Activists around the world are calling attention to harassment they’ve faced on Meta’s platforms. More than 90 percent of land and environmental defenders surveyed by Global Witness, a nonprofit organization that also tracks the murders of environmental advocates, reported experiencing some kind of online abuse or harassment connected to their work. Facebook was the most-cited platform, followed by X, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

Global Witness and many of the activists it surveyed are calling on Meta and its peers to do more to address harassment and misinformation on their platforms. Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks to activists. Around 75 percent of people surveyed said they believed that online abuse they experienced corresponded to offline harm.

“Those stats really stayed with me. They were so much higher than we expected them to be,” Ava Lee, campaign strategy lead on digital threats at Global Witness, tells The Verge. That’s despite expecting a gloomy outcome based on prior anecdotal accounts. “It has kind of long been known that the experience of climate activists and environmental defenders online is pretty awful,” Lee says.

Left to fester, they fear that online attacks could fuel real-world risks

Global Witness surveyed more than 200 people between November 2024 and March of this year that it was able to reach through the same networks it taps when documenting the killings of land and environmental defenders. It found Meta-owned platforms to be “the most toxic.” Around 62 percent of participants said they encountered abuse on Facebook, 36 percent on WhatsApp, and 26 percent on Instagram. 

That probably reflects how popular Meta’s platforms are around the world. Facebook has more than 3 billion active monthly users, more than a third of the global population. But Meta also abandoned its third-party fact-checking program in January, which critics warned could lead to more hate speech and disinformation. Meta moved to a crowdsourced approach to content moderation similar to X, where 37 percent of survey participants reported experiencing abuse. 

In May, Meta reported a “small increase in the prevalence of bullying and harassment content” on Facebook as well as “a small increase in the prevalence of violent and graphic content” during the first quarter of 2025.

“That’s sort of the irony as well, of them moving towards this kind of free speech model, which actually we’re seeing that it’s silencing certain voices,” says Hannah Sharpe, a senior campaigner at Global Witness.

Fatrisia Ain leads a local collective of women in Sulawesi, Indonesia, where she says palm oil companies have seized farmers’ lands and contaminated a river local villagers used to be able to rely on for drinking water. Posts on Facebook have accused her of being a communist, a dangerous allegation in her country, she tells The Verge.

The practice of “red-tagging” — labeling any dissident voices as communists — has been used to target and criminalize activists in Southeast Asia. In one high-profile case, a prominent environmental activist in Indonesia was jailed under “anti-communism” laws after opposing a new gold mine.

Ain says she’s asked Facebook to take down several posts attacking her, without success. “They said it’s not dangerous, so they can’t take it down. It is dangerous. I hope that Meta would understand, in Indonesia, it’s dangerous,” Ain says. 

Other posts have accused Ain of trying to defraud farmers and of having an affair with a married man, which she sees as attempts to discredit her that could wind up exposing her to more threats in the real world — which has already been hostile to her activism. “Women who are being the defenders for my own community are more vulnerable than men … more people harass you with so many things,” she says. 

Nearly two-thirds of people who responded to the Global Witness survey said that they have feared for their safety, including Ain. She’s been physically targeted at protests against palm oil companies accused of failing to pay farmers, she tells The Verge. During a protest outside of a government office, men grabbed her butt and chest, she says. Now, when she leads protests, older women activists surround her to protect her as a security measure. 

In the Global Witness survey, nearly a quarter of respondents said they’d been attacked on the basis of their sex. “There’s evidence of the way that women and women of color in particular in politics experience just vast amounts more hate than any other group,” Lee says. “Again, we’re seeing that play out when it comes to defenders … and the threats of sexual violence, and the impact that that is having on the mental health of lots of these defenders and their ability to feel safe.” 

“We encourage people to use tools available on our platforms to help protect against bullying and harassment,” Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton said in an email to The Verge, adding that the company is reviewing Facebook posts that targeted Ain. Meta also pointed to its “Hidden Words” feature that allows you to filter offensive direct messages and comments on your posts and its “Limits” feature that hides comments on your posts from users that don’t follow you. 

Other companies mentioned in the report, including Google, TikTok, and X, did not provide on-the-record responses to inquiries from The Verge. Nor did a palm oil company Ain says has been operating on local farmers’ land without paying them, as they’re supposed to do under a mandated profit-sharing scheme. 

Global Witness says there are concrete steps social media companies can take to address harassment on their platforms. That includes dedicating more resources to their content moderation systems, regularly reviewing these systems, and inviting public input on the process. Activists surveyed also reported that they think algorithms that boost polarizing content and the proliferation of bots on platforms make the problem worse. 

“There are a number of choices that platforms could make,” Lee says. “Resourcing is a choice, and they could be putting more money into really good content moderation and really good trust and safety [initiatives] to improve things.” 

Global Witness plans to put out its next report on the killings of land and environmental defenders in September. Its last such report found that at least 196 people were killed in 2023.

At an AI and fossil fuel lovefest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania last week, President Donald Trump - flanked by cabinet members and executives from major tech and energy giants like Google and ExxonMobil - said that "the most important man of the day" was Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin. "He's gonna get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say?" Trump said to chuckles in the audience. Later that week, the Trump administration exempted coal-fired power plants, facilities that make chemicals for semiconductor manufacturing, and certain other industrial sites from Biden-era a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

"I'm probably the only architect who created a final home," Bob Hendrikx tells The Verge. Tombs and catacombs aside, Hendrikx might be the only one to make a final home using mushrooms.

Hendrikx is the founder and CEO of Loop Biotech, a company that makes caskets out of mycelium, the fibrous root structure of mushrooms. This June, the first burial in North America to use one of Loop Biotech's caskets took place in Maine.

"He always said he wanted to be buried naked in the woods."

The mushroom casket gives people one more option to leave the living with a gentler impact, part of a growing array of what are supposed to be more sustainable …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Flash floods have wrought more havoc in the US this week, from the Northeast to the Midwest, just weeks after swollen rivers took more than 130 lives across central Texas earlier this month. Frustrations have grown in the aftermath of that catastrophe over why more wasn't done to warn people in advance.

Local officials face mounting questions over whether they sent too many or sent too few mobile phone alerts to people. Some Texans have accused the state of sending out too many alerts for injured police officers in the months leading up to the floods, which may have led to residents opting out of receiving warnings. And hard-hit Kerr County …

Read the full story at The Verge.

As The Verge's resident disaster writer, I'm tired of this nonsense. So let's just get into it.

What is cloud seeding?

Cloud seeding is basically an attempt to make precipitation fall from clouds. It targets clouds that have water droplets that are essentially too light to fall. Scientists at MIT learned in the 1940s that if you inject a mineral into the cloud that's similar to the crystalline structure of ice - typically silver iodide or salt - those small water droplets start to freeze to the mineral. This creates heavier ice particles that can eventually fall down to the ground. These days, researchers can use radar and satellite image …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Scorching hot days tend to hit certain neighborhoods harder than others, a problem that becomes more dangerous during record-breaking heat like swathes of the US experienced over the past week. A new online dashboard shows how Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately affected in California.

Developed by University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), the tool helps fill in gaps as the Trump administration takes a sledgehammer to federal climate, race, and ethnicity data resources. 

“We want to provide facts, reliable data sources. We don’t want this to be something that gets erased from the policy sphere,” says Arturo Vargas Bustamante, faculty research director at the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Institute (LPPI).

“We don’t want this to be something that gets erased”

The Latino Climate & Health Dashboard includes data on extreme heat and air pollution, as well as asthma rates and other health conditions — issues that are linked to each other. High temperatures can speed up the chemical reactions that create smog. Chronic exposure to fine particle pollution, or soot, can increase the risk of a child developing asthma. Having asthma or another respiratory illness can then make someone more vulnerable to poor air quality and heat stress. Burning fossil fuels — whether in nearby factories, power plants, or internal combustion vehicles — makes all of these problems worse. 

Latino neighborhoods have to cope with 23 more days of extreme heat a year compared to non-Latino white neighborhoods in California, the dashboard shows. LPPI defined extreme heat as days when temperatures climbed to 90 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. 

If you’ve ever heard about a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect, big differences in temperature from neighborhood to neighborhood probably wouldn’t come as a surprise. Areas with less greenery and more dark, paved surfaces and waste heat from industrial facilities or vehicles generally tend to trap heat. Around 1 in 10 Americans lives in a place where the built environment makes it feel at least 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than it would without that urban sprawl according to one study of 65 cities from last year. And after years of redlining that bolstered segregation and disinvestment in certain neighborhoods in the US, neighborhoods with more residents of color are often hotter than others.  

The dashboard includes fact sheets by county to show what factors might raise temperatures in certain areas. In Los Angeles County, for example, only four percent of land in majority-Latino neighborhoods is shaded by tree canopy compared to nine percent in non-Latino white neighborhoods. Conversely, impervious surfaces like asphalt and concrete that hold heat span 68 percent of land in Latino neighborhoods compared to 47 percent in majority non-Latino white areas in LA County. 

For this dashboard, LPPI defines a Latino neighborhood as a census tract where more than 70 percent of residents identify as Latino. It used the same 70 percent threshold to define non-Latino white neighborhoods. 

Latino neighborhoods in California are also exposed to twice as much air pollution and have twice as many asthma-related ER visits as non-latino white neighborhoods, according to the dashboard. It brings together data from the Census Bureau, US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the state’s environmental health screening tool called CalEnviroScreen, and other publicly-available sources. 

The Trump administration has taken down the federal counterpart to CalEnviroScreen, called EJScreen, as part of its purge of diversity and equity research. Researchers have been working to track and archive datasets that might be targeted since before President Donald Trump stepped back into office. 

Efforts to keep these kinds of studies going are just as vital, so that people don’t have to rely on outdated information that no longer reflects current conditions on the ground. And other researchers have launched new initiatives to document the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks. The Environmental Defense Fund and other advocacy groups, for instance, launched a mapping tool in April that shows 500 facilities across the US that the Environmental Protection Agency has recently invited to apply for exemptions to air pollution limits. 

UCLA’s dashboard adds to the patchwork of more locally-led research campaigns, although it can’t replace the breadth of data that federal agencies have historically collected. “Of course, we don’t have the resources that our federal government has,” Bustamante says. “But with what we are able to do, I think that one of the main aims is to keep this issue [at the top of] the agenda and provide reliable information that will be useful for community change.”

Data like this is a powerful tool for ending the kinds of disparities the dashboard exposes. It can inform efforts to plant trees where they’re needed most. Or it can show public health officials and community advocates where they need to check in with people to make sure they can find a safe place to cool down during the next heatwave.

Our water, health, and energy systems are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack.

Now, when tensions escalate - like when the US bombed nuclear facilities in Iran this month - the safety of these systems becomes of paramount concern. If conflict erupts, we can expect it to be a "hybrid" battle, Joshua Corman, executive in residence for public safety & resilience at the Institute for Security and Technology (IST), tells The Verge.

"With great connectivity comes great responsibility."

Battlefields now extend into the digital world, which in turn makes critical infrastructure in the real world a target. I first reached out to IST for their expertise on this issue back in 2021, when a ransomware attack forced the Colonial Pipeline - a major artery transporting nearly half of the east coast's fuel supply - offline for nearly a week. Since then, The Verge has also covered an uptick in cyberattacks against community water systems in the US, and America's attempts to thwart assaults supported by other governments.

It's not time to panic, Corman reassures me. But it is important to reevaluate how we safeguard hospitals, water supplies, and other lifelines from cyberattack. There hap …

Read the full story at The Verge.

EchoStar is skipping interest payments even as it commissions a new Dish TV satellite — citing “uncertainty” caused by a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) probe. 

The company just missed a $183 million interest payment, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. It missed another $326 million interest payment, Bloomberg reported on Friday. It’s potentially setting itself up for bankruptcy protection, SpaceNews reports.

It’s potentially setting itself up for bankruptcy protection

While those payments are on hold, EchoStar, which Dish Network rejoined last year, is still investing in its TV business. It commissioned a new communications satellite for television, Maxar Space Systems announced yesterday. The satellite, EchoStar XXVI, is supposed to be completed by 2028 to support Dish TV coverage across 50 US states and Puerto Rico. 

The FCC is investigating whether EchoStar is hitting requirements to deploy 5G that it’s supposed to meet in order to keep its spectrum licenses. Dish Network merged back with EchoStar — which also owns Boost Mobile — to try to compete in 5G, with the goal of trying to become a competitor with AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. The FCC probe has led EchoStar to “freeze its decision-making” for Boost Mobile, the Wall Street Journal reports.

SpaceX is also a rival vying with EchoStar for spectrum licenses in the 2 GHz band. Elon Musk’s company conducted its own analysis of Dish’s cellular signals and called EchoStar’s use of the gigahertz band “de minimis at best” in an April filing to the FCC. EchoStar accused SpaceX of a “land grab” for spectrum the Wall Street Journal reported last month. 

Neither Dish Network nor EchoStar responded immediately to a request for comment from The Verge.

Meta’s building a new AI data center so massive in Louisiana that the local utility company has plans to construct three new gas-fired power plants to provide it with enough electricity. Now, advocates and lawmakers are pressing Meta for answers about how it’ll clean up pollution stemming from the data center’s energy consumption.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, shot off a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday demanding answers about how much energy the data center would use and the greenhouse gas emissions that would be generated. Powering the new data center with gas “flies in the face of Meta’s climate commitments,” the letter says.

Tech companies are rushing to build out data centers to train and run new AI tools, driving up electricity demand. In this case, power utility Entergy wants to meet that demand with new gas infrastructure, raising concerns about the impact Meta’s data center will have on the environment and local residents.

“We urgently need corporate responsibility”

“Meta’s backslide from its own climate pledges risks triggering broader economic harm at a time when we urgently need corporate responsibility,” Sen. Whitehouse said in a statement emailed to The Verge.

In 2020, Meta pledged to reach net-zero emissions across its operations, supply chain, and consumer use of its products by the end of the decade. But the company’s carbon footprint is larger now than it was when it set that goal, according to its latest sustainability report, as it doubles down on AI. 

The company has tried to reduce its emissions by matching its electricity use with equal purchases of renewable energy. It’s a strategy Meta and other big companies often take: pay to support new clean energy projects to try to cancel out the environmental effects of your facilities plugging into a power grid that runs on dirty energy. Environmental advocates are increasingly concerned that this strategy still burdens communities with local pollution, and that the pressure to meet rising electricity demand from AI is boosting fossil fuel use rather than renewable energy. 

We’re seeing that tussle play out in Richland Parish, Louisiana, where Meta has plans to build its largest data center to date. It’s spending $10 billion on the project, the company announced in December. Once complete, the campus would span 4 million square feet, about as large as 70 football fields. But the project is moot unless Meta can ensure there will be enough electricity available for all those servers, a problem it’s working with Entergy to solve. Entergy proposed building three entirely new gas plants with a total capacity of 2,260 megawatts to support the data center, but it has to get regulatory approval first.

Some advocates contend that there hasn’t been enough transparency around Meta’s data center plans to help the public understand the potential impact on the local power grid. The New Orleans-based Alliance for Affordable Energy and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed a motion in March asking the Louisiana Public Service Commission to add Meta as an official party to proceedings over whether to approve construction of the new gas plants. Doing so would compel the company to disclose more information, and the commission is scheduled to consider the motion on Monday. 

“It’s hard to wrap your brain around [whether] a facility like this either might be good for your community or bad for your community without understanding the possible impact to your electrical system, your bills, and your water,” says Logan Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy.

There are already forecasts that rapidly growing data center electricity demand could raise electricity bills in the US. Meta said in December that it would contribute $1 million a year to an Entergy program that helps older adults and people with disabilities afford their bills. Data centers have also been notorious water-guzzlers, although Meta says it would invest in projects to restore more water than it would consume.

Sen. Whitehouse’s letter, meanwhile, asks Meta to answer a list of questions by May 28th. On top of questions about the data center’s electricity use and greenhouse gas emissions, Whitehouse wants to know what the justification is for building gas-fired power plants rather than renewable energy alternatives. And it presses Meta to explain how the proposal aligns with its 2030 climate goal.

Meta maintains that it’ll continue matching its electricity use with support for renewable energy, including a commitment to help fund 1,500 megawatts of new solar and battery resources in Louisiana. It also said it would help fund the cost of adding technology to at least one power plant that would capture carbon dioxide emissions. Whitehouse wants to know how much funding it will provide and how much carbon will be captured. Carbon capture tech has been prohibitively expensive to deploy and costs are often offset by using the captured CO2 to produce more fossil fuels through a process called enhanced oil recovery.

“We received the letter and look forward to providing a response,” Meta spokesperson Ashley Settle said in an email to The Verge. “We believe a diverse set of energy solutions are necessary to power our AI ambitions – and we continue to explore innovative technology solutions.”

Entergy didn’t immediately respond to inquiries from The Verge. It has a goal of making sure that 50 percent of its generating capacity is carbon pollution-free by 2030. But the utility said that gas “is the lowest reasonable cost option available that can support the 24/7 electrical demands of a large data center like Meta,” in a statement to Fast Company, which first reported on Whitehouse’s letter.

Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Friday afternoon directing the Department of Energy to “consider using all lawful authority to rescind” or weaken regulations for water and energy efficiency for dishwashers and washing machines. The action also includes water use standards for showers, faucets, toilets, and urinals.

It closes out a week of attacks on policies meant to save Americans money by incentivizing manufacturers to make products that save water and energy. Earlier in the week, CNN and E&E News reported that the Trump administration would shutter the Energy Star program as part of a “reorganization” planned at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Energy Star certifies products for energy efficiency, allowing consumers to choose the most energy-efficient home appliances by spotting the recognizable blue Energy Star label. The rules President Trump is targeting now are actually consumer protections, meant to ensure that any customer can purchase something that meets reasonable efficiency standards.

“Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.”

A White House fact sheet says the Secretary of Energy should work with the Office of Legislative Affairs to make recommendations to Congress on any water pressure “or related energy efficiency laws” that ought to change or be repealed altogether.

It also says the Secretary of Energy should pause enforcement of the rules mentioned in the memorandum until they’re rescinded or revised. “The Federal Government should not impose or enforce regulations that make taxpayers’ lives worse,” the presidential memorandum says.

“It’ll only raise costs for consumers to get rid of these standards, if they get rid of these standards,” says Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. “Congress enacted these laws, the president can’t just decide that they’re going to go away.” deLaski also notes that while the White House says it wants to get rid of “useless water pressure standards,” the rules mentioned in the memorandum actually target efficiency standards since water pressure depends on the plumbing system connected to the device. 

Trump also signed four bills approved through the Congressional Review Act undoing Biden-era efficiency standards for water heaters, refrigerators, walk-in coolers, and more. In April, the president signed an executive order to purportedly make “America’s showers great again” by rescinding an Obama-era definition of showerheads that raised efficiency standards.  

Update, May 10th: This story has been updated with more information about water pressure from Andrew deLaski.

Donald Trump wants to mine the depths of the ocean for critical minerals ubiquitous in rechargeable batteries, signing an executive order on Thursday to try to expedite mining within US and international waters. 

It’s a brash move that critics say could create unknown havoc on sea life and coastal economies, and that bucks international agreements. Talks to develop rules for deep-sea mining are still ongoing through the International Seabed Authority (ISA), a process that missed an initial 2023 deadline and has continued to stymie efforts to start commercially mining the deep sea.

“A dangerous precedent”

“Fast-tracking deep-sea mining by bypassing the ISA’s global regulatory processes would set a dangerous precedent and would be a violation of customary international law,” Duncan Currie, legal adviser for the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition that has advocated for a moratorium on deep sea mining, said in a press statement.

The ISA was established by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. More than 160 nations have ratified the convention, but the United States has not. Ignoring the convention, the executive order Trump signed directs federal agencies to expedite the process for issuing licenses to companies seeking to recover minerals “in areas beyond national jurisdiction” in accordance with the 1980 US Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act. A country’s territorial jurisdiction only extends roughly 200 nautical miles from shore.

The Trump administration wants to work with industry “to counter China’s growing influence over seabed mineral resources,” the executive order says. However, no country has yet to commercially mine the deep ocean where depths reach about 656 feet (200 meters) in international waters. There have already been efforts to explore parts of the ocean floor rich in nickel, copper, cobalt, iron, and manganese sought after for rechargeable batteries, though, and China is a leading refiner of many critical minerals.  

China responded on Friday: the BBC reported Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun as saying that Trump’s move “violates international law and harms the overall interests of the international community.”

The Metals Company announced in March that the Canadian company had already “met with officials in the White House” and planned to apply for permits under existing US mining code to begin extracting minerals from the high seas. 

California-based company Impossible Metals asked the Trump administration earlier this month to auction off mining leases for areas off the coast of American Samoa, which would be within US-controlled waters. Trump’s executive order also directs the Secretary of the Interior to expedite the process for leasing areas for mining within US waters.

Companies seeking to exploit offshore mineral resources argue that it would cause less harm than mining on land. Their opponents contend that there’s still too little research to even understand how widespread the effects of deep sea mining could be on marine ecosystems and the people who depend on them. Recent studies have warned of “irreversible” damage and loud noise affecting sea life, and one controversial study raises questions of whether the deep sea could be an important source of “dark oxygen” for the world. 

More than 30 countries — including Palau, Fiji, Costa Rica, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, New Zealand, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — have called for a ban or moratorium on deep-sea mining until international rules are in place to minimize the potential damage.

“The harm caused by deep-sea mining isn’t restricted to the ocean floor: it will impact the entire water column, top to bottom, and everyone and everything relying on it,” Jeff Watters, vice president for external affairs at the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy said in a press release.