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by by Filip Molcan
Exclusively upbeat news from the world’s forests, hills and meadows, with a sprinkling of digital minimalism, AI & startups. newsfromthewoods.substack.com
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- 2 weeks ago18 min
The people who were right about AI just published a plan. It's wilder than their predictions 🦾
In May I wrote about the people we didn’t believe ten years ago - and who turned out to be right. Now those same people have published a plan for surviving the arrival of superintelligence. It involves China building its datacenters in Canada, America building hers in Mongolia, and humanity handing over the keys to the machines in 2040.Two months ago I wrote here about the AI Futures Project team - the people who said strange things back in 2015, whom we laughed at, and who turned out to be terrifyingly right. I promised myself I’d keep watching them. I didn’t have to wait long. On July ninth they published a new piece called AI 2040. If you finished the last special thinking it couldn’t get any wilder...Same people, different genreA quick recap first. Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, and his team wrote the AI 2027 scenario last year - the one read by US Vice President JD Vance - which ended in one of two ways: either superintelligence wipes us out, or the future is run by a handful of people with AI under their thumb. Neither one is a win.AI 2040 is the sequel. But careful - this time it’s not a prediction, it’s a recommendation. The authors say so explicitly: this is the least bad plan we know of. Not what will happen. What should happen.That’s a fundamental shift. Last time they told us what’s coming. Now they’re telling us what to do about it. And by the way - they’ve moved the default timeline from 2027 to 2030. Without intervention, they say, fully automated AI research would be running in 2030, with superintelligence by the end of that same year. Plenty of people will disagree with that, but I’m passing it along as I found it. Daniel adds that things will probably move even faster than the scenario describes. Remember the Automated Coder from the last special? Its median is holding at mid-2028. Nothing has slowed down.Choose your pathThe most interesting thing about AI 2040 is the format. It’s an interactive website where the story runs year by year and stops in 2029. The world stands at a crossroads and you pick one of five paths. You literally click buttons. If you have some time on holiday, I recommend opening it on a computer or iPad (it doesn’t work well on a phone) and leafing through it like a good encyclopedia. What does the crossroads look like?Plan D - keep racing at full speed. America versus China, whoever gets there first. According to the authors, this is the default scenario, because it requires no decision at all. Just do nothing.Plan C - keep racing, but the leading project sacrifices at least a month of its lead on safety. Cosmetics. This is actually happening a little already (the US government slowing down model releases, and so on).Plan B - sabotage China, gain a lead, then use it for global dominance. It comes in two variants, the harder of which involves drone strikes on Chinese datacenters. Yes, you read that correctly.Plan S - halt development indefinitely. The authors admit they sympathize with it, but they don’t believe in it - sooner or later the race restarts anyway, and in the meantime nobody learns anything. We’ve actually been through a small version of this. Remember the cries from people like Elon Musk to “pause it all”? All it did was buy him time to invest more in xAI.Plan A - a deal. And that’s what the whole rest of the scenario is about.The authors attach an estimate to each path: the probability that it leads to a good future. Plan A got 42%. Plan B and the improved C around 25%. Plan D 10%. Even the best path doesn’t reach a coin flip. These people are not the optimists from a TV commercial. They argue that among bad options, there are less bad ones.And now the “best” part: the authors themselves estimate the chance that Plan A actually happens at three to fifteen percent. They wrote a hundred-page plan they believe will almost certainly not be adopted. Why? Because in their view, it needs to exist. So that when the crisis comes, it’s lying on the table.Plan A: slow down, open up, and booby-trap your own backyardSo what does Plan A propose? Three things, each stranger than the last for us mere mortals.First: delay superintelligence until 2040. In 2029, the US and China agree that the race to superintelligence is suicide for both sides. First they declare their compute capacities to each other, then they halt the training of the most powerful models, and finally they pull the rest of the world into the deal. AI keeps developing - but in a controlled way. In 2035, development pauses at the level of a top human expert and waits for safety research to catch up with capabilities. Only in 2040 do
- Jun 28, 20269 min
Special: Slow, and Above All Different. 30 Tips for Travelling Beyond the Crowds ✈️
Thirty concrete tricks for finding the places the crowds never reach - and for breaking the habit of collecting countries like stamps.I have one ugly habit. When I arrive somewhere everyone is photographing, I get an irresistible urge to walk in exactly the opposite direction. It’s not a pose. It’s more that over the years I’ve figured out one simple thing - the best of any place almost never stands in a queue.Travel has turned into a strange discipline over the past decade. We collect places like stamps. Ten cities in seven days, each one ticked off, photographed, uploaded. And then we come home exhausted and, oddly enough, remember almost nothing. Because we were never anywhere longer than one espresso and one photo in front of the right fountain - and, honestly, we often didn’t experience anything interesting at all.This special is about the opposite. It’s a collection of concrete, usable tricks. One idea ties them together: fewer places, more experiences. And a bit of nerve to go against the current.So let’s get to it.Before you even set off1. The twenty-percent rule. The traveller and writer Eric Weiner put it beautifully: estimate how much time you reasonably need in a place - then add twenty percent. Over the years he bumped it up to thirty or even forty, because as he says: “you can travel too quickly, you cannot travel too slowly.” Treat it as an antidote to an overstuffed itinerary.2. Pick one country, not three. Three weeks in a single region will give you incomparably more than three weeks sliced across five countries, four flights and endless repacking. Borders are not a checklist.3. Go on an “Instagram fast”. Try arriving somewhere without having seen it a hundred times beforehand. It’s a rare luxury these days.4. Don’t try to be a local. Be a curious foreigner. You won’t become a local anyway, and that’s actually an advantage - a foreigner notices things the locals stopped seeing long ago. Stop pretending you belong in the city, and start asking questions.5. Take the train, not the plane. For European connections up to roughly five hours, the train is time-competitive once you add in the whole circus around the airport. And a bonus: swapping a domestic flight for a train saves the planet around 86 % of emissions, and taking the Eurostar instead of a plane around 97 %. The scenery out the window is free. Sure, it doesn’t work everywhere - the Balkans, for instance, are a real adventure by train, but even that can be part of the experience.6. Skip the hotel, rent an apartment. Morning trip to the market for tomatoes, your own breakfast, wine on the balcony in the evening like a local, or down at the local pub. And if you do book a room, book it from someone local - no big chains. That’s the moment you stop being a visitor and become, for a while, a local. And you usually save money too.7. Don’t sleep somewhere new every night. Moving between hotels every other day is the fastest way to kill the slow-travel mood. Pick one base camp and explore the surroundings from there.8. Pick a town by, say, the Cittaslow label. There’s an international network of “slow towns” - municipalities under 50,000 people that deliberately reject rushed tourism.How to find the places the crowds never reach9. Hunt for beaches from satellite view. Before you go, switch your maps to satellite mode and look for small strips of sand between rocks with no name and no label. That’s usually a cove only the locals know about. It works surprisingly well.10. Read reviews in the locals’ language. Google now auto-translates reviews, so you can finally read what locals - not a tourist from Ohio - think of that ramen place. This is possibly the most underrated trick of all.11. Don’t judge a place by its stars, judge it by the visitors’ photos. Locals photograph the plates and the interior, tourists photograph the sign out front. Scroll through the photos before you trust the number above them.12. Use “search along route”. When your navigation is taking you somewhere, you can find a café, a viewpoint or a detour right while you drive, without leaving your route. The journey itself turns into discovery.13. Click on places with few reviews. Zoom in on the map and read the places that have only a handful of ratings - but good ones. Those are the hidden gems, just before everyone else “discovers” them.14. Alternative routes in your navigation. One of my favourite things is to take the alternative routes the navigation offers - even the longer ones. There’s often some interesting surprise along the way. Or nothing at all.15. Historical aerial imagery
- Jun 21, 202630 min
News from the woods #141 🐋
Business & Technology 👨💻* Meta needs data centers to develop the AI it doesn’t have. So for now it’s building them as “tent cities”.* There’s a jacket out there that makes water. One day we’ll go on a trek and won’t have to haul water with us!* ChatGPT is losing its lead fairly fast. Will the upcoming “super-app” save it?* Midjourney, known mainly for its AI images, is now trying to move into healthcare. It’s developing a full-body ultrasound scanner meant to create a 3D image of the body within a minute. Will it be another Theranos, or a real revolution?Travel 🧳* If you’re near Los Angeles, take a look inside this abandoned hospital.* Here are the 40 best newly opened hotels in the world.* If you’re feeling the heat, take a trip to Lapland…Nature ⛰️* Scientists have discovered (or rather re-mapped) a giant hidden network of underground fungi that stretches practically beneath the entire world and is seriously long.* Beautiful photos from Antarctica.* This one is truly unbelievable - 7 kilometers below the surface of the sea, scientists found a whale graveyard that stretches an incredible 1,200 kilometers. Hundreds of skeletons and remains up to 5 million years old. We want to go to space, yet the ocean floors still hold so many secrets…Unclassifiable 🧠* You’re playing the final scene of Romeo and Juliet, except a cat walks onto the stage. And the tragedy turns into a comedy.* The pyramids are built to be earthquake-resistant.* You know how it is - a car pulls up, drops off a package, but who carries it those last few meters to the house? A dog! A real, living one! Now that’s what I call last-mile delivery.* He’s 100 and still dancing. Inactive seniors face a lonely old age.* Someone founded a new country run by AI. It reminds me of a great film with one older, similar idea…Tips 💡What I'm reading: Zorba the GreekWhat I'm listening to: the sound of the seaWhat I'm watching: mountains aroundInteresting app: Firewood splitting - I’m mentally getting ready for summer.The sailing season in our village is in full swing. So if any of you happen to be sailing by, let me know!Thank you very much for your support and have a great day! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com
- Jun 7, 202626 min
News from the woods #140 🐙
Thanks to AI, the world is moving faster than ever. Anyone who stops learning is going to have a harder and harder time. Even though I try to “level up” a few hours every week, it still feels like too little. Time to kill the streaming platforms and stop watching content that gives me nothing in return. I’ve cancelled all my subscriptions except Apple TV, where at least there seems to be some basic effort to produce content with actual value. So instead of an evening series on Netflix, I’m trying lectures, podcasts, interviews…What do you think? Will I last? Anyone else want to try?Business & Technology 👨💻* A nice website has appeared that tracks whether AI has actually started making money for the big players. What do you think?* NASA wants to build a base on the Moon.* Drones - beyond delivering, photographing and fighting - can now also fell trees.* OpenAI no longer wants to publish research on the darker sides of AI. Hmm.* Nvidia isn’t slowing down and is betting its future on personal computers. I think we’re returning to a time when, thanks to AI, raw computer performance starts to matter again.Travel 🧳* What does a cheese bank look like inside?* How about a Pyrenees thru-hike this year?* Sell the house, buy a boat, live on it. Is it really as romantic as it sounds?* Heading to Sardinia? You might want to read this first…Nature ⛰️* A new species of octopus has been discovered in the Galápagos — fits in the palm of your hand and is absolutely adorable…* Want a proper aquarium at home?* And how about a proper greenhouse?* It sounds surprising, but after more than 100 years a wolf has reappeared in Sequoia NP. Yes — even in the American wilderness, humans had managed to drive them out…* Three hours of stunning nature footage with commentary by David…Unclassifiable 🧠* My son suggested that if I ever get bored at work, I should pick up this.* David Attenborough can finally play with Lego.* Police in California can now issue tickets to self-driving cars. The war with the machines has begun — first shot fired! :-)* Scientists have managed to freeze and thaw part of a brain. Immortality is close. Well — in mice, for now…* Ever wondered why an hour has exactly 60 minutes? Why not, say, 50?Tips 💡What I'm reading: Zorba the GreekWhat I'm listening to: the sound of the seaWhat I'm watching: my kids growing up far too fastInteresting app: MasterClassThank you very much for your support and have a great day! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit newsfromthewoods.substack.com
- May 9, 20269 min
The People Who Got AI Right – And the Rest of Us Who Didn't Believe Them
This week I read two texts that sent me out for a walk afterwards. I do that fairly often anyway, but this time I went even though the sun was blazing outside and all my Greek neighbors were asleep, saving their energy for the evening. The first piece is from the AI Futures Project team, which works on predicting when humans will stop programming. The second is by journalist Dylan Matthews, who – eleven years on – is apologizing to people he once dismissed as cranks. I’ll summarize them here, somewhat mercilessly. Anyone already afraid of the future is probably better off deleting this email now.The conference where weirdos stood at the lecternIn August 2015, the Effective Altruists organized a conference called EA Global. Among the speakers were Nick Bostrom (author of Superintelligence), Stuart Russell (a legend of computer science), Nate Soares (today the author of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies), and a still-fairly-reasonable Elon Musk. The topic: how artificial intelligence will sweep us all away.Among the attendees was Dylan Matthews, a journalist for Vox. He spoke there with a young engineer from Google named Chris Olah. With a philosophy PhD student named Amanda Askell. And with a programmer from PayPal named Buck Shlegeris.Dylan left the conference convinced that a promising movement, one that could be saving lives in Africa and chickens in cages, was about to destroy itself over a speculative fear of a technology that didn’t yet exist. He then wrote a rather tough article in Vox, framing that fear as proof that the movement was running away from real problems.This was August 2015. The Transformer had not yet been invented (and let me just note that one of the people involved in that breakthrough was our own Tomáš Mikolov), and OpenAI had not yet been founded. Nothing in the world resembled today’s ChatGPT.Eleven years later, Dylan writes: I should have looked more carefully.Chris Olah, in the meantime, helped lay the foundation of our present, named the entire field of mechanistic interpretability, and co-founded Anthropic. Amanda Askell works at the same company and is directly responsible for Claude’s personality. Buck Shlegeris runs Redwood Research, one of the most serious technical AI safety labs outside the walls of the big firms.Three people Dylan once treated as oddballs are today holding a piece of the global technological future in their hands.They missed the markAnd here is where it starts to get fun. Fun in the dark sense of the word.Dylan in his article mentions Leopold Aschenbrenner, a former OpenAI researcher who in 2024 wrote a series of essays under the title Situational Awareness. In them he predicted that by 2026, $520 billion would flow into AI infrastructure. Everyone tapped their head and called him crazy. Real-world investment is now estimated at $650 to $700 billion.We undershot it again. The reality is wilder than the wild prediction.Similarly, Ajeya Cotra and Peter Wildeford predicted at the end of 2024 what would happen to AI in 2025. Dylan writes: they were very accurate – and where they were wrong, they were wrong in underestimating the revenues of AI companies. Meaning, they didn’t err in expecting AI to grow more slowly. They erred in failing to dare to predict how fast it would actually grow.Anthropic? Annual revenue running at the $10 billion level. Tenfold growth every year. Claude Code, their programming tool, hit $2.5 billion in annualized revenue nine months after its launch. A product that isn’t even a year old.Revision to 2028The AI Futures Project team (Daniel Kokotajlo, Eli Lifland, Brendan Halstead) published a quarterly revision of its predictions. Daniel Kokotajlo is co-author of the famous AI 2027 scenario. Eli Lifland is a professional forecaster. These people predict the future for a living, not by crystal ball.What did they revise?They moved a moment they call the Automated Coder – AC. The point at which an AGI company would rather lay off all of its human software engineers than stop using AI for programming.Read that definition again. Slowly.It’s not about AI becoming better than programmers. It’s about companies preferring
- Apr 12, 202618 min
News from the Woods #136 🥾
Hey everyone, this is Filip and welcome to another episode of News from the Forest! Episode 136, and it’s a packed one. We’ll talk about how AI is reshaping schools — from typewriters at Cornell to a school with zero teachers in Chicago. How Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue. We’ll discover a brand-new island near Antarctica and find out how the war in Ukraine is devastating nature on a massive scale. And at the end, you’ll try doing absolutely nothing for two minutes. Let’s go.What do you tell your kid when you know the technology you’re building will rewrite the rules for an entire generation? The Wall Street Journal asked exactly this question to the heads of the biggest AI companies — Daniela Amodei from Anthropic, Jaime Teevan from Microsoft, Ethan Mollick from Wharton. And you know what’s fascinating about their answers? Not a single one said: learn to code.That Wall Street Journal piece really got to me. Because if I asked you — what should kids study to thrive in a world full of artificial intelligence — most of us would say: STEM, coding, data science. Makes sense, right? Except the people who are actually building AI are saying something completely different.Daniela Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the AI model that, full disclosure, also helps me produce this podcast — says, and I’m paraphrasing: “What won’t be replaceable is how you treat other people, how well you communicate with them, how kind you are.” This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is coming from someone whose company just surpassed OpenAI in revenue.Ethan Mollick from Wharton, who wrote the brilliant book Co-Intelligence, advises his teenagers to avoid hyper-specialization entirely. His logic is straightforward: if your job consists of repeating one specific cognitive task, AI will eventually do it faster, cheaper, and without complaining. The future, he says, belongs to people who bundle three or four distinct skills — communication, judgment, creativity, accountability.And that word — accountability — is key. AI can analyze data, write reports, propose solutions. But it can’t be held responsible. A human does that. And the ability to say “I own this” is, according to these people, the most valuable currency of the future.So here’s the paradox: the people building AI are telling their children — be as human as possible. Learn how to learn, be flexible, communicate, take responsibility. And above all — don’t be a narrow specialist, be a generalist.This theme — the tension between technology and humanity — runs like a red thread through today’s entire episode. Let’s start with how it’s playing out in schools.I’ve got three stories about education that seem to come from three different universes. And yet they’re all happening right now.Story one: Typewriters at CornellAt Cornell University, one of America’s most prestigious schools, a German language instructor named Grit Matthias Phelps does something once a semester that completely blows her students’ minds: instead of laptops, they find manual typewriters on their desks. No screens, no online dictionaries, no spellcheck, no Delete key.She started doing this in 2023 because she noticed students were submitting grammatically perfect German essays — thanks to AI and online translation tools. As she puts it: “What’s the point of me reading it if it’s already correct anyway, and you didn’t write it yourself?”And the students? Catherine Mong, a 19-year-old freshman, said: “I was so confused. I’d seen typewriters in movies, but they don’t tell you how a typewriter works.” One student was puzzled by the key labeled “Return” — and then realized you physically have to return the carriage to the beginning of the line. “Oh, that’s why it’s called Return!”But the most interesting observation came from computer science major Ratchaphon Lertdamrongwong. He said: “The difference with typing on a typewriter is not just how you interact with the typewriter, but how you interact with the world around you.” Without screens, no notifications. Without Google, he had to ask classmates for help. Suddenly, they were actually talking to each other. As he put it: “That was probably normal back then. But it’s drastically different from how we interact in the classroom in modern times.”This analog wave is spreading. It’s part of a broader national trend — back to handwritten tests, oral exams, pen-and-paper assignments. Because schools are looking for ways to verify that students are actually thinking.Story two: Sweden goes back to booksNow one at the national level. Sweden — a country that was a pioneer of digital education for twenty years. Every student had a tablet or laptop, textbooks were replaced with digital content. And now? A complete 180.The Swedish government is investing over 100 million euros to bring
- Jan 3, 202625 min
Startups and Brands You Didn't Know Were European 🇪🇺
The internet runs on European inventions. MySQL powers Facebook, Linux runs 96% of supercomputers, Bluetooth connects your headphones, and MP3 changed the music industry – all created in Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Yet when people hear “tech innovation,” most picture Silicon Valley, not Stockholm or Tallinn.This view overlooks a remarkable reality: Europe has created over 600 unicorns (startups valued above one billion dollars) and is behind technologies that form the foundation of modern IT, while continuing to produce some of the world’s fastest-growing companies.The narrative “Europe only regulates but doesn’t innovate” is misplaced. Yes, European venture capital represents just 5% of global VC (compared to 52% in the US). But this statistic masks extraordinary concentration of success. Sweden produces more tech startups per capita than anywhere except Silicon Valley. Estonia has more unicorns per capita than any other country in the world. And in 2024, the UK attracted $14 billion in startup funding – a year-over-year increase of 22% that defied the global downturn.True, not everything is rosy – especially in the AI era, we remain on the sidelines of the great US-China showdown. But I also don’t believe Europe is doomed to fade away or that nothing interesting is being created here. Let’s look at what interesting things could carry the “Designed in Europe” label...Foundational Technologies You Might Not Have Known Were EuropeanThe most surprising discovery isn’t about startups – but about the building blocks of modern technology.Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist at CERN in Switzerland, invented the World Wide Web in 1989. Linus Torvalds, a twenty-one-year-old Finnish student, released Linux in 1991 with the comment that it was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional.” Today Linux powers virtually all servers, Android phones, and cloud infrastructure.MySQL, the database under the hood of much of the internet (including Wikipedia, Facebook, and every WordPress site), was created by two Swedes and one Finn in 1995. Bluetooth was invented at Ericsson in Lund, Sweden – they named it after a 10th-century Danish king who unified warring tribes, and the logo combines his runic initials. MP3 came from Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute, where researchers persisted despite Sony and Panasonic rejecting the technology because “CDs work fine.”These are technologies that enabled the digital age – all invented by Europeans who are largely forgotten today.Classic European Tech GiantsSpotify – SwedenSpotify transformed music consumption from a Swedish apartment in Stockholm. Founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, it now serves 713 million monthly active users and 281 million paying subscribers. In 2024, Spotify reported its first annual profit ever: €1.138 billion. Ek’s personal fortune of $8.7 billion makes him wealthier than any musician in history – an irony not lost on the industry he disrupted.Skype – EstoniaSkype represents perhaps the most influential European tech story. While Swedish and Danish entrepreneurs provided business direction, the software itself was created exclusively by Estonian developers – Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn – in a former Soviet research complex in Tallinn where the USSR assembled its first computer. Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011.The “Skype mafia” that emerged transformed Estonia into a tech powerhouse. Roughly $150 million stayed in the country from various exits and funded over 30 tech entrepreneurs. Taavet Hinrikus, Skype’s first employee, co-founded Wise (formerly TransferWise), which now processes over $6 billion in monthly transfers.ARM – United KingdomARM, spun off from Acorn Computers in Cambridge in 1990, designs chip architecture found in 99% of smartphone processors. Over 300 billion ARM chips have been shipped. Every iPhone, every Android, every smartwatch uses ARM technology – designed in Britain.Fintech Unicorns Rewriting Global BankingRevolut – United KingdomRevolut, founded in London in 2015, reached a valuation of $75 billion in November 2025 – surpassing the market cap of NatWest, Lloyds, and Barclays. With 65 million customers in 48 countries and $1.5 billion net profit in 2024, Revolut has become Europe’s most valuable private company.CEO Nik Storonsky, born in Russia and trained as a physicist, conceived the multi-currency card when frustrated by exchange fees while traveling. His co-founder Vlad Yatsenko, a Brit of Ukrainian origin, previously worked at Deutsche Bank. Storonsky renounced his Russian citizenship in 2022 following the invasion of Ukraine.
- Nov 29, 202522 min
Why tech giants sacrifice children for growth
From Roblox’s CEO calling child predators an “opportunity” to Meta’s internal research showing Instagram harms teen girls, a pattern emerges across every major platform: companies know their products damage children and choose profits anyway. This report examines the evidence across Roblox, Meta, TikTok, and AI companies, revealing why self-regulation has failed and what parents need to understand about the forces shaping their children’s digital lives.The timing is critical. In November 2025, Roblox CEO David Baszucki’s disastrous interview exposed the mindset driving Silicon Valley’s approach to child safety. But Baszucki isn’t an outlier—he’s representative of an industry that has systematically prioritized growth metrics over children’s wellbeing for over a decade.The Roblox case reveals an industry-wide patternWhen New York Times journalists Casey Newton and Kevin Roose asked Roblox CEO David Baszucki about “the problem of predators” on his platform—used by 150 million daily active users, most of them children—his response shocked listeners: “We think of it not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well.”The interview, published November 21, 2025, became what the hosts called “the craziest interview we’ve ever done.” Baszucki grew increasingly combative, dismissing questions about child safety, interrupting hosts with sarcastic “high-fives,” and suggesting he wanted to discuss “fun stuff” instead. He even floated adding prediction markets—essentially gambling—to Roblox for children, calling it “a brilliant idea if it can be done legally.”This tone-deaf performance came as Roblox faces nearly 60 lawsuits alleging the platform facilitated child sexual exploitation. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s lawsuit accused Roblox of “putting pixel pedophiles and profits over the safety of Texas children.” Louisiana, Kentucky, and Florida have filed similar suits, while the SEC and FTC have opened undisclosed investigations.The Hindenburg Research report from October 2024 provided the most damning evidence. The short-seller’s in-game investigation found what they called “an X-rated pedophile hellscape, exposing children to grooming, pornography, violent content and extremely abusive speech.” Key findings include:* 38 groups openly trading child pornography on the platform* Games accessible to under-13 accounts titled “Escape to Epstein Island” and “Diddy Party”* Robux (virtual currency) used by predators as a bargaining tool to exploit children* Safety moderation outsourced to Asian call centers paying workers $12 per day* Over 13,000 reported instances of child exploitation in a single yearRoblox dismissed the report, noting Hindenburg was a short-seller (the firm has since shut down). But the company’s response—relying on vague AI promises while cutting trust and safety spending—exemplifies the industry’s playbook: acknowledge problems exist, claim technology will fix them, and resist any accountability.Meta knew Instagram harmed teens and chose growth anywayMeta’s internal research, leaked by whistleblower Frances Haugen in 2021, revealed the company knew its products damaged children—and prioritized engagement metrics regardless.The most damning finding came from Meta’s own slides: “We make body image issues worse for 1 in 3 teenage girls.”Internal surveys found 32% of teen girls said when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse. 13.5% of UK teen girls said Instagram worsened their suicidal thoughts. Meta’s own researchers compared their product to a drug, writing internally: “IG is a drug... we’re basically pushers.”Despite this knowledge, Meta assigned a “lifetime value” of $270 to each 13-year-old user and identified tweens as “a valuable but untapped market.” When employees proposed safety features—like making teen accounts private by default or hiding like counts—ideas were scrapped because they would “likely smash engagement” or be “pretty negative to FB
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