Each year, Project Censored releases a list of un- and under-reported news stories. Part I appeared in the Dec. 26 issue of City Weekly and is available here. Part II continues below.

5. Abortion Services Censored on Social Platforms Globally
On the first Election Day after Dobbs, PlanC, a nonprofit that provides information about access to abortion pills, posted a TikTok video encouraging people to vote to protect reproductive rights. Almost immediately, its account was banned. This was but one example of a worldwide cross-platform pattern.

"Access to online information about abortion is increasingly under threat both in the United States and around the world," Women's Media Center reported in Nov. of 2023. "Both domestic and international reproductive health rights and justice organizations have reported facing censorship of their websites on social media platforms including Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok as well as on Google." South Korea, Turkey and Spain also blocked the website Women on Web, which provides online abortion services and info in 200 countries. At the same time, disinformation for fake abortion clinics remains widespread.

"Women's rights advocacy groups are calling the ... overturning of Roe v. Wade the catalyst for the suppression of reproductive health information on social media," Project Censored noted. "Hashtags for #mifepristone and #misoprostol ... were hidden on Instagram after the Dobbs decision, the WMC reported." Within weeks of the decision, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) wrote to Meta, Ars Technica reported, questioning the company. "The senators also took issue with censorship of health care workers," Ars Technica wrote, "including a temporary account suspension of an 'organization dedicated to informing people in the United States about their abortion rights.'"

"U.S. state legislatures are currently considering banning access to telehealth abortion care," Project Censored noted. "Furthermore, CNN reported that 'at the end of 2023, nine states where abortion remained legal still had restricted telehealth abortions in some way.'"

There are similar problems with Meta and Google worldwide, according to a March report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and MSI Reproductive Choices, which provides services in 37 countries. This sparked a Guardian article by Weronika Strzyyska.

"In Africa, Facebook is the go-to place for reproductive health information for many women," MSI's Whitney Chinogwenya told the Guardian. "We deal with everything from menopause to menstruation but we find that all our content is censored." She explained that "Meta viewed reproductive health content through 'an American lens,'" the Guardian reported, "applying socially conservative U.S. values to posts published in countries with progressive policies such as South Africa, where abortion on request is legal in the first 20 weeks of pregnancy."

Abortion disinformation is also a threat—particularly the promotion of "crisis pregnancy centers," which masquerade as reproductive healthcare clinics but discourage, rather than provide, abortion services. WMC reported on a June 2023 CCDH report, which "found that CPCs spent over $10 million on Google Search ads for their clinics over the past two years." Google claimed to have "removed particular ads," said Callum Hood, CCDH's head of research, "but they did not take action on the systemic issues with fake clinic ads."

"Women's rights organizations and reproductive health advocates have been forced to squander scarce resources fighting this sort of disinformation online," Project Censored observed, which has gotten some coverage, but "As of June 2024, corporate coverage of abortion censorship has been limited."

The sole CNN story it cited ran immediately after the Dobbs decision, before most of the problems fully emerged. "There appeared to be more corporate media focus on abortion disinformation rather than censorship," they added. "Independent reporting from Jezebel, and Reproaction via Medium, have done more to draw attention to this issue."

6. Global Forest Protection Goals at Risk
The UN's goal to end deforestation by 2030 is unlikely to be met, according to the '23 annual Forest Declaration Assessment, Olivia Rosane reported for Common Dreams in October 2023. The goal was announced to great fanfare at the 2021 UN summit in Glasgow, but the failure of follow-through has received almost no notice.

The same month, the World Wildlife Fund issued its first Forest Pathways Report, in which it warned: The two largest tropical forests are at risk of reaching tipping points. This would release billions of tonnes of carbon and have devastating consequences for the millions of people who depend on the stability of their ecosystems. It would also have a global impact on our climate and catastrophic effects on biodiversity.

The problem is money. "We are investing in activities that are harmful for forests at far higher rates than we are investing in activities that are beneficial for forests," the report coordinator, Erin Matson, told Common Dreams. To meet the 2030 goal would require $460 billion annually, according to the report, but only $2.2 billion is being invested. Meanwhile, 100 times as much public finance is "committed to activities that have the potential to drive deforestation or forest degradation," known as "gray" finance, the report explained. While the overall picture is dark, not all countries are failing. "Well over 50 countries are on track to eliminate deforestation within their borders by 2030," the report noted.

The report's lead, Mary Gagen, noted in an article published by The Conversation: "Global forest loss in 2022 was 6.6 million hectares, an area about the size of Ireland. That's 21% more than the amount that would keep us on track to meet the target of zero deforestation by 2030, agreed in Glasgow." At 33% over the necessary target, loss of tropical rainforests was "even more pronounced," Gagen reported.

Gagen emphasized four recommendations: 1.) Accelerate recognition of Indigenous peoples' and local communities' right to own and manage their lands, territories and resources; 2.) Provide more money, both public and private, to support sustainable forest economies; 3.) Reform the rules of global trade that harm forests, getting deforesting commodities out of global supply chains, and removing barriers to forest-friendly goods, and; 4.) Shift towards nature-based and bio economies.

Corporate media ignored both reports, though a Washington Post story discussed the subject a month after the reports were issued, but "made no direct reference to ... them," Project Censored summarized. In contrast, "International outlets, including Germany's DW and France 24, a state-owned television network, did produce substantive reports based on the Forest Declaration Assessment."

7. Gen Z Military Recruits Targeted with Lurid Social Media Tactics
"If the military was a great, honorable profession, then they wouldn't need to spend $6 billion a year bribing people to join," journalist and veteran Rosa del Duca explained. Nonetheless, 2022 was the worst year for recruitment since '73, when the draft was abolished. That's the background to Alan MacLeod's reporting for MintPress News about the military, "using e-girls to recruit Gen Z into service."

While MacLeod also deals with the army sponsoring YouTube stars—male and female—to "join" for a day as part of a whole spectrum of social media efforts, his main subject is Army Psychological Operations Specialist Hailey Lujan, whose online videos feature "sexually suggestive content alongside subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) calls to join up," Macleod reports. "The 21-year-old makes content extolling the fun of Army life to her 731,000 TikTok followers. 'Don't go to college, become a farmer or a soldier instead,' she instructs viewers in a recent video. 'Just some advice for the younger people: if you're not doing school, it's ok. I dropped out of college. And I'm doing great,' she adds."

Project Censored observed, "Lujan's videos seemingly violate the code of conduct of the image-conscious U.S. military, and it is unclear what role the military has in producing Lujan's content." But ambiguity is part of the allure. "What makes Lujan stand out is her offbeat, Gen-Z style humor and how she leans into the idea that she is a military propaganda operation," Macleod writes. "With videos titled 'My handlers made me post this', "'Not endorsed by the DoD :3' or 'most wholesome fedpost', she revels in layers of irony and appears to enjoy the whole 'am I or aren't I' question that people in her replies and mentions constantly debate."

"I can't believe she's getting away with posting some of this stuff," said del Duca in a MintPress interview. "Everyone learns in boot camp that when you are in uniform, you cannot act unprofessionally, or you get in deep trouble." The Defense Department didn't respond when MacLeod asked for clarification.

"[Lujan's] overt use of her sensuality and her constant encouragement of her followers to enlist make her noteworthy." Project Censored noted. "She is using her femininity to recruit legions of lustful teens into an institution with an infamous record of sexism and sexual assault against female soldiers," MacLeod wrote.

"The branches of the U.S. military are no stranger to partnerships with entertainment giants that traditionally engage viewers from all walks of life—as in armed forces' partnerships with the National Football League. But this new attempt to appeal to niche youth audiences has not been scrutinized," Project Censored said. "It is now well-established (if not well-known) that the Department of Defense also fields a giant clandestine army of at least 60,000 people whose job it is to influence public opinion, the majority doing so from their keyboards," MacLeod reported, adding that a 2021 Newsweek exposé "warned that this troll army was likely breaking both domestic and international law."

As of May 2024, Project Censored reported "no new coverage on this specific instance" that appears to take such lawbreaking to a new level.

8. New Federal Rule Limits Transcript Withholding by Colleges
More than six million students have "stranded credits" due to colleges and universities withholding transcripts to force students to repay loan debts. But a new federal Department of Education regulation will make withholding more difficult, Sarah Butrymowicz and Meredith Kolodner reported for The Hechinger Report in December 2023. Withholding "has become a growing worry for state and federal regulators," they wrote. "Critics say that it makes it harder for students to earn a degree or get a job, which would allow them to earn enough to pay back their debts. But the system of oversight is patchwork; no single federal agency bans it, state rules vary and there are significant challenges with monitoring the practice."

The rule was part of a package intended to "strengthen the U.S. Department of Education's ability to protect students and taxpayers from the negative effects of sudden college closures," the DOE said in a press release. It went into effect in July. Specifically, it prevents withholding a transcript for terms in which a student received federal financial aid and paid off the balance for the term.

"As Katherine Knott reported for Inside Higher Education ... the new policy is part of a set of regulations intended to enhance the DOE's oversight of institutions by providing additional tools to hold all colleges accountable," Project Censored explained. "But these protections do not apply to institutions that accept no federal student aid, including many for-profit colleges." However, "The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is also investigating transcript withholding, which the Bureau has deemed abusive because the practice is 'designed to gain leverage over borrowers and coerce them into making payments.'"

"It's a huge step forward, and it's really going to benefit a lot of people," Martin Kurzweil, an official at consulting firm Ithaka S+R, told Knott. The firm first identified the problem in a paper three years ago. He called the decision "stunning," given it was just three years since his firm identified the problem.

"That's lightning speed in policy terms," Kurzweil told Knott. "It speaks to the salience of this issue and unfairness in transcript withholding. I commend the Education Department for taking this so seriously." Practically, it's essentially a national ban, he added. "I suspect that for a lot of institutions, it'll be more trouble than it's worth to try to carve off a term that was completed but not fully paid for. It'll be administratively difficult."

Another expert—Edward Conroy, a senior policy advisor at the New America think tank, told The Hechinger Report something similar: that it probably helps all students, not just ones getting federal aid. "It wouldn't completely surprise me if one of the institutional reactions was, 'We're just going to stop doing this period,'" Conroy told them. "The number of students who are paying completely out of pocket isn't that big; you don't want to have separate administrative systems."

This has already been seen at the state level, Hechinger noted: For instance, in 2022, Colorado passed a law prohibiting withholding transcripts from students requesting them for several reasons including needing to provide it to an employer, another college or the military. Carl Einhaus, a senior director at the Colorado Department of Education says that most institutions found it too burdensome to differentiate between which transcript requests were required by law to be honored and which weren't and have opted to grant all requests.

Coverage has been limited as of May 2024. When the rule package was announced in October 2023, the Washington Post published a substantive report on the package, emphasizing the protections from sudden college closures, but only briefly noted the issue of transcript withholding. Early reporting in U.S. News & World Report and the New York Times (in a partnership with The Hechinger Report) did cover the issue. But the government's response has gone virtually unnoticed.

9. Acquitted-Conduct Sentencing Challenged by U.S. Commission
You might be surprised—even shocked—to learn that federal judges can determine defendants' sentences based on charges they've been acquitted of by a jury. But in April 2024, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC)—a bipartisan panel that creates guidelines for the federal judiciary—voted to end the practice as it applies to "calculating a sentence range under the federal guidelines."

The change will significantly limit judges' use of acquitted-conduct sentencing, as legal news service Law360 and Reason magazine reported. The commission voted unanimously "to prohibit judges from using acquitted conduct to increase the sentences of defendants who receive mixed verdicts at trial," Stewart Bishop reported for Law360, but was "divided" on whether its proposal ought to apply retroactively. There are still narrow circumstances where such conduct can be considered—if it underlies a charge the defendant is found guilty of as well as the acquitted crime.

Acquitted conduct had been allowed under a lower standard—if the judge found the charges more likely truth than not, rather than the jury's standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt." It's "a practice that has drawn condemnation from a wide range of civil liberties groups, lawmakers, and jurists," C.J. Ciaramella reported for Reason, which in turn has "raised defendants' scores under the federal sentencing guidelines, leading to significantly longer prison sentences."

But now, "Not guilty means not guilty," chair of the USSC, U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves, said in a press release. "By enshrining this basic fact within the federal sentencing guidelines, the Commission is taking an important step to protect the credibility of our courts and criminal justice system."

Project Censored noted that "Acquitted-conduct sentencing partly explains why two Black men from Virginia, Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne, have been serving life sentences for the murder of police officer Allen Gibson in 1998 despite being found not guilty by a federal jury in 2001," a case whose reconsideration has been reported on repeatedly by Meg O'Connor at The Appeal.

The initial travesty of justice in this case was that police hid exonerating evidence from their original attorneys, and because of that, they pled guilty to lesser state charges. That was then used to give them life sentences in federal court, even though they were acquitted of murder in that trial. An evidentiary hearing was ordered by the Virginia Supreme Court in February 2024, and the judge in that hearing allowed some new evidence to be introduced—but not all of it. Still, it's possible that Richardson could be released from prison.

There's been little corporate media coverage. Project Censored cited one story in Bloomberg Law, but nothing in the New York Times nor Washington Post as of June 2024. In addition, "Richardson's and Claiborne's cases have received nearly no national coverage by corporate outlets," except for a March 2023 BET report, "which addressed coerced confessions but not acquitted-conduct sentencing."

10. Generative AI Apps Raise Serious Security Concerns
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps carry considerable risks, some poorly understood, which can result in exposing sensitive data and exposing organizations to attacks from bad actors. In response, both government and businesses have taken steps to limit or even block AI access to data.

Congress "only permits lawmakers and staff to access ChatGPT Plus, a paid version of the app with enhanced privacy features, and forbids them from using other AI apps or pasting blocks of text that have not already been made public into the program," Project Censored noted. A follow-up regulation banned the use of Microsoft's Copilot AI on government-issued devices.

The National Archives and Records Administration is even more restrictive. In May 2024 it "completely prohibited employees from using ChatGPT at work and blocked all access to the app on agency computers." And "Samsung decided to ban its employees' use of generative AI apps (and develop its own AI application) in May 2023 after some users accidentally leaked sensitive data via ChatGPT," Priya Singh wrote for Business Today in April 2024.

Programs such as ChatGPT and Copilot are built by a training process that collects and organizes data, which can be regurgitated in response to just a snippet of text. They are then "aligned" with an added layer of training to produce helpful output—which is what ordinary users normally see.

But something as simple as asking ChatGPT to repeat a word endlessly can cause it to break alignment and reveal potentially sensitive data, Tiernan Ray reported for tech news site ZDNet in December 2023. Researchers from Google's DeepMind AI research lab found that ChatGPT "could also be manipulated to reproduce individuals' names, phone numbers, and addresses, which is a violation of privacy with potentially serious consequences," he reported. "With our limited budget of $200 USD, we extracted over 10,000 unique examples," the researchers wrote. "However, an adversary who spends more money to query the ChatGPT API could likely extract far more data."

And while training data itself can hold sensitive information, users are constantly adding new sensitive data that can also be exposed. In an article for ZDNet, Eileen Yu cited a survey of some 11,500 employees in the U.S., Europe (France, Germany and the U.K.) and Asia (Australia, China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea), which found that "57 percent of employees used public generative AI tools in the office at least once weekly, with 22.3 percent using the technology daily," and that "31 percent of employees polled admitted entering sensitive information such as addresses and banking details for customers, confidential HR data, and proprietary company information into publicly accessible AI programs (and another 5 percent were unsure if they had done so)."

"Corporate media have given a lot of breathless coverage to the existential threat to humanity allegedly posed by AI," Project Censored notes. "Yet these outlets have been far less attentive to AI apps' documented data security risks and vulnerability to hackers, issues that have been given exhaustive coverage by smaller, tech-focused news outlets."

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Salon.