Times’ Tech Tonic, Sept. 9: “The Telegram case: Privacy vs security” (Eva Galperin) 
• Command Prompt's More Than A Refresh, Sept. 10: “Cooper Quintin, Senior Staff Technologist @ The EFF” 
• Mindplex Podcast, Sept. 16: “Pavel Durov's Arrest & Telegram's Encryption Issues” (David Greene)

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

EFF supporters get that strong encryption is tied to one of our most basic rights: the right to have a private conversation. In the digital world, privacy is impossible without strong encryption. 

That’s why we’ve always got an eye out for attacks on encryption. This year, we pushed back—successfully—against anti-encryption laws proposed in the U.S., the U.K. and the E.U. And we had a stark reminder of just how dangerous backdoor access to our communications can be. 

U.S. Bills Pushing Mass File-Scanning Fail To Advance

The U.S. Senate’s EARN IT Bill is a wrongheaded proposal that would push companies away from using encryption and towards scanning our messages and photos. There’s no reason to enact such a proposal, which technical experts agree would turn our phones into bugs in our pockets. 

We were disappointed when EARN IT was voted out of committee last year, even though several senators did make clear they wanted to see additional changes before they support the bill. Since then, however, the bill has gone nowhere. That’s because so many people, including more than 100,000 EFF supporters, have voiced their opposition. 

People increasingly understand that encryption is vital to our security and privacy. And when politicians demand that tech companies install dangerous scanning software whether users like it or not, it’s clear to us all that they are attacking encryption, no matter how much obfuscation takes place. 

EFF has long encouraged companies to adopt policies that support encryption, privacy and security by default. When companies do the right thing, EFF supporters will side with them. EFF and other privacy advocates pushed Meta for years to make end-to-end encryption the default option in Messenger. When Meta implemented the change, they were sued by Nevada’s Attorney General. EFF filed a brief in that case arguing that Meta should not be forced to make its systems less secure. 

UK Backs Off Encryption-Breaking Language 

In the U.K., we fought against the wrongheaded Online Safety Act, which included language that would have let the U.K. government strongarm companies away from using encryption. After pressure from EFF supporters and others, the U.K. government gave last-minute assurances that the bill wouldn’t be applied to encrypted messages. The U.K. agency in charge of implementing the Online Safety Act, Ofcom, has now said that the Act will not apply to end-to-end encrypted messages. That’s an important distinction, and we have urged Ofcom to make that even more clear in its written guidance. 

EU Residents Do Not Want “Chat Control” 

Some E.U. politicians have sought to advance a message-scanning bill that was even more extreme than the U.S. anti-encryption bills. We’re glad to say the EU proposal, which has been dubbed “Chat Control” by its opponents, has also been stalled because of strong opposition. 

Even though the European Parliament last year adopted a compromise proposal that would protect our rights to encrypted communications, a few key member states at the EU Council spent much of 2024 pushing forward the old, privacy-smashing version of Chat Control. But they haven’t advanced. In a public hearing earlier this month, 10 EU member states, including Germany and Poland, made clear they would not vote for this proposal. 

Courts in the E.U., like the public at large, increasingly recognize that online private communications are human rights, and the encryption required to facilitate them cannot be grabbed away. The European Court of Human Rights recognized this in a milestone judgment earlier this year, Podchasov v. Russia, which specifically held that weakening encryption put at risk the human rights of all internet users. 

A Powerful Reminder on Backdoors

All three of the above proposals are based on a flawed idea: that it’s possible to give some form of special access to peoples’ private data that will never be exploited by a bad actor. But that’s never been true–there is no backdoor that works only for the “good guys.” 

In October, the U.S. public learned about a major breach of telecom systems stemming from Salt Typhoon, a sophisticated Chinese-government backed hacking group. This hack infiltrated the same systems that major ISPs like Verizon, AT&T and Lumen Technologies had set up for U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies to get “lawful access” to user data. It’s still unknown how extensive the damage is from this hack, which included people under surveillance by U.S. agencies but went far beyond that. 

If there’s any upside to a terrible breach like Salt Typhoon, it’s that it is waking up some officials to understand that encryption is vital to both individual and national security. Earlier this month, a top U.S. cybersecurity chief said “encryption is your friend,” making a welcome break with the messaging we’ve seen over the years at EFF.  Unfortunately, other agencies, including the FBI, continue to push the idea that strong encryption can be coupled with easy access by law enforcement. 

Whatever happens, EFF will continue to stand up for our right to use encryption to have secure and private online communications.

This article is part of our Year in Review series. Read other articles about the fight for digital rights in 2024.

Within the human digestive tract are trillions of bacteria from thousands of different species. These bacteria form communities that help digest food, fend off harmful microbes, and play many other roles in maintaining human health.

These bacteria can be vulnerable to infection from viruses called bacteriophages. One of bacterial cells’ most well-known defenses against these viruses is the CRISPR system, which evolved in bacteria to help them recognize and chop up viral DNA.

A study from MIT biological engineers has yielded new insight into how bacteria in the gut microbiome adapt their CRISPR defenses as they encounter new threats. The researchers found that while bacteria grown in the lab can incorporate new viral recognition sequences as quickly as once a day, bacteria living in human gut add new sequences at a much slower rate — on average, one every three years.

The findings suggest that the environment within the digestive tract offers many fewer opportunities for bacteria and bacteriophages to interact than in the lab, so bacteria don’t need to update their CRISPR defenses very often. It also raises the question of whether bacteria have more important defense systems than CRISPR.

“This finding is significant because we use microbiome-based therapies like fecal microbiota transplant to help treat some diseases, but efficacy is inconsistent because new microbes do not always survive in patients. Learning about microbial defenses against viruses helps us to understand what makes a strong, healthy microbial community,” says An-Ni Zhang, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Zhang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal Cell Genomics. Eric Alm, director of MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the paper’s senior author.

Infrequent exposure

In bacteria, CRISPR serves as a memory immune response. When bacteria encounter viral DNA, they can incorporate part of the sequence into their own DNA. Then, if the virus is encountered again, that sequence produces a guide RNA that directs an enzyme called Cas9 to snip the viral DNA, preventing infection.

These virus-specific sequences are called spacers, and a single bacterial cell may carry more than 200 spacers. These sequences can be passed onto offspring, and they can also be shared with other bacterial cells through a process called horizontal gene transfer.

Previous studies have found that spacer acquisition occurs very rapidly in the lab, but the process appears to be slower in natural environments. In the new study, the MIT team wanted to explore how often this process happens in bacteria in the human gut.

“We were interested in how fast this CRISPR system changes its spacers, specifically in the gut microbiome, to better understand the bacteria-virus interactions inside our body,” Zhang says. “We wanted to identify the key parameters that impact the timescale of this immunity update.”

To do that, the researchers looked at how CRISPR sequences changed over time in two different datasets obtained by sequencing microbes from the human digestive tract. One of these datasets contained 6,275 genomic sequences representing 52 bacterial species, and the other contained 388 longitudinal “metagenomes,” that is, sequences from many microbes found in a sample, taken from four healthy people.

“By analyzing those two datasets, we found out that spacer acquisition is really slow in human gut microbiome: On average, it would take 2.7 to 2.9 years for a bacterial species to acquire a single spacer in our gut, which is super surprising because our gut is challenged with viruses almost every day from the microbiome itself and in our food,” Zhang says.

The researchers then built a computational model to help them figure out why the acquisition rate was so slow. This analysis showed that spacers are acquired more rapidly when bacteria live in high-density populations. However, the human digestive tract is diluted several times a day, whenever a meal is consumed. This flushes out some bacteria and viruses and keeps the overall density low, making it less likely that the microbes will encounter a virus that can infect them.

Another factor may be the spatial distribution of microbes, which the researchers believe prevents some bacteria from encountering viruses very frequently.

“Sometimes one population of bacteria may never or rarely encounter a phage because the bacteria are closer to the epithelium in the mucus layer and farther away from a potential exposure to viruses,” Zhang says.

Bacterial interactions

Among the populations of bacteria that they studied, the researchers identified one species — Bifidobacteria longum — that had gained spacers much more recently than others. The researchers found that in samples from unrelated people, living on different continents, B. longum had recently acquired up to six different spacers targeting two different Bifidobacteria bacteriophages.

This acquisition was driven by horizontal gene transfer — a process that allows bacteria to gain new genetic material from their neighbors. The findings suggest that there may be evolutionary pressure on B. longum from those two viruses.

“It has been highly overlooked how much horizontal gene transfer contributes to this dynamic. Within communities of bacteria, the bacteria-bacteria interactions can be a main contributor to the development of viral resistance,” Zhang says.

Analyzing microbes’ immune defenses may offer a way for scientists to develop targeted treatments that will be most effective in a particular patient, the researchers say. For example, they could design therapeutic microbes that are able to fend off the types of bacteriophages that are most prevalent in that person’s microbiome, which would increase the chances that the treatment would succeed.

“One thing we can do is to study the viral composition in the patients, and then we can identify which microbiome species or strains are more capable of resisting those local viruses in a person,” Zhang says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Broad Institute and the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

It is our end-of-year tradition at EFF to look back at the last 12 months of digital rights. This year, the number and diversity of our reflections attest that 2024 was a big year. 

If there is something uniting all the disparate threads of work EFF has done this year, it is this: that law and policy should be careful, precise, practical, and technologically neutral. We do not care if a cop is using a glass pressed against your door or the most advanced microphone: they need a warrant.  

For example, much of the public discourse this year was taken up by generative AI. It seemed that this issue was a Rorschach test for everyone’s anxieties about technology - be they privacy, replacement of workers, surveillance, or intellectual property. Ultimately, it matters little what the specific technology is: whenever technology is being used against our rights, EFF will oppose that use. It’s a future-proof way of protecting us. If we have privacy protections, labor protections, and protections against government invasions, then it does not matter what technology takes over the public imagination, we will have recourse against its harms. 

But AI was only one of the issues we took on this past year. We’ve worked on ensuring that the EU’s new rules regarding large online platforms respect human rights. We’ve filed countless briefs in support of free expression online and represented plaintiffs in cases where bad actors have sought to silence them, including citizen journalists who were targeted for posting clips of city council meetings online.  

With your help, we have let the United States Congress know that its citizens are for protecting the free press and against laws that would cut kids off from vital sources of information. We’ve spoken to legislators, reporters, and the public to make sure everyone is informed about the benefits and dangers of new technologies, new proposed laws, and legal precedent.  

Even all of that does not capture everything we did this year. And we did not—indeed, we cannot—do it without you. Your support keeps the lights on and ensures we are not speaking just for EFF as an organization but for our thousands of tireless members. Thank you, as always.  

We will update this page with new stories about digital rights in 2024 every day between now and the new year. 

Defending Encryption in the U.S. and Abroad
EFF in the Press

Imagine that the head of a company office is misbehaving, and a disillusioned employee reports the problem to their manager. Instead of the complaint getting traction, however, the manager sidesteps the issue and implies that raising it further could land the unhappy employee in trouble — but doesn’t deny that the problem exists.

This hypothetical scenario involves an open secret: a piece of information that is widely known but never acknowledged as such. Open secrets often create practical quandaries for people, as well as backlash against those who try to address the things that the secrets protect.

In a newly published paper, MIT philosopher Sam Berstler contends that open secrets are pervasive and problematic enough to be worthy of systematic study — and provides a detailed analysis of the distinctive social dynamics accompanying them. In many cases, she proposes, ignoring some things is fine — but open secrets present a special problem.

After all, people might maintain friendships better by not disclosing their salaries to each other, and relatives might get along better if they avoid talking politics at the holidays. But these are just run-of-the-mill individual decisions.

By contrast, open secrets are especially damaging, Berstler believes, because of their “iterative” structure. We do not talk about open secrets; we do not talk about the fact that we do not talk about them; and so on, until the possibility of addressing the problems at hand disappears.

“Sometimes not acknowledging things can be very productive,” Berstler says. “It’s good we don’t talk about everything in the workplace. What’s different about open secrecy is not the content of what we’re not acknowledging, but the pernicious iterative structure of our practice of not acknowledging it.  And because of that structure, open secrecy tends to be hard to change.”

Or, as she writes in the paper, “Open secrecy norms are often moral disasters.”

Beyond that, Berstler says, the example of open secrets should enable us to examine the nature of conversation itself in more multidimensional terms; we need to think about the things left unsaid in conversation, too.

Berstler’s paper, “The Structure of Open Secrets,” appears in advance online form in Philosophical Review. Berstler, an assistant professor and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, is the sole author.

Eroding our knowledge

The concept of open secrets is hardly new, but it has not been subject to extensive philosophical rigor. The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about them in the early 20th century, but mostly in the context of secret societies keeping quirky rituals to themselves. Other prominent thinkers have addressed open secrets in psychological terms. To Berstler, the social dynamics of open secrets merit a more thorough reckoning.

“It’s not a psychological problem that people are having,” she says. “It’s a particular practice that they’re all conforming to. But it’s hard to see this because it’s the kind of practice that members, just in virtue of conforming to the practice, can’t talk about.”

In Berstler’s view, the iterative nature of open secrets distinguishes them. The employee expecting a candid reply from their manager may feel bewildered about the lack of a transparent response, and that nonacknowledgement means there is not much recourse to be had, either. Eventually, keeping open secrets means the original issue itself can be lost from view.

“Open secrets norms are set up to try to erode our knowledge,” Berstler says.

In practical terms, people may avoid addressing open secrets head-on because they face a familiar quandary: Being a whistleblower can cost people their jobs and more. But Berstler suggests in the paper that keeping open secrets helps people define their in-group status, too.

“It’s also the basis for group identity,” she says.

Berstler avoids taking the position that greater transparency is automatically a beneficial thing. The paper identifies at least one kind of special case where keeping open secrets might be good. Suppose, for instance, a co-worker has an eccentric but harmless habit their colleagues find out about: It might be gracious to spare them simple embarrassment.

That aside, as Berstler writes, open secrets “can serve as shields for powerful people guilty of serious, even criminal wrongdoing. The norms can compound the harm that befalls their victims … [who] find they don’t just have to contend with the perpetrator’s financial resources, political might, and interpersonal capital. They must go up against an entire social arrangement.” As a result, the chances of fixing social or organizational dysfunction diminish.

Two layers of conversation

Berstler is not only trying to chart the dynamics and problems of open secrets. She is also trying to usefully complicate our ideas about the nature of conversations and communication.

Broadly, some philosophers have theorized about conversations and communication by focusing largely on the information being shared among people. To Berstler, this is not quite sufficient; the example of open secrets alerts us that communication is not just an act of making things more and more transparent.

“What I’m arguing in the paper is that this is too simplistic a way to think about it, because actual conversations in the real world have a theatrical or dramatic structure,” Berstler says. “There are things that cannot be made explicit without ruining the performance.”

At an office holiday party, for instance, the company CEO might maintain an illusion of being on equal footing with the rest of the employees if the conversation is restricted to movies and television shows. If the subject turns to year-end bonuses, that illusion vanishes. Or two friends at a party, trapped in an unwanted conversation with a third person, might maneuver themselves away with knowing comments, but without explicitly saying they are trying to end the chat.

Here Berstler draws upon the work of sociologist Erving Goffman — who closely studied the performative aspects of everyday behavior — to outline how a more multi-dimensional conception of social interaction applies to open secrets. Berstler suggests open secrets involve what she calls “activity layering,” which in this case suggests that people in a conversation involving open secrets have multiple common grounds for understanding, but some remain unspoken.

Further expanding on Goffman’s work, Berstler also details how people may be “mutually collaborating on a pretense,” as she writes, to keep an open secret going.

“Goffman has not really systematically been brought into the philosophy of language, so I am showing how his ideas illuminate and complicate philosophical views,” Berstler says.

Combined, a close analysis of open secrets and a re-evaluation of the performative components of conversation can help us become more cognizant about communication. What is being said matters; what is left unsaid matters alongside it.

“There are structural features of open secrets that are worrisome,” Berstler says. “And because of that we have to more aware [of how they work].”

Advocates say there’s a growing ethical obligation for researchers to explore alternative solutions to climate change.

Heather MacDougall vacated OSHA citations in Trump’s first term. Her nomination could collide with agency efforts to shield workers from extreme heat.

Elon Musk has applauded Javier Milei’s progress in “deleting entire departments” of the Argentinian government.

Two European scientists who tried to make the voluntary carbon market more credible found problems with “industry-led self-regulation.”

Treasury is doing an unprecedented analysis of climate change and property insurance. Advocates want the information before Trump takes power.

Gov. Kathy Hochul is expected to forge ahead with a cap-and-trade-style policy to charge for emissions.

The tribe says decades of massive engineering projects for development and agriculture have devastated the ecosystem that’s sustained them.