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Riverside County has launched an 8-mile "smart freeway" pilot on northbound I-15 near Temecula, using roadway sensors and an algorithm to coordinate ramp meters and suggest speeds rather than widening the freeway. Officials say the $33 million project could reduce stop-and-go traffic and travel times. According to SFGATE, similar systems in Australia and Denver reportedly cutting delays by 20% to 65%. From the report: Unlike typical on-ramp stoplights that run on a timer lasting a few seconds, Interstate 15 drivers could find themselves waiting up to four minutes or even longer while the system determines the necessary speed for traffic entering the freeway. By spacing out the cars, transportation officials hope to improve traffic flow, reduce stop-and-go traffic and decrease the amount of time that travelers have to spend on the freeway. The transportation commission spent $33 million to build the project, which will run for two years. Riverside County Transportation Commission spokesperson David Knudsen told SFGATE that if the program is successful, the agency will work with Caltrans to deploy it elsewhere in the county and then potentially to other traffic choke points in California. "This system is a lot less expensive than trying to build new lanes, and so the idea here is let's make the system that we have work better," he said. Knudsen said the program is not managed by artificial intelligence but instead uses advanced sensors in the roadway to monitor real-time traffic conditions and make adjustments. The stretch of freeway that connects Temecula at the Riverside/San Diego County line to the Interstate 215 interchange in Murrieta can be notoriously clogged. What can be less than a 10-minute drive with no traffic can take between 25 and 45 minutes during the afternoon peak period, according to the transportation commission. "The intent is to create a consistent flow of traffic on the freeway system, and the coordinated ramp metering among the three on-ramps ... will help do that," Knudsen said. "If we can manage that, then we can help prevent that stop-and-go traffic frustration that so many people feel ... on the freeway."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: While traditional hotspots in the region such as Thailand, South Korea and Malaysia focus on services such as cosmetic surgery, IVF or physicals, China is trying to differentiate itself by providing some of the world's most advanced procedures. "There are two reasons why a patient travels for medical treatments: availability of advanced treatments and price," said Victor Cao, operations director of Joyful Medical, an agency in Shanghai that connects international patients to advanced cancer therapies in China. "Chinese people used to travel overseas for treatments that were not available at home, but now tables have turned." As expanding visa-free policies eased travel in the past year or so, videos are proliferating on social media of foreigners recounting their positive experiences of treatment in China, usually for consumer procedures like acupuncture and tooth scaling. But one treatment that's more quietly gaining traction is CAR-T, among the most promising breakthroughs in oncology but unavailable in most countries, or extremely costly. The process sees doctors collect T cells from the patient's blood then modify them in a lab to produce a special receptor, CAR, that can bind to a specific protein on cancer cells. These engineered cells are then multiplied into large numbers and infused back into the patient. The CAR-T cells seek out cancer cells carrying the target antigen and kill them. In the US, one single infusion can cost between $300,000 to $475,000, according to the American Cancer Society. In China, the equivalent costs about $150,000 to $180,000, and it could get even cheaper -- its drug regulator recently accepted a marketing application for a therapy aimed to be priced below 300,000 yuan ($44,000). China's medical tourism market remains in its infancy. Lecheng International Medical Tourism Pilot Zone in Hainan, which was designated as the country's only special medical zone in 2013, treated just a few thousand foreign medical tourists last year, compared to hundreds of thousands of domestic patients who visited. There, patients can access advanced drugs, devices, and therapies approved in other countries but not elsewhere in mainland China. But China is pushing to upgrade its economy and reshape its global image from just a manufacturing hub into a provider of high-value services, and demand for medical tourism is surging. Globally, the market is estimated at around $34 billion and expected to reach $126 billion by 2035, according to San Francisco-based Grand View Research. Meanwhile, China's sector is projected to grow from $1.3 billion in 2025 to $3.4 billion by 2035, according to New York-based firm Market Research Future. "The patients chose China for something they can't get at home," said Shi Haoying, the group's founder and chief executive officer. "I think the growing attention to medical tourism to China is the inevitable result of long-term accumulation and development in many areas, such as growing medical technologies, quality of service and cost-effectiveness." Jeroen Groenewegen-Lau, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, added: "Many new treatments, including in very advanced areas, are made in China but too advanced for the state of its healthcare system and the ability of its patients to pay for these things. It's in China's interest to integrate into the international system."

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Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides." The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."

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Polish lawmakers have voted to criminalize "trash streaming," with up to five years in prison for online broadcasts of serious crimes such as rape or murder, animal cruelty, humiliating violence, gambling promotion, or even simulated depictions of those acts. Reuters reports: The move is part of a broader push by Poland to tighten regulation of online content. Recent measures include banning the use of mobile phones by children under 16 in schools and introducing stricter age verification rules to access pornography. Under the new provisions, broadcasting crimes punishable by more than five years in prison, including murder or rape, will itself be classed as a separate offence punishable by up to five years behind bars. The law also covers content showing cruelty to animals, violence aimed at humiliating others, and the promotion of gambling. The same penalties will apply to individuals who simulate or falsely portray the commission of such crimes while streaming, lawmakers said.

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From white-boarding my ideas on a Google Doc, to writing a formal design document in Crosswords, my ability to communicate technical ideas clearly is being put to the test.

Writing documentation is critical to guide others’ understanding of the code and choices made on a particular codebase. Especially when several developers are introduced to the system, a way to reference material leads to more preparedness to contribute to the codebase.

I wrote a design document introducing the concepts I would like to implement towards creating a way to generate a dynamic grid. Critique is welcome.

Standard libipuz crosswords currently rely on using an existing dictionary to fill a static box of X length x Y width. However, the implementation of vocab puzzles goes against this logic and instead generates a new grid of N length x M width based on a list of 0 <= W <= 30 words of 1 <= L <= 25 characters long.

I reconsidered the idea of using a GArray to store unplaced words because I want something idempotent. To avoid unwanted time complexity bloat, the backend should not carry the memory of unplaced words. Instead, the frontend will compare the generated grid against the original list to manage words that couldn’t be placed.

Integrating this new feature will be a fascinating technical challenge.

I created a new IpuzVocab class which inherits from IpuzCrossword. I learned how GNOME manages its developer documentation by writing a file myself to introduce this class. Writing this document made me think about the whole picture: how vocab puzzles handle grids, clues, and guesses, comparing it to standard crossword puzzles. I wrote the support to display a vocab puzzle in light and dark mode, with my next goal to integrate them via gi-docgen.

OpenAI is reportedly considering sharp price cuts for paid access to its AI models as competition with Anthropic intensifies and both companies race for users ahead of potential IPOs. "The company is weighing significant cuts to what it charges for tokens, the unit of measurement artificial-intelligence firms use to bill for their products," the Wall Street Journal said, adding that it was "in anticipation of similar cuts the company expects at Anthropic." CNBC reports: The ChatGPT producer, which did not immediately respond to CNBC's requests for comment, currently charges consumers in tiered subscriptions of $8, $20 and $100 and above each month for access to its flagship GPT-5.5 models. Anthropic conversely charges users $17 each month with an annual subscription to Claude Pro, and $100 and above monthly for a subscription to Claude Max. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO on Monday, just a week after Anthropic made its own filing.

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Opendoor is shutting down its India operations less than two years after opening offices there. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a post from Opendoor CEO Kaz Nejatian: "I shared this note earlier today with the entire team at Opendoor. Today we began to say goodbye to our colleagues in India as we wind down our India operations. Our customers are in America, and that's where our operational work belongs." TechCrunch reports: In announcing the decision on Wednesday, CEO Kaz Nejatian cited a push to bring operational work back to the U.S., where Opendoor's customers are, and a shift toward smaller AI-native teams. The company did not respond to requests for comment on how many employees were affected or how much of the decision was driven by AI efficiency. But the announcement quickly gained traction across Silicon Valley, where founders, investors, and outsourcing experts see it as an early example of how AI is reshaping the economics that made India a global hub for back-office operations. [...] Some investors viewed the decision as a sign of what AI could mean for India's vast outsourcing workforce. "As manual work gets replaced by AI, a lot of jobs will be lost in India," wrote Sheel Mohnot, co-founder of Better Tomorrow Ventures. Others viewed Opendoor as evidence of a larger shift in how companies are organized. Keshav Lohia, a venture capitalist at Emergent Ventures, described the decision as a "watershed moment" for AI-driven operations, arguing that advances in AI are beginning to challenge the cost-arbitrage model that made India a popular offshoring destination. Phil Fersht, chief executive of HFS Research, an advisory firm that tracks the global outsourcing and business services industry, told TechCrunch that the development should not be viewed simply as jobs moving from India to the U.S. The more important shift, he said, is that AI is reducing the amount of operational labor companies require in the first place, allowing firms to run leaner organizations regardless of location. "This is not an isolated restructuring," Fersht said. "It is part of a much broader pattern we are starting to see as companies redesign operations around AI, automation, and much leaner workflows." Fersht argued that the winners would be companies that combine AI, software and human expertise to deliver outcomes without continually adding headcount, a model he described as "Services-as-Software." While Opendoor may be one of the first high-profile examples, he said it is unlikely to be the last. Some investors are already extrapolating beyond individual companies. Varun Rekhi, a venture capitalist at Speedinvest, argued that if AI reduces demand for labor-intensive services, it could eventually pressure one of India's most important export industries, which is built around supplying talent and expertise to global corporations.

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Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty told staff that Xbox's current economics "cannot continue," citing more than $20 billion in spending over five years, declining revenue outside Activision Blizzard King, console supply constraints tied to RAMaggedon, and an overextended studio portfolio. The memo stops short of announcing layoffs, but a Bloomberg report says substantial Xbox cuts are expected after Microsoft's fiscal year ends on June 30. Engadget reports: The takeaways are pretty grim. For starters, the simple math of Xbox's revenue isn't adding up to success. "Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time," the execs state. "Going forward, this cannot continue." They also acknowledge the impact of RAMaggedon: "We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix." (Helix, in this case, is Project Helix, the codename for Xbox's new console.) Then there's the kicker, a renewed admission that Xbox still can't support the many studios it acquired in the late 2010s in an effort to grow its first-party game ambitions. "We have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content," the pair said, noting elsewhere that with so many good games, not to mention the plethora of other forms of entertainment available, "Going forward, our competition is attention."

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Attackers are actively exploiting a high-severity vulnerability in Langflow, an open-source platform used to build and run AI workflows.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: China was likely behind an online influence operation to sway U.S. perceptions of artificial intelligence technology and reshape the debate in Washington around the infrastructure needed to support it, according to research from OpenAI published Wednesday. OpenAI said it caught the influence campaign because China-backed operatives were using ChatGPT to create content for the social media campaign. [...] OpenAI's researchers identified two clusters of ChatGPT users "likely originating from China" who used the AI chatbot to generate social media content "in support of apparent covert influence operations" promoting certain narratives about AI. This includes claims that data center build-outs are raising electricity costs for the average American family and that President Donald Trump has weaponized tariffs to keep the U.S. ahead in the global tech race. These accounts have since been banned, the report said. One cluster of users asked ChatGPT to generate images and comments pushing these narratives. These comments were then posted on social media by "batches of accounts" posing as Americans, [said Ben Nimmo, principal investigator of intelligence and investigations at OpenAI]. Another cluster identified by researchers used AI to generate social media content criticizing the Trump administration's tariffs as an attempt to "dominate technological competition." Prompts used for this campaign were submitted in Simplified Chinese and asked that AI-generated content not include Chinese President Xi Jinping and focus solely on Trump -- a possible tell that China was behind the operation, according to the report. Nimmo said that the influence campaign amplified existing public backlash in the U.S. against the creation of new AI data centers, which has resulted in dozens of proposed moratoriums at the local, state and national level. "Neither campaign appears to have gained much authentic engagement," Nimmo said. "They're important for what they reveal about the intentions of influence operators from China, and the narratives they're testing and seeking to amplify, but not for the impact."

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Version:next-20260611 (linux-next) Released:2026-06-11

With npm v12, dependency preinstall, install, and postinstall scripts will no longer execute automatically during package installation. Script execution will require explicit approval through new controls such as npm approve-scripts, with the change expected to arrive in July 2026.

Longtime Slashdot reader MattSparkes shares a report from NewScientist, captioned: "For years we've had unconfirmed reports, rumors, hints... now we know." From the report: Fully autonomous drones with no human oversight have killed soldiers on the battlefield for the first time. This is according to a senior figure in the Ukrainian defense industry, marking a watershed moment in warfare. The one-off test involved 10 AI-controlled "Terminator" drones on the front line of the Ukraine war. Russian soldiers were killed. "We tried it," says drone-maker Alexander Kokhanovskyy, who supplied the technology and spoke to New Scientist at a press event hosted by the Ukrainian embassy. "It's a test. We never implemented it [more widely]." The test took place two years ago and involved quadcopter drones that were programmed to fly towards the front line, cover between 3 and 5 kilometres over around 10 minutes and then engage "Terminator mode," in which an AI model searches for and intercepts targets. "We just launch it and we know everything will be dead -- everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead," says Kokhanovskyy. "There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing... Everything it sees will be killed." With no way to tell what the automated drones had seen or targeted, human-piloted drones were sent into the area after the test to manually check results. Victims included "a couple of soldiers, one truck," says Kokhanovskyy. While there is no recording of the automated drones attacking these targets, it was concluded that the drones had killed them. Kokhanovskyy says that he was not at the test personally but that it was carried out by an unnamed military unit near the cities of Bakhmut and Chasiv Yar as part of a Ukrainian counteroffensive push. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence did not respond to questions about the test or the current legal position on the use of fully autonomous weapons.

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The GNOME Foundation has selected the first recipients who will receive funding through its new Fellowship program, and is delighted to announce that Peter Eisenmann and Sophie Herold will begin work as our first Fellows in July.

Sophie and Peter are both long-running GNOME contributors, with many significant contributions as members of the GNOME community. Sophie is known as developer of apps, libraries, and websites, including Loupe, Pika Backup, Glycin, and welcome.gnome.org. Peter is a long-standing Nautilus maintainer (officially known as the Files app), as well as an experienced contributor to platform libraries, including GTK and GLib.

Both Fellows will spend time working to enhance the long-term sustainability and health of the GNOME project. Sophie will be working to establish a new RFC process for GNOME, which will enhance our project-level governance. She will also be working on more maintainable and secure libraries through Rust adoption. Peter will work to modernize many aspects of the Files app, including thumbnailing, user directory localization, and the use of modern GNOME platform conventions.

Congratulations to Peter and Sophie – we’re genuinely excited to see what you’ll achieve as our first Fellows, and proud to be supporting your work.

We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who submitted applications to the first round of the Fellowship. We received some genuinely excellent proposals, and would strongly encourage unsuccessful applicants to apply again in future rounds.

Peter and Sophie’s work is made possible by the generosity of GNOME’s supporters. If you’d like to help fund future rounds and support contributors like them, please consider donating.

fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Tests reveal that when people are ambling about, they have a natural tendency to turn to the left and walk in an anticlockwise direction. "If you simply ask someone to start walking, whether they are wandering around a museum, a supermarket, or even an empty room, it is surprisingly likely that they will drift counterclockwise," said Dr Inaki Echeverria Huarte at University of Navarra in Spain. As with many critical discoveries in science, the revelation owes a debt to serendipity. During the pandemic, the researchers ran experiments to see how many people could share a space while keeping a safe distance. On reviewing the video, they noticed that crowds overwhelmingly walked in an anticlockwise direction. The surprise set in motion an entire research project. The scientists conducted a series of experiments in which individual pedestrians or small crowds roamed around enclosed spaces. Time and again, the researchers observed the tendency to walk in an anticlockwise direction. Suspecting that cultural norms might play a role, the team joined forces with Dr Claudio Feliciani at the University of Tokyo. He found the same results in Japan. The finding held when the researchers accounted for people being right-handed, right-footed and right-eye dominant, and was seen in both male and female walkers. The only difference they spotted was a more pronounced bias in children. "Each of us carries a small personal bias to turn slightly to one side, and when many people share a space, those tiny biases add up into a net counterclockwise rotation," said Echeverria Huarte. Researchers think the tendency may be tied to biomechanics: people are not perfectly symmetrical, and the way the brain processes sensory information and coordinates muscles may gently tip walkers toward one side. Right-side dominance may also play a role, especially in running, where anticlockwise movement puts more internal force on the right side of the body and may feel more natural to right-leg-dominant athletes. "We have tested several ideas and the bias stubbornly keeps showing up, so the exact mechanism is still an open question," said Echeverria Huarte. The findings have been published in Nature Communications.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Solar generated more U.S. electricity than coal for the first month on record in May 2026, according to new analysis from global energy think tank Ember. Solar supplied 12.8% of U.S. electricity during the month, while coal dropped to 12.2%. That's a dramatic shift in the U.S. power mix. Just five years ago, coal generated 19.7% of U.S. electricity in May, while solar accounted for only 5.4%. U.S. solar generation hit a record 45.5 terawatt-hours (TWh) in May 2026, up 17% from May 2025 and higher than the previous record set last July. Ember says another record could be broken again this summer. Solar output usually peaks in June or July, but its share of the electricity mix is often highest in spring, when strong sunshine lines up with milder temperatures before summer cooling demand ramps up. May was also the first time solar became the third-largest individual source of electricity in the U.S., behind only natural gas and nuclear. (If solar is included with all other renewables, then they're the second-largest source of electricity as an overall category of electricity.) Meanwhile, coal keeps sliding (and will continue to slide). Coal generation hit an all-time monthly low of 39.3 TWh in April 2026. Output rose slightly in May to 43.4 TWh, but it was still 11% lower than May 2025 levels. Even with that small rebound, coal couldn't keep pace with solar's rapid growth.

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A researcher using the name Nightmare Eclipse has released a new Microsoft Defender zero-day exploit called "RoguePlanet," which reportedly works on fully patched Windows 10 and 11 systems and can spawn a command prompt with SYSTEM privileges through a Defender race condition. The release came just hours after Microsoft fixed two previously disclosed flaws during its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop -- its largest Patch Tuesday release ever. BleepingComputer reports: The researcher shared a proof-of-concept exploit on Tuesday afternoon in a self-hosted Git repository after saying that GitHub and GitLab repositories hosting their exploits had previously been removed by Microsoft. "The exploit is a race condition, so it's a hit or miss. I have managed to get a 100% success rate on some machines while it struggled to work on others," Nightmare Eclipse wrote in the repository. [...] Cybersecurity firm ThreatLocker told BleepingComputer that they successfully reproduced the flaw in their testing and confirmed the exploit worked against fully patched Windows 11 systems with KB5094126 installed, and shared a video demonstrating it. "Our initial analysis confirms that the RoguePlanet exploit is viable and performs as described. Organizations using application allowlisting can prevent the exploit from executing, providing an effective layer of protection against this attack," Danny Jenkins, CEO of ThreatLocker, told BleepingComputer. According to Nightmare Eclipse, RoguePlanet was originally developed as a remote code execution vulnerability that exploited Microsoft Defender's handling of files hosted on remote SMB shares. "In initial development, it was confirmed that this vulnerability was a remote code execution," the researcher explained in a blog post. "It required an attacker to coerce a victim to open a .vhd(x) in a remote SMB server, succesful exploitation resulted in defender overwriting its own files and obviously the end outcome was an RCE." The researcher says another attack scenario could lead to remote code execution simply by coercing a victim into opening an SMB share if symlink evaluation settings were enabled. However, the researcher claims Microsoft silently hardened Defender in mid-May by patching "mpengine!SysIO*" API, which blocked junction attacks. "Rewriting RoguePlanet to make it functional again drained my soul and I couldn't complete the other scenarios and for now it remains unclear if RoguePlanet is limited to LPE or there is some sort of way to turn it into an RCE," the researcher wrote.

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Visa is integrating its payment network with ChatGPT so AI agents can shop and complete purchases on users' behalf. "It means AI agents can not only recommend products but complete the purchase on the user's behalf, at potentially any merchant that accepts Visa," reports the Associated Press. "The payment network's previous attempts at this technological leap were confined to a single retailer or a small set of enrolled merchants." From the report: OpenAI will provide the technology to allow agents to interact, make decisions and initiate purchases through ChatGPT. Visa, the world's largest payment network outside of China, will provide the payment authorization and fraud monitoring needed to do this at scale. "As AI agents become active participants in the economy, Visa's focus is to ensure transactions are trusted, secure and seamless," said Jack Forestell, chief product and strategy officer at Visa. Speaking at a company event Wednesday in San Francisco Wednesday, Forestell gave an example of a customer telling ChatGPT they're looking for a pair of wireless headphones under $150. The chatbot would find a pair for sale under those parameters and buy it on behalf of the customer. Visa and OpenAI did not disclose the financial terms of the collaboration and did not give details on the fees merchants or customers would have to pay. [...] Visa says the feature will have guardrails like spending limits, required approval steps and approved merchants for shopping in order to protect consumers and minimize fraud.

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Valve is discontinuing physical Steam Gift Cards and says it will stop restocking them as retailers sell through remaining inventory. In a blog post, the company blamed persistent gift card scams as the reason, though Steam Digital Gift Cards will remain available and existing physical cards can still be redeemed. PC Guide reports: Valve says it has "responded to gift card scams over the years" -- but this doesn't stop scammers from adapting. The Steam creator has actively worked with retailers and law enforcement, among other precautions, to counteract scams, but says the issue can never be fully resolved. Steam Digital Gift Cards will continue to operate as normal.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last year, Meta radically overhauled the rules around what content it would allow on its platforms. The company claimed that its own efforts policing speech had gone too far and that it would relax the rules around what speech was allowed. "We have been over-enforcing our rules, limiting legitimate political debate and censoring too much trivial content and subjecting too many people to frustrating enforcement actions," Joel Kaplan, Meta's chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post at the time. Over a year later, new research from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) shows the immediate impact of these changes. The researchers analyzed about 8 million Facebook comments and found that abusive and racist comments targeting both Republican and Democrat lawmakers tripled in the six months after the new rules were put in place. Some categories of abusive comments documented by the researchers saw even sharper rises, with violent threats and hate speech quadrupling during the same period. The report cites specific examples of gendered and racist abuse directed at lawmakers like US representatives Jasmine Crockette of Texas and Byron Daniels of Florida. These comments were not taken down by Meta. The CCDH researchers also found that threats against President Trump more than doubled in the six months after Meta overhauled its rules. Many of the comments, which included direct threats to his life, could have been classified as felony offenses, the researchers say. [...] Comments that violated Meta's policies around violent threats quadrupled, from 1,800 in the six months before the changes to 7,600 in the six months after. Hate speech comments also quadrupled, from 6,900 to 30,000. Comments that broke Meta's rules on bullying and harassment doubled, from 15,700 to 39,900.

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