This is the third installment in a blog series documenting EFF's findings from the Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. You can read additional posts here. 

Imagine sharing information about reproductive health care on social media and receiving a message that your content has been removed for violating a policy intended to curb online extremism. That’s exactly what happened to one person using Instagram who shared her story with our Stop Censoring Abortion project.

Meta’s rules for “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals” (DOI) were supposed to be narrow: a way to prevent the platform from being used by terrorist groups, organized crime, and those engaged in violent or criminal activity. But over the years, we’ve seen these rules applied in far broader—and more troubling—ways, with little transparency and significant impact on marginalized voices.

EFF has long warned that the DOI policy is opaque, inconsistently enforced, and prone to overreach. The policy has been critiqued by others for its opacity and propensity to disproportionately censor marginalized groups.

Samantha Shoemaker's post about Plan C was flagged under Meta's policy on dangerous organizations and individuals

Meta has since added examples and clarifications in its Transparency Center to this and other policies, but their implementation still leaves users in the dark about what’s allowed and what isn’t.

The case we received illustrates just how harmful this lack of clarity can be. Samantha Shoemaker, an individual sharing information about abortion care, shared straightforward, facts about accessing abortion pills. Her posts included:

• A video linking to Plan C’s website, which lists organizations that provide abortion pills in different states.
  
  
• A reshared image from Plan C’s own Instagram account encouraging people to learn about advance provision of abortion pills.
  
  
• A short clip of women talking about their experiences taking abortion pills.

Information Provided to Users Must Be Accurate

Instead of allowing her to facilitate informed discussion, Instagram flagged some of her posts under its “Prescription Drugs” policy, while others were removed under the DOI policy—the same set of rules meant to stop violent extremism from being shared.

We recognize that moderation systems—both human and automated—will make mistakes. But when Meta equates medically accurate, harm-reducing information about abortion with “dangerous organizations,” it underscores a deeper problem: the blunt tools of content moderation disproportionately silence speech that is lawful, important, and often life-saving.

At a time when access to abortion information is already under political attack in the United States and around the world, platforms must be especially careful not to compound the harm. This incident shows how overly broad rules and opaque enforcement can erase valuable speech and disempower users who most need access to knowledge.

And when content does violate the rules, it’s important that users are provided with accurate information as to why. An individual sharing information about health care will undoubtedly be confused or upset by being told that they have violated a policy meant to curb violent extremism. Moderating content responsibly means offering the greatest transparency and clarity to users as possible. As outlined in the Santa Clara Principles on Transparency and Accountability in Content Moderation, users should be able to readily understand:

• What types of content are prohibited by the company and will be removed, with detailed guidance and examples of permissible and impermissible content;
• What types of content the company will take action against other than removal, such as algorithmic downranking, with detailed guidance and examples on each type of content and action; and
• The circumstances under which the company will suspend a user’s account, whether permanently or temporarily.

What You Can Do if Your Content is Removed

If you find your content removed under Meta’s policies, you do have options:

• Appeal the decision: Every takedown notice should give you the option to appeal within the app. Appeals are sometimes reviewed by a human moderator rather than an automated system.
• Request Oversight Board review: In certain cases, you can escalate to Meta’s independent Oversight Board, which has the power to overturn takedowns and set policy precedents.
• Document your case: Save screenshots of takedown notices, appeals, and your original post. This documentation is essential if you want to report the issue to advocacy groups or in future proceedings.
• Share your story: Projects like Stop Censoring Abortion collect cases of unjust takedowns to build pressure for change. Speaking out, whether to EFF and other advocacy groups or to the media, helps illustrate how policies harm real people.

Abortion is health care. Sharing information about it is not dangerous—it’s necessary. Meta should allow users to share vital information about reproductive care. The company must also ensure that users are provided with clear information about how their policies are being applied and how to appeal seemingly wrongful decisions.

This is the third post in our blog series documenting the findings from our Stop Censoring Abortion campaign. Read more in the series: https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion   

The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”

Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:

First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—­whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to ­the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the ...

As governor of North Dakota, Doug Burgum bragged about his state’s wind energy. He shed those views when he became Interior secretary.

They want the scientist to explain how DOE's now-disbanded climate group was formed to write a skeptical report on global warming.

A Montana judge ruled that challengers should not have to pick up the tab when their rights are violated.

Legislation that Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to sign also requires protection of consumers from major price increases by businesses.

The move comes as nonprofits that received billions of dollars for clean energy financing are running out of options.

Developers said returning to the 2020 energy code would shave $12,000 off the construction cost of an average home.

Countries on Thursday agreed on a vague statement of intent in lieu of a new plan mandated by the Paris Agreement.

The French president has joined Poland, Italy and Hungary to stall discussions ahead of the COP30 climate conference in November.

A record hot year driven by climate change contributed to unpredictable river flows and rainfall in 2024, according to a report.

Hundreds of women were trained in eco-friendly farming methods for oysters to lessen the impact of climate change.

Critics believe the announcement was driven more by geopolitics than environmental protection.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02441-8

Nearly one-third of the global shoreline is in the Arctic, a region undergoing some of the most rapid warming and substantial environmental transitions due to climate change. While Arctic research has largely focused on terrestrial and open-ocean systems, there is now an urgent need to focus on the unique challenges associated with changing coastal ecosystems.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02437-4

Sea-level rise poses a substantial risk to coastal communities and economies, thus accurate predictions are needed to enable planning and adaptation. This Perspective provides an overview of uncertainties in model projections of sea-level rise, and how observations can be used to reduce these.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 September 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02425-8

ChatGPT provides a way of teaching people about climate change. This research reveals that conversations between climate sceptics and ChatGPT reduced climate scepticism, but these effects are modest, inconsistent across studies and prone to decay over time.

It's been a year full of challenges, but also important victories for digital freedoms. From EFF’s new lawsuit against OPM and DOGE, to launching Rayhunter (our new tool to detect cellular spying), to exposing the censorship of abortion-related content on social media, we’ve been busy! But we’re not the only ones leading the charge. 

On September 10 in San Francisco, we presented the annual EFF Awards to three courageous honorees who are pushing back against unlawful surveillance, championing data privacy, and advancing civil liberties online. This year’s awards went to Just Futures Law, Erie Meyer, and the Software Freedom Law Center, India. 

If you missed the celebration in person, you can still watch it live! The full event is posted on YouTube and the Internet Archive, and a transcript of the live captions is also available.  

WATCH NOW

SEE THE EFF AWARDS CEREMONY ON YOUTUBE

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn opened the evening by reflecting on our victories this past year and reiterated how vital EFF’s mission to protect privacy and free speech is today. She also announced her upcoming departure as Executive Director after a decade in the role (and over 25 years of involvement with EFF!). No need to be too sentimental—Cindy isn’t going far. As we like to say: you can check out at any time, but you never really leave the fight. 

Cindy then welcomed one of EFF’s founders, Mitch Kapor, who joked that he had been “brought out of cold storage” for the occasion. Mitch recalled EFF’s early days, when no one knew exactly how constitutional rights would interact with emerging technologies—but everyone understood the stakes. “We understood that the matter of digital rights were very important,” he reflected. And history has proven them right. 

Honoring Defenders of Digital Freedom

The first award of the night, the EFF Award for Defending Digital Freedoms, went to the Software Freedom Law Center, India (SFLC.IN). Presenting the award, EFF Civil Liberties Director David Greene emphasized the importance of international partners like SFLC.IN, whose local perspectives enrich and strengthen EFF’s own work. 

SFLC.IN is at the forefront of digital rights in India—challenging internet shutdowns, tracking violations of free expression with their Free Speech Tracker, and training lawyers across the country. Accepting the award, SFLC.IN founder Mishi Choudhary reminded us: “These freedoms are not abstract. They are fought for every day by people, by organizations, and by movements.” 

SFLC.IN founder Mishi Choudhary accepts the EFF Award for Defending Digital Freedoms

Next, EFF Staff Attorney Mario Trujillo introduced the winner of the EFF Award for Protecting Americans’ Data, Erie Meyer. Erie has served as CTO of the Federal Trade Commission and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and was a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service. Today, she continues to fight for better government technology and safeguards for sensitive data. 

In her remarks, Erie underscored the urgency of protecting personal data at scale: “We need to protect people’s data the same way we protect this country from national security risks. What’s happening right now is like all the data breaches in history rolled into one. ‘Trust me, bro’ is not a way to handle 550 million Americans’ data.” 

Erie Meyer accepts the EFF Award for Protecting Americans’ Data

Finally, EFF General Counsel Jennifer Lynch introduced the EFF Award for Leading Immigration and Surveillance Litigation, presented to Just Futures Law. Co-founder and Executive Director Paromita Shah accepted on behalf of the organization, which works to challenge the ways surveillance disproportionately harms people of color in the U.S. 

“For years, corporations and law enforcement—including ICE—have been testing the legal limits of their tools on communities of color,” Paromita said in her speech. Just Futures Law has fought back, suing the Department of Homeland Security to reveal its use of AI, and defending activists against surveillance technologies like Clearview AI. 

Just Futures Law Executive Director Paromita Shah accepted the EFF Award for Leading Immigration and Surveillance Litigation

Carrying the Work Forward

We’re honored to shine a spotlight on these award winners, who are doing truly fearless and essential work to protect online privacy and free expression. Their courage reminds us that the fight for civil liberties will be won when we work together—across borders, communities, and movements. 

Join the fight and donate today

A heartfelt thank you to all of the EFF members worldwide who make this work possible. Public support is what allows us to push for a better internet. If you’d like to join the fight, consider becoming an EFF member—you’ll receive special gear as our thanks, and you’ll help power the digital freedom movement. 

And finally, special thanks to the sponsor of this year’s EFF Awards: Electric Capital.

  Catch Up From the Event

Reminder that if you missed the event, you can watch the live recording on our YouTube and the Internet Archive. Plus, a special thank you to our photographers, Alex Schoenfeldt and Carolina Kroon. You can see some of our favorite group photos that were taken during the event, and photos of the awardees with their trophies. 

In 2025, six faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Sara Brown is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. She develops stage designs for theater, opera, and dance by approaching the scenographic space as a catalyst for collective imagination. Her work is rooted in curiosity and interdisciplinary collaboration, and spans virtual environments, immersive performance installations, and evocative stage landscapes. Her recent projects include “Carousel” at the Boston Lyric Opera; the virtual dance performance “The Other Shore” at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Jacob’s Pillow; and “The Lehman Trilogy” at the Huntington Theatre Company. Her upcoming co-directed work, “Circlusion,” takes place within a fully immersive inflatable space and reimagines the female body’s response to power and violence. Her designs have been seen at the BAM Next Wave Festival in New York, the Festival d’Automne in Paris, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.

Naoki Egami is a professor in the Department of Political Science. He is also a faculty affiliate of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Egami specializes in political methodology and develops statistical methods for questions in political science and the social sciences. His current research programs focus on three areas: external validity and generalizability; machine learning and AI for the social sciences; and causal inference with network and spatial data. His work has appeared in various academic journals in political science, statistics, and computer science, such as American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), NeurIPS, and Science Advances. Before joining MIT, Egami was an assistant professor at Columbia University. He received a PhD from Princeton University (2020) and a BA from the University of Tokyo (2015).

Rachel Fraser is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Before coming to MIT, Fraser taught at the University of Oxford, where she also completed her graduate work in philosophy. She has interests in epistemology, language, feminism, aesthetics, and political philosophy. At present, her main project is a book manuscript on the epistemology of narrative.

Brian Hedden PhD ’12 is a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, with a shared appointment in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on how we ought to form beliefs and make decisions. He works in epistemology, decision theory, and ethics, including ethics of AI. He is the author of “Reasons without Persons: Rationality, Identity, and Time” (Oxford University Press, 2015) and articles on topics including collective action problems, legal standards of proof, algorithmic fairness, and political polarization, among others. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the Australian National University and the University of Sydney, and a junior research fellow at Oxford. He received his BA From Princeton University in 2006 and his PhD from MIT in 2012.

Viola Schmitt is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. She is a linguist with a special interest in semantics. Much of her work focuses on trying to understand general constraints on human language meaning; that is, the principles regulating which meanings can be expressed by human languages and how languages can package meaning. Variants of this question were also central to grants she received from the Austrian and German research foundations. She earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Vienna and worked as a postdoc and/or lecturer at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, Göttingen, and at the University of California at Los Angeles. Her most recent position was as a junior professor at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Miguel Zenón is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. The Puerto Rican alto saxophonist, composer, band leader, music producer, and educator is a Grammy Award winner, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Doris Duke Artist Award. He also holds an honorary doctorate degree in the arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón. Zenón has released 18 albums as a band leader and collaborated with some of the great musicians and ensembles of his time. As a composer, Zenón has been commissioned by Chamber Music America, Logan Center for The Arts, The Hyde Park Jazz Festival, Miller Theater, The Hewlett Foundation, Peak Performances, and many of his peers. Zenón has given hundreds of lectures and master classes at institutions all over the world, and in 2011 he founded Caravana Cultural — a program that presents jazz concerts free of charge in rural areas of Puerto Rico.

The San Francisco Police Department is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the city at risk and is especially dangerous for immigrants, abortion seekers, and other targets of the federal government.

This week, we sent the San Francisco Police Department a demand letter and request for records under the city’s Sunshine Ordinance following the SF Standard’s recent report that SFPD provided non-California agencies direct access to the city’s ALPR database. Reporters uncovered that at least 19 searches run by these agencies were marked as related to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”). The city’s ALPR database was also searched by law enforcement agencies from Georgia and Texas, both states with severe restrictions on reproductive healthcare.

ALPRs are cameras that capture the movements of vehicles and upload the location of the vehicles to a searchable, shareable database. It is a mass surveillance technology that collects data indiscriminately on every vehicle on the road. As of September 2025, SFPD operates 415 ALPR cameras purchased from the company Flock Safety.

Since 2016, sharing ALPR data with out-of-state or federal agencies—for any reason—violates California law (SB 34). If this data is shared for the purpose of assisting with immigration enforcement, agencies violate an additional California law (SB 54).

In total, the SF Standard found that SFPD had allowed out-of-state cops to run 1.6 million searches of their data. “This sharing violated state law, as well as exposed sensitive driver location information to misuse by the federal government and by states that lack California’s robust privacy protections,” the letter explained.

EFF and ACLU are urging SFPD to launch a thorough audit of its ALPR database, institute new protocols for compliance, and assess penalties and sanctions for any employee found to be sharing ALPR information out of state.

“Your office reportedly claims that agencies outside of California are no longer able to access the SFPD ALPR database,” the letter says. “However, your office has not explained how outside agencies obtained access in the first place or how you plan to prevent future violations of SB 34 and 54.”

As we’ve demonstrated over and over again, many California agencies continue to ignore these laws, exposing sensitive location information to misuse and putting entire communities at risk. As federal agencies continue to carry out violent ICE raids, and many states enforce harsh, draconian restrictions on abortion, ALPR technology is already being used to target and surveil immigrants and abortion seekers. California agencies, including SFPD, have an obligation to protect the rights of Californians, even when those rights are not recognized by other states or the federal government.

See the full letter here: https://www.eff.org/files/2025/09/17/aclu_and_eff_letter_to_sfpd_9.16.2025-1.pdf

Cancer cells have one relentless goal: to grow and divide. While most stick together within the original tumor, some rogue cells break away to traverse to distant organs. There, they can lie dormant — undetectable and not dividing — for years, like landmines waiting to go off.

This migration of cancer cells, called metastasis, is especially common in breast cancer. For many patients, the disease can return months — or even decades — after initial treatment, this time in an entirely different organ.

Robert Weinberg, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research at MIT and a Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research founding member, has spent decades unraveling the complex biology of metastasis and pursuing research that could improve survival rates among patients with metastatic breast cancer — or prevent metastasis altogether.

In his latest study, Weinberg, postdoc Jingwei Zhang, and colleagues ask a critical question: What causes these dormant cancer cells to erupt into a frenzy of growth and division? The group’s findings, published Sept. 1 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), point to a unique culprit.

This awakening of dormant cancer cells, they’ve discovered, isn’t a spontaneous process. Instead, the wake-up call comes from the inflamed tissue surrounding the cells. One trigger for this inflammation is bleomycin, a common chemotherapy drug that can scar and thicken lung tissue.

“The inflammation jolts the dormant cancer cells awake,” Weinberg says. “Once awakened, they start multiplying again, seeding new life-threatening tumors in the body.”

Decoding metastasis

There’s a lot that scientists still don’t know about metastasis, but this much is clear: Cancer cells must undergo a long and arduous journey to achieve it. The first step is to break away from their neighbors within the original tumor.

Normally, cells stick to one another using surface proteins that act as molecular “velcro,” but some cancer cells can acquire genetic changes that disrupt the production of these proteins and make them more mobile and invasive, allowing them to detach from the parent tumor. 

Once detached, they can penetrate blood vessels and lymphatic channels, which act as highways to distant organs.

While most cancer cells die at some point during this journey, a few persist. These cells exit the bloodstream and invade different tissues—lungs, liver, bone, and even the brain — to give birth to new, often more-aggressive tumors.

“Almost 90 percent of cancer-related deaths occur not from the original tumor, but when cancer cells spread to other parts of the body,” says Weinberg. “This is why it’s so important to understand how these ‘sleeping’ cancer cells can wake up and start growing again.”

Setting up shop in new tissue comes with changes in surroundings — the “tumor microenvironment” — to which the cancer cells may not be well-suited. These cells face constant threats, including detection and attack by the immune system. 

To survive, they often enter a protective state of dormancy that puts a pause on growth and division. This dormant state also makes them resistant to conventional cancer treatments, which often target rapidly dividing cells.

To investigate what makes this dormancy reversible months or years down the line, researchers in the Weinberg Lab injected human breast cancer cells into mice. These cancer cells were modified to produce a fluorescent protein, allowing the scientists to track their behavior in the body.

The group then focused on cancer cells that had lodged themselves in the lung tissue. By examining them for specific proteins — Ki67, ITGB4, and p63 — that act as markers of cell activity and state, the researchers were able to confirm that these cells were in a non-dividing, dormant state.

Previous work from the Weinberg Lab had shown that inflammation in organ tissue can provoke dormant breast cancer cells to start growing again. In this study, the team tested bleomycin — a chemotherapy drug known to cause lung inflammation — that can be given to patients after surgery to lower the risk of cancer recurrence.

The researchers found that lung inflammation from bleomycin was sufficient to trigger the growth of large lung cancer colonies in treated mice — and to shift the character of these once-dormant cells to those that are more invasive and mobile.

Zeroing in on the tumor microenvironment, the team identified a type of immune cells, called M2 macrophages, as drivers of this process. These macrophages release molecules called epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) ligands, which bind to receptors on the surface of dormant cancer cells. This activates a cascade of signals that provoke dormant cancer cells to start multiplying rapidly. 

But EGFR signaling is only the initial spark that ignites the fire. “We found that once dormant cancer cells are awakened, they retain what we call an ‘awakening memory,’” Zhang says. “They no longer require ongoing inflammatory signals from the microenvironment to stay active [growing and multiplying] — they remember the awakened state.”

While signals related to inflammation are necessary to awaken dormant cancer cells, exactly how much signaling is needed remains unclear. “This aspect of cancer biology is particularly challenging, because multiple signals contribute to the state change in these dormant cells,” Zhang says.

The team has already identified one key player in the awakening process, but understanding the full set of signals and how each contributes is far more complex — a question they are continuing to investigate in their new work. 

Studying these pivotal changes in the lives of cancer cells — such as their transition from dormancy to active growth — will deepen our scientific understanding of metastasis and, as researchers in the Weinberg Lab hope, lead to more effective treatments for patients with metastatic cancers.