The federal government has introduced a new bill to parliament intended to make it easier to prosecute people involved in the illicit tobacco trade.

If passed, the changes to the Customs Act mean prosecutors will no longer need to prove an accused person knew the tobacco they were handling had been smuggled.

Instead, authorities will be able to point to the characteristics of the product itself – an implausibly low price, non-compliant packaging, concealment – to establish that it entered the country unlawfully.

The bill also expands powers to obtain documents and confiscate the proceeds of crime.

It’s the second Commonwealth bill cracking down on illicit tobacco this year. In March, the Combating Illicit Tobacco Bill increased maximum penalties and gave law enforcement the right to use wiretaps when investigating tobacco offences.

States have similarly expanded enforcement and penalties, introducing store closure powers, multi-million dollar fines and lengthy prison sentences.

There’s an emerging pattern. With few signs the sale of illegal tobacco products is being curtailed, each round of punitive laws seems to produce more rounds of even more punitive laws. It’s an escalating spiral of legislation, but with little improvement to show for it.

Read more:
Three things Australia must do to end the tobacco wars

The scale of the problem

On a superficial level, further expanding police powers and penalties appears to make sense.

Following the imposition of some of the world’s highest tobacco taxes, and the prohibition of vapes and other less harmful nicotine products, criminals have launched a hostile takeover of the nation’s nicotine trade.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently estimated up to 80% of all nicotine consumed in Australia is illicit. Annual expenditure is estimated to be up to A$8.5 billion – more than on cannabis, cocaine, ecstasy and heroin combined.

Competition among organised crime for these massive profits has prompted increasingly serious crimes, including more than half a dozen homicides, robberies and extortion targeting both legal and illicit retailers. As of Tuesday, we saw the 305th tobacco-related firebombing reported in the media since January 2023.

Even if smoking rates are falling – the national survey and the state and commercial surveys tell conflicting stories – it is a strange definition of success in which fewer people use nicotine while an increasing proportion buy it from organised crime.

Why enforcement is failing

The underlying assumption of the latest round of legislation is that a lack of penalties and police powers are the reasons for the ongoing growth of the black market.

This was the same justification provided for previous legislation prohibiting the commercial sale of vapes and the increase in penalties for engaging in the illicit trade.

The implicit logic is clear: legislate hard enough and criminals will get the message and exit the market.

But three years and $350 million in additional enforcement expenditure later, illicit tobacco and vapes remain easily accessible on practically every high street in the country.

This is not unexpected. Criminological research consistently shows it’s not the severity of penalties that matter, but rather the certainty of being caught.

This suggests the real problem is not a lack of police powers, but the extraordinary scale of the market.

With an estimated 40,000 retailers and millions of consumers routinely breaking the law, the odds of any individual criminal supplier being caught remain implausibly low. The new bill does nothing to address this.

Can enforcement ever be enough?

So, can enforcement ever feasibly be ratcheted up to have a deterrent effect?

Unfortunately, our experience with the broader “war on drugs” – and indeed the failed experiment with alcohol prohibition in the United States a century ago – suggests a resounding “no”.

Despite Australia’s ever growing, multi-billion dollar investment in enforcement, and yearly record levels of arrests and seizures, illicit drugs remain cheaper and more readily available than ever.

A big part of the problem is who the laws are most likely to affect. Assistant Minister for Customs Julian Hill claims the laws will target “serious criminals”, ranging from those “high up in the crime groups, mid-level operatives, distributors or those running and working in the shops”.

However, in practice, the new laws will almost certainly not affect those at the top of the criminal hierarchy, who rarely, if ever, would be caught handling an illicit product.

Instead, the laws will likely reach mules involved in transportation and those sitting behind a shop counter. These are the most easily replaceable personnel in any drug operation, and those who profit the least.

What this shows is a broader failure in our illicit drug strategy, one increasingly being applied to nicotine. Where a black market has already reached mass scale, the evidence shows further enforcement buys very little.

Suppliers pass the cost of seizures and arrests on to consumers, replace incarcerated personnel from a steady supply of people with few legitimate alternatives, and distribute through networks dense enough to absorb the loss of any individual node.

In other words, legal restrictions are not an effective barrier for organised crime – they are necessary for their business model.

Read more:
If recreational vapes are banned, why are there still vape shops everywhere?

Ever-expanding prohibition

The underlying driver of the illicit market is the restriction on legal supply in a context of strong, persistent consumer demand.

Without addressing this driver, the only option the Commonwealth has is to double down further on enforcement. This creates the sort of escalating spiral we have warned about previously.

What the government has not yet done is examine highly regressive tobacco taxation and its rejection of reduced harm alternatives. It should evaluate whether they are fit for purpose, ethically or practically.

The Coalition, One Nation, and a cross-party New South Wales parliamentary inquiry, including state Labor and Greens, have endorsed this re-evaluation, recommending both reduced taxation and reconsideration of the ban on vapes.

The division is therefore not partisan but jurisdictional, with the Commonwealth collecting the excise while the states are left with the mess.

The continued expansion of the illicit market in the presence of increasing enforcement, and the fact that millions of our fellow citizens have become unwilling accomplices in organised criminal activity, should be seen as evidence that current federal policies are ill-conceived.

Until that happens, the response to each failure of prohibition will be more prohibition.

Read more:
Cutting the tobacco excise won’t stop the illegal trade. This is how other countries solved the problem

James Martin receives funding from the Department of Home Affairs to conduct research into the Australian illicit tobacco and nicotine markets. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the funder. James has received data from British American Tobacco Australia for a research project conducted in conjunction with Victoria Police. The provision of this data was one-way and approved by the Deakin University Human Research Ethics Committee. British American Tobacco Australia received no benefit, consideration or influence in return. James also has an unpaid role as an advisor to the board of the non-profit organisation Harm Reduction Australia. This arrangement creates no obligations and in no way compromises James’ independence. James has never received any funding from the tobacco or nicotine industries.

Edward Jegasothy receives funding from the Department of Home Affairs to conduct research into the Australian illicit tobacco and nicotine markets. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of the funder. He is also a member of the Public Health Association of Australia. He has never received funding from the tobacco or nicotine industries.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/10/the-government-has-proposed-new-laws-for-tackling-illegal-tobacco-but-they-likely-wont-do-much/

Warmer weather has arrived and mosquitoes will be buzzing about before you know it. As El Niño is expected to bring an early start to summer heat, it’s likely mosquitoes will make their presence felt earlier than usual.

The threat of mosquitoes depositing flesh-eating bacteria has been restricted to a few parts of the country. But while rare, research shows it is now showing up in more areas – including in backyards in Melbourne’s inner city.

So what exactly is Buruli ulcer, where is it now found, and how can you prevent it? Here’s what we know so far, and what researchers are currently developing to protect against the bacteria in future.

What are Buruli ulcers?

Buruli ulcer is a skin infection resulting from the bacterium Mycobacterium ulcerans.

It starts as small and often painless inflammation after a mosquito bite, which may not be seen until months after initial infection. It transforms into a disfiguring ulcer after many weeks.

If left untreated, it can continue increasing in size with a loss of skin and muscle.

A buruli ulcer is treated with an eight-week course of antibiotics. Recovery can be much slower than expected for other common skin infections, with healing time highly dependent on the condition of the ulcer when first treated. It may take more than four months for ulcers to heal.

How do people become infected?

Mycobacterium ulcerans can infect urban wildlife, such as possums, which suffer symptoms similar to those in humans.

Recent research has shown mosquitoes pass the bacterium to people.

The mosquito most closely associated with areas at risk of Mycobacterium ulcerans is Aedes notoscriptus. Commonly known as the Australian backyard mosquito, it is widespread in Australia and commonly found in water-holding containers in suburban areas.

There may be other pathways of infection but health authorities have strongly encouraged people to prevent mosquito bites as the best way to avoid Buruli ulcer.

Where is it found?

Buruli ulcer has been reported in more than 30 countries around the world, including in Africa, South America and the Western Pacific.

In Australia, it has been reported in several states, territories and regions, including Victoria, Far North Queensland, the Northern Territory and New South Wales.

Victoria has been hit hardest, with 426 cases reported in the state in 2025 alone.

Victorian cases have mostly been reported from coastal regions but Melbourne’s suburbs have also seen an increase in activity. Inner north-west suburbs such as Essendon, Brunswick West and Moonee Ponds are part of the new cluster.

With the potential for more cases, and in more locations, surveillance beyond known areas of activity is needed.

Since Buluri ulcer became a notifiable disease in NSW, there have been six cases reported from the NSW south coast.

There was concern this was because the Victorian outbreak had spread to the state and could also spread to new regions. But genomic analysis suggests the NSW cases are from a separate outbreak rather than spread from Victoria. This raises questions about how widespread this pathogen may be and what conditions are likely to give rise to human infections in new regions.

How best to stop the flesh-eating bacteria’s spread?

Australian health authorities have recommended insect repellents and reducing exposure to mosquitoes for decades to reduce the risks of mosquito-borne disease.

But while health authorities might ordinarily consider insecticides to control mosquito populations, they’re not likely to be an effective way to reduce numbers of mosquitoes buzzing about the local suburbs in the long term.

New research in Victoria led by two of us (Véronique Paris and Andrew Buultjens) tested a novel approach to mosquito control and found evidence that reducing mosquito numbers can also reduce a person’s risk of contracting Buruli ulcer.

Using mosquitoes as pest-controllers

Special devices, known as autodissemination stations, are designed to offer a breeding site to mosquitoes looking for somewhere to lay their eggs. A stinky mix of water and yeast draws them in.

Once inside, the mosquito is exposed to a gauze strip coated with the control agent pyriproxyfen (an insect growth regulator) and Beauveria bassiana (insect specific fungus).

When the mosquito leaves the station, its days are numbered due to the fungal infection. But before they die, they’ll transfer the mosquito control agent to other water-holding containers as they look for other places to lay their eggs.

The mosquitoes become accidental pest controllers themselves.

How effective was it?

After eight-weeks of station deployment, mosquito egg counts (a measure of mosquito activity) were 70% lower in treatment areas compared with control areas.

Buruli ulcer presents an unusual challenge when trying to measure whether an intervention had impact on human disease because symptoms typically develop almost five months after infection.

To account for this delay, we had to work backwards to estimate when infection likely occurred and use forensic genomic analysis to determine which cases were acquired locally.

At the predicted peak of the mosquito-control effect, Buruli ulcer incidence was estimated to be 83% lower in the treatment areas than in the control areas.

The greater the reduction in mosquitoes, the greater the apparent protection from Buruli ulcer, providing further evidence that mosquito control can reduce disease risk.

The mosquito control stations used in the study are not yet available for purchase in Australia, but regulatory approval for their use is imminent and new products using similar approaches are also being tested.

However, in this study the control stations were deployed in high numbers, so it’s unclear what the impact of their use in a single household would be.

So how can you reduce your risk of Buruli ulcer this summer?

Current predictions are for hot and relatively dry conditions this summer in eastern Australia.

While this may mean there are fewer mosquitoes emerging from wetlands and other bodies of water, the mosquitoes closely associated with Mycobacterium ulcerans spread are found in our backyards.

Water will still be available for mosquitoes around the home in bird baths, rainwater tanks, blocked drains, sump pits and roof gutters, and water left out for wildlife. To prevent mosquitoes breeding in them, make sure you refill bird baths weekly, clear your gutters, cover water tanks, and empty and refill water for wildlife at least once per week.

It’s also a good idea to keep using insect repellents. Mosquito control, whatever form it takes, will never get rid of all the mosquitoes. Covering up with long-sleeve shirts, long pants and enclosed shoes when outdoors will also help stop the bites.

Read more:
Mosquitoes can spread the flesh-eating Buruli ulcer. Here’s how you can protect yourself

Cameron Webb and the Department of Medical Entomology, NSW Health Pathology and University of Sydney, have been engaged by a wide range of insect repellent and insecticide manufacturers to provide testing of products and provide expert advice on medically important arthropods, including mosquitoes. Cameron has also received funding from local, state and federal agencies to undertake research into various aspects of mosquito and mosquito-borne disease management.

Andrew Buultjens and Veronique Paris do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/10/mozzies-are-causing-buruli-ulcers-in-more-parts-of-australia-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

In the 1950s and 60s, artists, writers and musicians were drawn to the islands in the Aegean, including Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift, who took up residence on the Greek island of Hydra, as did the young Leonard Cohen.

In 1962, Melbourne-born Australian artist Leonard French spent six months on Samos, with his wife Helen, his son Marc, and me, then just a baby. While there, a fortune teller told him he would “decorate the heavens”.

It proved to be an apt prediction, and became a much-retold family story. In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) opened on St Kilda Road with my father’s monumental stained-glass ceiling illuminating its Great Hall. He had created what is still believed to be “the world’s largest cut-glass ceiling”.

The heavens had, indeed, been decorated.

One of my childhood memories is of my father laying out the thick pieces of glass on vast glowing light boxes, then adding sawdust in between the glass to see the effect. I also recall visiting the Great Hall while the ceiling was being constructed, and later lying on the floor beside him, gazing up at his work: the giant turtles at either end, surrounded by birds and partly obscured serpents, all facing a massive sun at its centre.

The NGV has just installed another work by my late father at the Ian Potter Centre, its Australian art museum at Federation Square. I had not seen it before, and coming face to face with it for the first time was thrilling; it is spectacular!

To view it, visitors ride the escalator to the right of the gallery entrance and slowly approach the work. It looks so perfect there, one could imagine it was commissioned for that space.

A key to deciphering a masterpiece

It proves to be a fabulous companion to the original NGV commission. Able to be seen close up, this window provides visitors with something unexpected: a key to deciphering the imagery of French’s Great Hall ceiling, one of Australia’s most familiar, yet surprisingly little-interrogated, artworks.

At the top of the new window is a figure with outstretched hands reaching to a blue sky. Beneath each arm, three birds fly upwards, signifying renewal.

The water, which is teeming with life, has a giant brightly coloured fish swimming in a turquoise sea, and a massive royal blue serpent with a vivid red eye, sliding upwards towards the figure.

At the bottom, three turtles surge forward. The exhilarating upward movement of the composition is beautiful and joyous.

Each of the motifs in the new window recur throughout French’s work. Here, the progression from turtles (land), through the fish (water), to birds (sky), give the work a powerful sense of regeneration and ascent, a spiritual and natural completeness.

From private home to public gallery

By the 1960s, Leonard French had achieved a degree of celebrity unusual for an Australian visual artist of the period. He appeared on the cover of The Bulletin in June 1967 and Life (Australia) in August 1968, and received a number of high profile public commissions, including the Alpha and Omega window at Monash University.

Growing up, I was aware of his fame.

NGV Australia’s window was originally commissioned by the late businessman and entrepreneur Gordon Barton for his private home. It was the largest of several windows my father created for the house, which he referred to collectively as “Gordon Barton’s windows” (here I will refer to NGV Australia’s work as the Barton window).

According to my father, Barton had admired his stained-glass windows at the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and commissioned him through architect Michael Dysart to create windows for his new home in Vaucluse, Sydney. The NGV’s window was originally commissioned for the stairwell, where it was installed around 1972.

In 2020, the Barton window, which had been removed from the house by subsequent owners, was offered for private sale by Leonard Joel auction house, where it was purchased by a philanthropist, who later donated it to the NGV.

Conservation has included removing white paint that had covered areas around the glass, allowing French’s original composition and the extraordinary luminosity of the glass to be seen again.

I am delighted that the window, more than half a century after it was created, has been placed on public view.

The Barton window has found a particularly fitting home at NGV Australia. The Great Hall ceiling is one of the museum’s most recognisable works, yet its distance from the viewer can make the imagery of turtles, serpents, fish and birds difficult to discern.

I have lived with my father’s images all my life, but for many viewers these creatures are hidden in what can appear to be geometric abstraction. The Barton window offers a new way into his visual world.

Lisa French is one of the daughters of Leonard French.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/10/decorating-the-heavens-a-new-leonard-french-window-sheds-light-on-his-masterpiece/

OpenAI has announced one of its unreleased artificial intelligence (AI) models has found an answer to one of the biggest open questions in mathematics, the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. The Millennium Prizes offer million-dollar rewards for solutions to seven notoriously difficult mathematical puzzles, and until now only one had been solved.

Mathematical problems at this level are extremely complex. A solution to the similarly difficult ABC conjecture ran to more than 500 pages, and it took mathematicians six years to understand it enough to spot potential flaws. Researchers can devote entire careers to these problems, in the hopes of getting close to a solution.

And this is what seems to have happened here: building on the work of several human mathematicians, OpenAI unleashed a swarm of 10,000 AI agents running a new experimental model, which churned through millions of dollars’ worth of computing power in the space of a few days to complete what the American Mathematical Society called “the final steps” of the solution process.

So what is the Navier-Stokes problem, and what did OpenAI do? And why are a lot of mathematicians impressed with the result but unimpressed with the AI company’s behaviour?

A fluid situation

OpenAI’s announcement concerns the Navier-Stokes equations, which model the behaviour of fluids such as water and air. These equations underpin modern science and engineering, but our mathematical understanding of them is incomplete.

To explain the problem, imagine looking at the flow of water, before zooming in with a camera. According to the equations, both the zoomed and un-zoomed water should look exactly the same, except that things will look a little faster in the zoomed-in view.

We know this can’t be right in the real world. If we keep zooming in far enough, we will stop seeing a smooth fluid and start seeing a teeming crowd of molecules jostling against one another. So the Navier-Stokes equations must break down somewhere.

The biggest concern is whether fluid swirls can shift their energy into smaller, faster swirls, accelerating every time we zoom in. If this is possible, then the fluid may become impossibly fast, creating a “blow-up” in speed (also known as a “singularity”).

We know this can never happen in the real world, but the Millennium Prize was about finding out whether it could happen in the equations. OpenAI found that yes, the Navier-Stokes equations do allow a blow-up under certain conditions.

A blow-up in finite time

As OpenAI tells the tale, their researchers heard rumours mathematicians at rival company Anthropic were close to solving two Millennium problems on September 1. They deployed their latest in-development model in an effort to crack one first.

After launching a swarm of agents, the model produced a solution in just 88 hours, with verification taking another 17. The result is a coup for OpenAI, which is trying to demonstrate the capacity of its models against those of its leading competitor Anthropic, as both companies head towards planned share market listings.

One of the rival teams closing in on a Navier-Stokes solution featured Anthropic staffer Levent Alpöge, who was collaborating in a private capacity with mathematician Tristan Buckmaster from New York University.

Read more:
‘hello there the jacobian conjecture is false thanx’: why a tiny social media post has mathematicians rethinking AI

As it turns out, OpenAI had contacted Buckmaster to discuss his work and theirs. In a statement published hours before OpenAI’s, Buckmaster said he and Alpöge had been using OpenAI’s publicly available models in their work for some time, and had been pursuing a line of thinking similar to what was used in OpenAI’s result.

He says he asked whether their data had been used by OpenAI’s model to produce its results, but received no answer to this question. Instead, he says OpenAI offered to collaborate with him if he removed Alpöge’s name from the work, because of Alpöge’s Anthropic affiliation. (OpenAI denies this claim.)

Other mathematicians have also raised concerns, with German mathematician Andreas Thom suggesting OpenAI’s models were hoovering up unpublished human work and presenting it as AI generated.

The ripple effect

OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes result looks like a big win for mathematics. But some mathematicians are not so sure.

US-Australian mathematician Terence Tao has been vocal in his reservations about some tendencies in AI mathematical research. He is concerned about “the indiscriminate use of powerful solution-extraction tools” to “achieve the immediate short-term goal of solving problems” at the expense of broader understanding.

OpenAI’s behaviour in this instance has also provoked alarm. Asking for an author’s name to be removed from work due to corporate politics is completely unaligned with scientific practice.

Moreover, as Tao put it, if AI companies jump on a rumour of promising work and throw millions of dollars at trying to scoop competitors, researchers may end up “no longer sharing any promising research with the broader community”.

This would destroy the principles of open and reproducible science. It could also remove the foundation stones scientists use to identify and solve the next wave of new, interesting problems. Why would you spend years on a problem if rumours of your work might spur an AI company to spend millions to beat you to the punch?

And that’s before we get to privacy and intellectual property concerns. OpenAI insists no specific user data was accessed by its researchers. However, serious questions remain about whether their model was trained on Buckmaster and Alpöge’s private work.

Companies and individuals around the world will now be re-examining how much they can trust OpenAI and other AI companies to handle their private and business data.

Meanwhile, the Millennium Prize conditions say prizes cannot be awarded until at least two years after the publication of a potential solution. For now, the Navier-Stokes problem is still officially unsolved.

Andrew Cullen is a Board Member of Music Technology Australia, serves on the World Intellectual Property Organization’s AI Technical Exchange Committee, and is the managing consultant at EthiCan consultants.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/10/openai-claims-another-huge-mathematical-result-amid-fights-over-credit-ethics-and-privacy/

Hearing loss affects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide. Close to 80% live in low – and middle – income countries, where hearing care is out of reach for most. In Africa, an estimated 136 million people live with hearing loss, a figure expected to more than double to 337 million by 2050. Yet fewer than 2% of people on the continent who need a hearing aid have one.

This shortfall is not a minor inconvenience but a major public health crisis. Left unaddressed, hearing loss drives costs across healthcare, education and productivity, falling hardest on children, whose language development and schooling depend on being able to hear. A 2024 Lancet Commission report identified it as one of the largest modifiable risk factors for dementia. The World Health Organization puts the annual global cost of unaddressed hearing loss at close to a trillion US dollars (page 10).

Despite this, access to care remains scarce. There are too few audiologists (fewer than one for every million people in many African countries), hearing aids cost more than a year’s income for many households, services are concentrated in cities and a persistent stigma keeps people from seeking help even where it exists.

Our research team at the University of Pretoria, where I head the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for the Prevention of Deafness and Hearing Loss – the only such centre on the continent – has spent the past decade pioneering ways to close this gap. Our latest study reviews a decade of evidence on whether hearing care can be delivered outside clinics, by people who aren’t specialists.

Our data shows that the pieces are now in place. Affordable devices, automated mobile testing tools and non-specialist training have each been shown to work. Together they form a care pathway that can deliver hearing services to most adults with hearing loss outside clinics – meeting people where they are.

Rethinking who provides frontline community care

The traditional model for fitting a hearing aid has barely changed in decades: a patient visits an audiologist, undergoes testing in a soundproof booth and returns for several follow-up appointments. That works reasonably well where specialists are plentiful. It cannot scale in places where the nearest audiologist is hours away.

What our work shows is that this no longer has to be the only way. Over the past several years, our research group and others have been testing a “high-tech, soft-touch” approach: training community health workers – trusted, non-specialist members of the community – to carry out the essential steps of hearing care themselves, using smartphones and tablets loaded with validated apps. This is already happening in three low-income communities in South Africa: Khayelitsha and Mbekweni in the Western Cape, and Atteridgeville in Gauteng.

The process typically runs through five steps: a tablet or smartphone hearing test; an ear examination using a small camera attached to the phone; a chance to try a hearing aid; fitting of an affordable, rechargeable device; and several weeks of support delivered by text message or WhatsApp. A remote audiologist checks the results without ever needing to be in the room. In several of our South African studies, a single visit was enough for a person to walk away wearing a hearing aid fitted to their own hearing loss.

Much of this evidence comes from work with the hearX Foundation, the non-profit implementation partner of our research centre. Led by audiologist Tersia de Kock, the foundation trains and manages the community health workers.

Does it actually work?

Community health workers have now fitted hearing aids for hundreds of adults across South Africa, and outcomes – hearing aid use, satisfaction, quality of life – are broadly comparable to traditional clinic-based care. In several of our studies, we found that more than 70% of people were still using their devices six months on, a retention rate that compares favourably with many specialist-led programmes in high-income countries.

Two developments have made this possible. The first is the emergence, largely over the past decade, of affordable digital technologies for ear and hearing assessment that rely on automated testing that can be facilitated by community health workers with minimal training. The second is low-cost preset hearing aids that don’t need individual programming by an audiologist and that increasingly use rechargeable batteries. This removes one of the most underestimated barriers to hearing aid use in poorer communities: reliable access to disposable batteries.

None of this means the model is perfect. Most evidence so far comes from small studies run by research teams, not from health systems delivering this care routinely at scale. Brazil and India offer a glimpse of what that could look like: both have built hearing care into their national public health systems at scale. We also don’t yet know enough about long-term outcomes when people select their own hearing aid programme rather than having one fitted to clinical hearing test results, called an audiogram.

And stigma remains a barrier that technology alone won’t solve. Some people see hearing aids as a sign of old age, and sometimes cultural beliefs link hearing loss to misfortune. Our recent review of stigma in low- and middle-income countries found that generic awareness campaigns developed for wealthier countries made little difference. What does work is education delivered by trusted local figures (community leaders, religious institutions, peer networks) and grounded in local beliefs and language.

What needs to happen now

The case for investment is unusually strong, even by public health standards. The World Health Organization estimates that scaling up ear and hearing care globally would cost less than US$1.40 per person per year, yet return nearly $16 for every dollar invested over a decade in health, productivity and broader societal gains.

What’s missing is political will. Governments need to fold hearing care into national health insurance schemes, remove the import tariffs that inflate hearing aid prices in many African countries, and invest in training and supporting community health workers. And the few audiologists there are should be deployed to train, support and oversee these community-based services.

Multiplying the reach of hearing care across the hundreds of millions of people still waiting will take more than good technology. It will take the same ingredient our research keeps pointing back to: someone in the community, equipped and trusted to help.

De Wet Swanepoel consults to and owns shares in the hearX Group. He receives funding from the National Institutes of Health, USA and the World Health Organization.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/fewer-than-2-of-africans-who-need-hearing-aids-have-them-but-new-solutions-offer-hope/

From the Vredefort Dome in South Africa (the world’s oldest and largest known meteorite-impact structure) to the volcanic lakes of the Great Rift Valley in Kenya, Africa’s landscapes hold some of Earth’s oldest stories. Morocco’s M’Goun Unesco Global Geopark records more than 200 million years of geological history, while Tanzania’s Ngorongoro-Lengai landscape brings together a vast caldera, an active volcano and the fossil record of Olduvai Gorge.

These places are not simply beautiful. Their rocks, fossils, caves, craters and river valleys preserve evidence of ancient climates, vanished environments, human origins and changes in the Earth’s surface. They are part of Africa’s geoheritage: geological features and processes with scientific, educational and cultural value.

Yet much of this heritage in Africa remains poorly documented and unevenly protected. Many countries lack formal inventories of important geological sites. Legal protection is inconsistent, public awareness is limited and responsibility is often split between geological surveys, universities, conservation agencies and tourism authorities.

When a place is missing from an inventory or map, it is also more likely to disappear online. It may never be photographed systematically, modelled in three dimensions or added to searchable databases. That makes it harder for researchers, teachers, visitors and funders to find. The under-representation of African journals in major academic databases deepens the problem.

I am a research fellow at the University of Western Cape, South Africa, geoscientist and founder of DigGeoNaija, which explores how digital tools can document, interpret and promote Africa’s geological heritage. In a recent study, I examined the visibility of Africa in the international literature on digital geoheritage.

A global digital transformation, with Africa at the margins

Around the world, heritage managers are using geographic information systems (GIS), satellite imagery, drones, photogrammetry, laser scanning, 3D modelling, virtual reality and artificial intelligence to record and explain geological sites. These tools can reveal erosion, quarrying and vandalism. They can also give students and researchers access to places that are distant or fragile, while helping visitors understand a landscape before they arrive.

Read more:
Fossil treasure chest: how to preserve the geoheritage of South Africa’s Cape coast

There are African projects that show what is possible. At M’Goun, researchers created digital records for 13 geological sites, combining photographs, location data and descriptions in an interactive map. The geopark also offers 360-degree virtual visits to selected geosites.

The African Fossils virtual laboratory is another example. Anyone with an internet connection can examine 3D models of fossils, ancient tools and other objects, many from the Lake Turkana region of Kenya. Lake Turkana and its surrounding basin are internationally important to the study of human origins because of the fossils and archaeological material discovered there. Some of the digital models can also be downloaded for 3D printing. This does not replace museums, local guides or field visits. Instead, it broadens access and can encourage deeper engagement with the landscapes and communities behind the material.

What my study found

I analysed publication records in Scopus and Web of Science, two major academic citation databases, searching for research about geoheritage sites. This was not a complete census of every African project, community initiative or unpublished archive. But it measured Africa’s visibility in influential indexed research on geoheritage.

The result was striking. The global Scopus search returned 885 publications, but only 31 were Africa-related. Web of Science returned 534 publications, of which 20 concerned Africa. In both datasets, Africa accounted for fewer than 4% of the results from 2001 to 2025. No African country appeared among the ten leading global contributors or case-study locations. Within Africa, publications were concentrated mainly in Morocco, Egypt and South Africa, with Ethiopia also more visible than most countries. Many nations with major fossil, volcanic, desert and impact-crater landscapes had little or no representation.

Read more:
Ghana has a rare treasure, a crater made when a meteor hit Earth: why it needs to be protected

This does not rank the value of any country’s geological heritage. The pattern probably reflects unequal funding, limited access to equipment, differences in institutional capacity, international partnerships and the greater likelihood that research from some countries reaches indexed journals.

The central point is simple: visibility influences what gets researched, funded, taught and protected. Closing this gap is about providing better evidence for conservation, education, tourism and local decision-making.

Why digital visibility matters

First, documentation supports protection. Decision-makers cannot safeguard what has never been identified or assessed. A geosite may be damaged by mining, road construction, uncontrolled collecting, urban growth or poorly managed tourism before its value is understood. Digital records cannot stop destruction, but they create evidence of a site’s importance and condition.

Read more:
Rock stars: how a group of scientists in South Africa rescued a rare 500kg chunk of human history

Second, visibility can create economic opportunity. Geoheritage can expand African tourism beyond wildlife, beaches and major monuments. When carefully managed, places such as Baringo and M’Goun can support local guides, accommodation, museums, transport, crafts and food businesses. The benefits must be shared with communities.

Third, digital resources make Earth science more relevant to African students. A learner should be able to study volcanic landforms in Tanzania, Nigerian inselbergs, Ethiopian fossil sites or Saharan landscapes through maps and models. Africa’s evidence also matters to global science. Without it, our understanding of Earth’s history remains incomplete.

What needs to happen next

The answer is not simply to buy expensive virtual-reality equipment. The first task is to build reliable, searchable inventories of geological sites. Governments, universities, geological surveys, tourism agencies and conservation bodies need shared methods for identifying sites, assessing their significance and recording threats.

There are foundations to build on. Unesco has supported capacity-building and aspiring geoparks such as Baringo. M’Goun has shown how field information can become a useful public map. In Nigeria, DigGeoNaija is developing a university-linked programme for GIS documentation, virtual interpretation and promotion, with Olumo Rock as an early pilot site.

Investment in people matters as much as technology. Young African geoscientists need training in mapping, remote sensing, drone surveying, 3D modelling, database management and public communication. They also need skills in preserving files, managing metadata, securing community consent and maintaining platforms after funding ends.

Regional collaboration could lower costs through shared standards, multilingual platforms, equipment centres, training programmes and repositories. Research searches must also extend beyond Scopus and Web of Science to African Journals Online, institutional repositories and national publications.

Most importantly, local communities must be partners from the beginning. Geological sites are often tied to oral histories, spiritual traditions, livelihoods and identity. Digital documentation should not remove knowledge or authority from the people who live with these landscapes. It should help them tell their own stories and shape decisions about access, tourism and commercial use.

Africa’s geological heritage has always been here. What is missing is consistent documentation, protection and visibility. With sustained investment, African leadership and community participation, these ancient landscapes can become better-protected scientific archives, living classrooms and responsibly managed sources of local pride.

The rocks already hold the stories. The task is to make sure people can find them, understand them and protect them.

Kamaldeen O L Omosanya does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/africas-rocks-hold-ancient-stories-we-need-better-ways-to-document-and-protect-them/

Renting clothing used to be restricted to a wedding suit or prom dress, but the options are growing and becoming more popular.

Today, you can rent clothes directly from other people through apps like By Rotation and Hurr, or go straight to high street brands such as John Lewis and Selfridges. Most clothing rental platforms are online only, so shoppers can’t test the fit, sizing or style before committing.

But in a recently published study, I examined, with colleagues, what people thought about renting everyday clothing, and how an AI chatbot with an integrated avatar could change how people choose rental clothing items.

The study used three focus groups and 28 interviews. People said they had a strong desire to use AI tools to see what clothing looked like on them, before paying for the rental.

The chatbot could be used by an online shop to engage with the consumer by asking about size, fit and what the customer wanted the outfit for. The AI chatbot could then save these conversations (if given consumer permission) for use in future sales.

Consumers could upload an image of themselves to the avatar to “try on” a selection of pieces.

One renter from our study called the idea “a welcome need in fashion”. Another said a chatbot could clear up queries about the hidden details of renting clothes, such as unexpected costs or existing stains.

The chatbot could also tap into consumers’ environmental values by sharing sustainability information about the rental item and renting more generally. Many gen Z consumers say they cared about climate change and sustainability, and this could be reflected in their clothing choices.

Moving away from fast fashion to rental requires a significant mindset shift. But as shoppers grow more comfortable with AI, chatbots could guide people toward smarter, more sustainable wardrobes, where they rent more and buy less.

Read more:
Visible mending: why showing off repairs is better than hiding them

One of the reasons why more shoppers might want to think about rental is linked to consumers’ growing awareness of fast fashion’s negative impact on the environment, such as the colossal amount of waste ending up in landfill or polluting developing countries. Over-consumption of clothes means that the sector is responsible for 10% of global CO₂ emissions and about 85% of textiles end up in landfill.

Rental should keep clothing in circulation for longer. There’s some evidence that by extending a garment’s life, fashion rental could reduce an item of clothing’s carbon, water and waste footprint by 20% to 30%.

Studies also show that chatbots can effectively encourage people to make greener choices. Our paper demonstrates how a chatbot with “green nudges” would share sustainability information. For example, it might say: “Save 2,700 litres of water and 3kg of CO₂ by renting instead of buying.” This data could be certified by an organisation such as the waste charity Wrap to demonstrate the accuracy of the information.

By remembering past interactions, a chatbot could also offer style advice and subtle prompts that encourage shoppers to step out of their comfort zone.

For instance, if you’re going on holiday a chatbot could create a good combination of clothing for you and save a lot of time, one gen Z shopper told us.

But some barriers still keep current consumers from renting outfits. These include hygiene concerns as well as fear of damage and cleaning fees and the feeling that renting isn’t mainstream enough yet.

Our study found shoppers also worried about whether rental clothing catered to different skin tones and colours.

Using AI to promote sustainability raises an obvious paradox. Studies show that the use of AI can have a large environmental impact such as the significant use of energy and water consumption.

But there are already some positive moves that show clothing rental is becoming a more widespread option. In August 2026, global charity Oxfam launched a pilot clothes rental scheme. The charity said it would give people access to special pieces, without adding to the wear-once cycle.

If virtually trying on clothes can make people feel more confident about renting, rather than buying, there is definitely potential to cut the huge amount of environmental damage that the fast fashion world is currently creating. It just depends on whether consumers are ready for that change.

Rebecca Beech works for Oxford Brookes University and consults for Oxfam UK. She received funding from United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/virtually-trying-on-clothes-using-ai-can-help-cut-fast-fashion-waste-study-reveals/

Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” is not for everyone – and it does not need to be.

But it does encapsulate a central concern in the philosophy of art: What makes something art, and who gets to decide?

Whatever our tastes, art can challenge accepted systems and make us reconsider what we think we know.

Duchamp’s friend and chess partner John Cage observed in 1988, “I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” “Fountain” embodies this thinking.

A version of “Fountain” is part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection and will appear in the museum’s upcoming Duchamp retrospective, which opens Oct. 10, 2026, and runs through Jan. 31, 2027. The exhibition will revisit Duchamp’s enduring questions about what art is and what it can be.

As an art historian and former Philadelphia Museum of Art staff lecturer, I have developed an intimate knowledge of Duchamp’s art through years of teaching his work. During and after my tenure at the museum, I presented 101 lectures and led 25 gallery-based programs. Some of these focused directly on Duchamp, while others explored broader questions about originality, authorship, intention, skill and value.

These questions are embedded in the remarkable story of “Fountain.”

Courting ‘ready-made’ controversy

The 1917 original “Fountain” survives only in photographs, but 14 authorized full-scale replicas followed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art owns the earliest, signed by Duchamp in 1950.

“Fountain” continued a press narrative about Duchamp’s work that had begun four years earlier when his 1912 painting “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” became a sensation at the 1913 Armory Show in New York City. Journalist Julian Street remarked that it resembled “the explosion of a shingle factory.”

Former president Theodore Roosevelt declared that a Navajo rug in his bathroom was “a far more satisfactory and decorative picture” than the cubist artists on display at the armory.

By 1917, Duchamp knew that controversy could compel audiences to debate what qualified as art. With “Fountain” that debate became part of the artwork.

Its story began with the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in April 1917. Duchamp had helped found the society and establish its democratic premise that every member could exhibit without a jury. He tested that principle by purchasing a porcelain urinal, turning it on its side, signing it “R. Mutt 1917” and submitting it under a pseudonym.

The organizers excluded it from the official display and placed it behind a partition outside the main exhibition area. Collector Walter Arensberg, Duchamp’s friend and fellow board member, defended it and reportedly intended to purchase it. Both men resigned in protest.

Alfred Stieglitz photographed “Fountain” at his 291 gallery positioned in front of Marsden Hartley’s 1913 painting “The Warriors.” The painting depicts a German military parade, and the title of the painting suggests a battle between old and new ways of thinking. Stieglitz’s photograph appeared in the May 1917 issue of The Blind Man, a short-lived New York avant-garde art magazine, alongside an editorial that argued that Duchamp’s act of choosing an ordinary object created “a new thought for that object.”

Duchamp called such objects “readymades,” a term historians believe he first used in a letter to his sister Suzanne dated Jan. 15, 1916. His first so-called readymade was “Bicycle Wheel” (1913), which joined an inverted bicycle wheel to a wooden stool. The lost original survives through replicas, including an authorized version from 1964 that’s held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“Bicycle Wheel” proposed that art doesn’t have to be handmade. An object can become art because the artist selects it and invites us to think about it differently.

Making the viewer part of the art

Duchamp studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and was fully capable of traditional drawing and painting. He arrived at the readymades not because he lacked technical ability, but because he prioritized art that engaged the mind over what he called “retinal art,” art that primarily pleased the eye.

Seeing “Fountain” in Philadelphia provides a key to two of the museum’s other great Duchamp works: “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” and “Étant donnés.” The eroticism that “Fountain” implied with its associations to bodily functions evolved into frustrated desire in “The Large Glass.” In “Étant donnés,” the eroticism becomes explicit and voyeuristic, as it asks viewers to peer through holes in a weathered door.

Duchamp’s nod to manufactured plumbing systems in “Fountain” also anticipates his exploration of mechanical themes. In “The Large Glass,” the nine bachelors form part of an elaborate mechanical apparatus. In “Étant donnés,” an electric motor inside a cookie tin rotates a perforated disc, creating the illusion of a moving waterfall.

All three works shift art away from a self-contained image and toward an encounter involving object, idea, context, chance and viewer. “Fountain” transforms plumbing through the artist’s selection. “The Large Glass” incorporates chance through cracks created when it was shattered accidentally in transit – damage Duchamp repaired and embraced. “Étant donnés” incorporates found materials, including an old wooden door Duchamp obtained in Cadaqués, the Catalonian village where he and his wife, Alexina “Teeny” Duchamp, spent their summers.

Together, the works demonstrate that art can be a question to contemplate, a system to decipher, or an experience our actions complete. Seen together in Philadelphia, they reveal how consistently Duchamp made the viewer central to artistic meaning.

It’s OK to laugh – or scowl

Despite its philosophical seriousness, “Fountain” is deliberately absurd and comical. It is appropriate to laugh. I’ve seen viewers even get angry and irritated. Its irreverent humor, provocation and rejection of artistic convention place it within Dada, a movement that began at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 as an absurdist protest against the nationalism and supposedly rational values that had led to World War I. Dada became an international movement active in Berlin, Paris and New York, and it transformed modern art.

The legacy of the readymades, especially “Fountain,” is difficult to overstate. They paved the way for Louise Nevelson, who transformed discarded pieces of wood into monumental assemblages, and Andy Warhol, who elevated Campbell’s soup cans into icons of American culture. Maurizio Cattelan addressed Fountain directly in 2016 with “America,” a fully functioning toilet cast in 18-karat gold.

Nearly a century later, Cattelan echoed Duchamp’s questions about where artistic value resides: Is it in the object, its material, its price, its context, the artist’s idea or the institution declaring it art?

This leads to the great paradox of Duchamp’s legacy. Art conceived to challenge permanence, originality and inherent value has itself become permanent, invaluable and iconic.

Read more of our stories about Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, or sign up for our Philadelphia newsletter on Substack.

Matthew Palczynski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/fountain-might-make-you-laugh-or-scowl-but-asks-important-questions-a-philly-art-historian-explains-why-marcel-duchamps-iconic-1917-sculpture-still-provokes/

The Hawaiian Islands rarely see significant hurricane damage, but they just experienced the effects of their second hurricane in a year as Hurricane Lowell’s eyewall brushed Niihau, west of Kauai, on Sept. 8, 2026.

The hurricane brought heavy downpours, high surf and hurricane-force wind gusts that pounded both islands, knocking out power and flooding roads. Tropical storm conditions reached as far as Honolulu on the island of Oahu.

Lowell was the 14th named Pacific storm of 2026 and the fifth hurricane. The one that formed right after it, Hurricane Marie, sent big waves to Southern California, eroding coastal areas, and the Pacific hurricane season doesn’t end until Nov. 30. By some metrics, the season has had the most active start since 2021.

In August, a near-miss by Hurricane Lala brought hurricane-force winds to the Hawaii’s Big Island for the first time since 1871.

People joke that the Hawaiian Islands have a force field keeping hurricanes away. But this year, a few things are keeping that force field down. I’m one of the few atmospheric scientists whose research focuses on Pacific hurricanes. Here’s what I’m seeing in the eastern and central Pacific basins this year.

2 reasons Hawaii is typically spared

For decades, Hawaii was thought of as a special place that somehow dodged hurricanes despite its tropical location. While it lies at a similar latitude to other hurricane-prone regions, such as the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico or the Bahamas, significant hurricane damage is rare there.

Hurricanes Dot (1959), Iwa (1982), Iniki (1992) and Lane (2018) were the most notable storms in the islands’ recorded history.

Iniki is often considered the worst: Its 145 mph wind gusts damaged about 70% of Kauai’s homes and businesses and more than 550 buildings on Oahu.

There are two reasons for Hawaii’s lack of more frequent hurricane impacts.

First, Hawaii is a pretty small target over the vast Pacific Ocean. The probability of a hurricane passing over any particular point is low, especially farther from the Mexican coast, since most Pacific hurricanes tend to stay closer to Mexico.

Second, the ocean itself forms a hurricane shield of sorts for the islands. The ocean has cooler water temperatures to the east, where most storms approaching the islands come from. Without warm oceans to provide fuel, hurricanes tend to weaken and fizzle out as they approach the islands.

Hawaii is often affected by weaker and decaying tropical systems, but their impacts are typically limited to localized flooding and large waves. That’s what Hawaii saw from Hurricane Kiko in 2025 as it weakened passing north of the islands.

In 2026, Lala also approached the islands from the east, but it stayed at a lower latitude, which allowed the storm to intensify over warmer-than-normal waters. Most of the storms that approach the islands from the east are forced to battle the normal “shield” of cooler ocean temperatures located to the east of the islands.

Lowell, like Dot, Iniki, and Lane, took a different journey this year. While all four of those storms developed to the east-southeast of the islands, they all tracked south of the islands before making a sharp turn toward the north or northwest to head toward Hawaii.

Dot and Iniki made landfall on Kauai, one of the westernmost islands. Iniki was the only known landfall of a major hurricane – a Category 3 storm or higher – in the state.

In 2018, Hurricane Lane turned toward Oahu, but it weakened due to increasingly hostile atmospheric conditions – including increased vertical wind shear, with faster winds near the top of the storm than the bottom, making it harder for the storm to keep its organized structure – and a drier, more stable air mass. While it didn’t make landfall, Lane still brought record-breaking rainfall to the islands, with as much as 58 inches (1.47 meters) falling on the Big Island.

Why Lowell made a sharp turn south of Hawaii

In the eastern and central Pacific, the most common tropical storm track is a nearly straight line toward the west, driven by an atmospheric feature known as the Hawaiian High or subtropical ridge. This semipermanent high-pressure system sits to the northeast of Hawaii.

The Hawaiian High’s sinking air makes it harder for hurricanes to draw heat and moisture from the ocean. The result is pleasant conditions for the islands while hurricanes are steered around the edge of the high-pressure system.

The typical pattern around the high directs storms to the west, missing the islands. However, occasionally, low-pressure troughs can migrate southward and turn a storm toward the north, increasing its acceleration in the process, as happened with Lowell.

The role of El Niño

Another important player on the Pacific hurricane scene is El Niño.

During strong El Niño years, like 2026, the tropical Pacific is much warmer than normal. The ocean tends to be busier with hurricanes during El Niño, while the Atlantic is typically quieter – as we’re seeing in 2026.

Researchers at the University of Hawaii-Manoa identified a significant increase in the frequency and likelihood of tropical cyclones in the vicinity of Hawaii during El Niño years compared with other years. They hypothesize that El Niño years favor more Hawaiian systems due to increases in atmospheric humidity and favorable wind patterns in the region.

The most notable change during El Niño years is the warmer-than-normal ocean temperatures, particularly to the south and east of Hawaii. These warmer temperatures supported Lala intensifying into Category 1 hurricane as it approached the Big Island from the east and passed just south of the chain.

Multiple studies have also noted that increases in hurricane activity across the western portion of the eastern Pacific and the central Pacific generally are seen during El Niño years as well, such as in 2015.

What’s likely for the rest of the Pacific season?

Generally, as the season progresses into fall, hurricanes near Hawaii become less likely, while the risk of hurricane landfalls rises for the Pacific coast of Mexico.

In recent years, several powerful Pacific storms have made landfall in Mexico, including Hurricanes Willa (2018), Roslyn (2022) and Otis (2023), all of which hit during the last third of October.

The Atlantic, meanwhile, is forecast to remain much less active than normal, even through the peak months of its 2026 hurricane season.

Nicholas Grondin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/a-second-hurricane-just-sideswiped-hawaii-why-the-islands-usual-force-field-seems-to-be-down-in-2026/

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced a civil lawsuit against TikTok on Aug. 11, 2026, filed in Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas and accusing the social media platform of violating state consumer protection laws in ways that harm youth.

There are two central charges.

One is deceit: for example, making false statements about how much of TikTok’s content contains mature themes, and about the ability of its guardrails to protect youth from that content.

The second alleges that “TikTok knowingly created platform features intended to cause excessive, compulsive, and addictive use, despite knowing that young people are more susceptible to – and acutely harmed by – those features.” Those features include infinite scrolling, autoplay and push notifications designed to trigger the release of dopamine, the neurotransmitter that drives the brain’s reward system.

The company rejects the charges. In a statement to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star, a spokesperson for TikTok said, “This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community.”

I’m a public policy professor, not a lawyer, so I won’t predict who’ll win in court. But after nearly 40 years studying how addictive products are marketed, I agree that goods and services that lead to compulsive behaviors – whether scrolling or smoking – deserve special scrutiny. However, they do not fall neatly into binaries such as being addictive or not, or dangerous for youth but safe for adults. Lawsuits that find defendants liable or not liable risk imposing black-and-white distinctions on trade-offs that require nuanced thinking.

Binary thinking doesn’t work

There is a long history of binary thinking about addictive goods.

Drugs such as heroin were seen as dangerous and bad, so they were banned.

Most everything else was good, or at least neutral. The government might tax and regulate, but traditionally it does not focus on protecting consumers from the consequences of overindulgence. The health department may regulate what goes into a doughnut, but not how many doughnuts go into you.

Reality is closer to a continuum. Alcohol, nicotine and caffeine are psychoactive chemicals that can cause varying degrees of problems, but they were never lumped together with heroin. And even when cannabis was prohibited, neither sentencing guidelines nor the public equated its dangers with crack. The public was sophisticated enough to know that some drugs cause more harm.

Gambling also challenges black-and-white thinking. It triggers neural pathways similar to those activated by drug addiction, and the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual recognizes that it can produce compulsive, self-destructive behavior even without a drug involved. Yet no compulsion-inducing product – not even the powerful synthetic opioid fentanyl – always induces addictive or self-destructive behavior. After all, many patients have “used” fentanyl during surgery.

Countries regulate gambling with that variation in mind. Until recent decades, the U.S. banned commercial sports betting. Japan limits casino visits to a set number per week or month. Norway permits gambling only via state monopolies aimed at preventing gambling problems and at funneling profits to nonprofits.

I’m not arguing that Japan’s or Norway’s gambling policies are right, or that the U.S. should follow Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia in blocking youth social media accounts. I’m only suggesting such actions merit real debate, not automatic dismissal.

Binary distinctions between bad and good don’t work because products and their features vary widely in how likely they are to cause regrettable, repetitive engagement. Free societies rightly presume that adults can manage their own affairs without government interference – but children are a different matter, and even adult freedom has exceptions.

Is TikTok engineered to addict?

Pennsylvania’s lawsuit charges that TikTok is engineered to trap users and thereby maximize the time they spend generating revenue for the company. That is reminiscent of cigarette manufacturers intentionally modifying chemical formulations, such as adding ammonia compounds, to enhance the speed and efficiency of nicotine absorption to maintain user addiction.

On the other hand, keeping users continuously engaged – through casino floor design, gym membership contracts or automated billing for subscriptions – is a mainstream strategy across industries. Plenty of legal, respected organizations use it to maximize profit.

Likewise, reputable studies also find some degree of dopamine response to video games, milkshakes and even music. The intensity of that response is far lower than what drugs such as cocaine or heroin produce, but it illustrates that one should not leap from the mere existence of a dopamine response to a reflexive ban.

Ideally, legislatures would strike a balance between freedom and protecting the minority who’d misuse it. But lately, state and national legislatures have been stalled by partisan division, swayed by commercial interests and reluctant to pass new restrictions.

When courts do the regulating

Given this legislative lethargy, state attorneys general sometimes step in to protect the public from companies that exploit compulsion-inducing products. Pittsburgh Public Schools made a similar case years before Sunday’s lawsuit: The district sued TikTok and other social media platforms in federal court, arguing the companies induced students to “compulsively use their services” and left the district to absorb the resulting mental health costs. That case, consolidated with similar suits from districts nationwide, ended when TikTok settled rather than go to trial this spring – a resolution that came just months before Pennsylvania filed its own case making a similar addictive-by-design argument.

Important elements of modern tobacco control came not from Congress but from the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement. This agreement resolved lawsuits brought by state attorneys general against major cigarette manufacturers. It also eliminated cigarette billboard ads, cartoon mascots like Joe Camel, most free samples and tobacco-brand sponsorships, and it banned cigarette marketing aimed at youth. Congress didn’t give the FDA broad authority over tobacco until a decade later, in 2009.

The opioid crisis provides a more recent example. Settlements of lawsuits against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacy chains imposed not only billion-dollar fines but also rules governing future conduct. Johnson & Johnson agreed to stop selling and promoting opioids for 10 years. Major drug distributors agreed to stronger systems for identifying suspicious wholesale opioid orders and sharing distribution data, while CVS, Walgreens and Walmart agreed to systems for flagging suspicious opioid prescriptions. Litigation accomplished some of the work ordinarily associated with regulation.

Regulation by litigation has drawbacks. Courts and attorneys general are no substitute for legislatures and expert regulatory agencies. But when conventional regulation fails to keep pace with powerful new products capable of inducing self-destructive, compulsive consumption, courts offer another route.

The path Attorney General Sunday has now opened may prove long and contentious, but the TikTok suit could come to be seen as the beginning of an important new layer of public protection against compulsion-inducing product design.

Jonathan Caulkins receives funding from The National Science Foundation and is an adjunct researcher with the RAND Corporation. The opinions expressed here are those of Caulkins alone, and do not reflect the views of either Carnegie Mellon University or RAND.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/pennsylvania-is-suing-tiktok-over-addictive-features-a-policy-expert-explains-why-its-messier-than-that-sounds/

Most days, you can look up and see the Sun shining above. Even if it’s hidden behind clouds, you know it’s there, lighting up the sky. But while the Sun’s light might be relatively constant, its surface is surprisingly active. If you hopped on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe for a closeup view of the Sun, you might see spurts of charged gas called solar flares coming off its surface, or dramatic explosions called coronal mass ejections. These events travel outward from the Sun through space, and sometimes they interact with Earth’s magnetic field, causing space weather.

This week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is tracking several coronal mass ejections that could lead to a minor geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere. People in Canada and the northern United States may be able to see an aurora the evening of Sept. 9, 2026.

The Conversation U.S. has compiled some articles from our archives on space weather, from the science behind how the phenomenon works to how researchers are working to better understand it – and even predict it.

1. What is space weather?

Solar flares and coronal mass ejections are made up of plasma: electrically charged gas. After they explode off the Sun’s surface, they travel through space and may eventually reach Earth. When they run into Earth’s atmosphere, they interact with the magnetic field shrouding our planet.

As explained by Yeimy J. Rivera, Rosa Tatiana Niembro Hernández and Samuel Badman – a team of astrophysicists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory – this collision with the magnetic field causes space weather, or geomagnetic storms, which produce the northern lights: the beautiful streaks of green or purple you may have had the chance to see across the sky last year.

The Sun also produces the solar wind, which is much different from a breeze you might feel on Earth. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles and magnetic field lines ejected from the Sun. Many scientists are interested in how interactions between coronal mass ejections, the solar wind and Earth’s magnetic field influence geomagnetic storms.

Read more:
What are solar storms and the solar wind? 3 astrophysicists explain how particles coming from the Sun interact with Earth

2. Space weather and technology on Earth

While space weather may look beautiful, it can also be very destructive. These events add more particles into Earth’s atmosphere, which can increase drag on satellites and cause them to fall. They also disrupt the radio waves that some satellites use to communicate with Earth.

GPS is one type of technology that uses radio waves. Many facets of modern life rely on GPS – not just the map apps on your phone or in your car.

“For many industries – aviation, maritime, robotics, transportation, farming, military and others – GPS positioning errors of a few meters are simply not tenable,” wrote Piyush Mehta, an aerospace engineer at West Virginia University.

2025’s space weather events disrupted some satellite communications and even triggered overheating alarms for power grids. But history can tell you that some space weather events are far more severe: A strong enough space weather event could do far worse than disrupt satellite communications for a few minutes.

Read more:
Solar storms can destroy satellites with ease – a space weather expert explains the science

3. Space weather throughout history

Over a century ago, in 1859, a large solar flare outshone the Sun, wrote Dagomar Degroot, an environmental historian at Georgetown University. Telegraph lines – still very new at the time – shorted out, and that night, bright auroras lit up the sky.

Since then, technology has advanced past the telegraph. Beyond satellites, a strong enough solar storm could disrupt cell networks and electrical power grids. These systems underlie communications, transportation, utilities – even the sewer systems.

“For now, one thing is certain: to protect these networks, scientists must monitor the Sun in real time,” Degroot wrote. “That way, operators can reduce or reroute the electricity flowing through grids when a coronal mass ejection approaches. A little preparation may prevent a collapse.”

Read more:
Solar storms have influenced our history – an environmental historian explains how they could also threaten our future

4. Studying space weather

Space agencies across the globe have a suite of missions that monitor the Sun and the flares and ejections it produces. In 2025, NASA launched a few more. As Ryan French, a solar physicist at the University of Colorado Boulder, described, together these instruments will monitor space weather from different vantage points, to learn more about how these events are created and how they travel.

In March 2025, NASA launched the Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere, made up of four satellites in Earth’s orbit that study how the Sun’s outer surface layer creates the solar wind.

Then, in September, NASA launched two more missions: the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, and the Carruthers Geocorona Observatory.

Both IMAP and Carruthers traveled out to the L1 Lagrange point, which is a spot between Earth and the Sun where the two celestial bodies’ gravitational pulls balance out. Spacecraft orbiting here get a great view of the Sun, and the gravitational balance means they don’t need to constantly use fuel to stay in position.

IMAP will study the solar wind and map how far particles ejected from the Sun reach into space. Carruthers, on the other hand, will turn its sights back on Earth. It will observe what happens to the outer layer of Earth’s atmosphere during space weather events.

Next year, in 2027, NASA plans to launch another complementary mission called the Sun Coronal Ejection Tracker. This mission will watch how coronal mass ejections change as they are ejected from the Sun.

All these missions will help scientists monitor and respond to space weather events – and the latter goal will only grow more important.

Read more:
2 newly launched NASA missions will help scientists understand the influence of the Sun, both from up close and afar

5. Forecasting space weather events

Before the end of the decade, NASA hopes to send humans back to the Moon. And because the Moon doesn’t have a magnetic field like Earth, it’s especially vulnerable to space weather events, wrote Lulu Zhao, a space scientist at the University of Michigan.

Particles in space, called cosmic radiation, generally aren’t good for the human body. Earth’s magnetic field deflects most of those particles and keeps life on Earth safe. But if particles from the Sun hit an astronaut on the lunar surface, the astronaut could be at risk for health complications like cancer.

“During a large solar energetic particle event, the radiation dosage an astronaut receives inside a spacesuit could exceed 1,000 times the dosage someone on Earth receives,” wrote Zhao. “That would exceed an astronaut’s recommended lifetime limit by 10 times.”

Zhao and her colleagues are developing a research center that would predict space weather events. Accurate, timely predictions could protect astronauts by giving them the time they’d need to get inside a shelter, as well as protect infrastructure back on Earth.

Read more:
Space weather forecasting needs an upgrade to protect future Artemis astronauts

Space weather research is advancing quickly, with researchers around the globe coming up with designs to help predict these events even further out. The more interconnected the world becomes, the more there will be to protect.

This story is a roundup of articles from The Conversation’s archives.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/space-weather-can-cause-both-beautiful-auroras-and-infrastructure-challenges-5-essential-reads-on-protecting-life-and-technology/

By Russell Palmer of RNZ

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/labour-would-prioritise-recognition-of-palestine-sanctions-on-israel/

Writer Blanche d’Alpuget has died aged 82, leaving a lasting imprint on Australian literature, and having influenced the course of political history with her pathbreaking 1982 book on the then prime ministerial aspirant, Bob Hawke.

Now deeply fused in the public mind with Hawke, d’Alpuget was already an acclaimed writer with significant star power of her own before becoming publicly associated with him through that book, and later through marriage – the second for both.

d’Alpuget was the daughter of Sydney Sun journalist Lou d’Alpuget, who once shouted so hard at then cadet journalist John Pilger for getting facts wrong that Pilger fainted.

Blanche grew up in Sydney’s eastern suburbs and was educated at Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School (SCEGGS) and the University of Sydney.

She became a journalist on the Sun’s rival tabloid newspaper, the Daily Mirror, in the early 1960s, working alongside fellow journalist Anna Torv who would later become the second Mrs Rupert Murdoch.

When tyro journalist Laurie Oakes graduated from Sydney University and joined the Mirror, he sat between d’Alpuget and Torv in the Mirror’s Holt Street newsroom.

“She and Anna were each charged with showing me the ropes, showing me how to do it,” Oakes said.

The manuscript of d’Alpuget’s first novel, Monkeys in the Dark, was written while living in Indonesia where her first husband, journalist turned diplomat Tony Pratt, was posted in the early 1970s.

Rejected by publishers, d’Alpuget turned to short story writing. She returned to Australia to live in Canberra, where Pratt continued work as a public servant and she became active in the women’s movement.

Friend, fellow feminist activist and later Hawke government minister, Susan Ryan, described d’Alpuget as vivacious and unconventional. “Dazzlingly pretty and petite, she looked like a Thai beauty with blond curls,” Ryan wrote in her memoir Catching the Waves:

Blanche was full of fun. She liked to make loud, outrageous observations about people, particularly about their sexual demeanour […] In an era of dull and careless feminist dress codes she was a welcome sight at (Women’s Electoral Lobby) meetings, a little bird of paradise in gold high-heeled sandals, tight black slacks and a mink jacket to keep out the Canberra cold, her face luminous with detailed make up.

d’Alpuget’s short story turn worked. She won Fellowship of Australian Writers prizes for two of them in 1975.

A friendship with Sue Kirby, daughter of Arbitration Commission president Richard Kirby, serendipitously led in 1977 to the publication of her first book, Mediator: A biography of Sir Richard Kirby.

Kirby had personally known Sukarno, president of Indonesia (1945–67), and d’Alpuget, as she later wrote, was an “observer in the last days of (Sukarno’s) shattered dream”. It was a shared bond that created a strong chassis for the biographer-subject relationship that resulted in a critically acclaimed book.

d’Alpuget’s stepmother, journalist and editor Tess van Sommers, critiqued draft chapters of the Kirby manuscript. In d’Alpuget’s view it was this, along with the input of Melbourne University Press publisher Peter Ryan, that forged her as a writer.

She then reworked her Monkeys in the Dark manuscript, found a publisher and won the Sydney PEN Golden Jubilee Award for her first novel.

Her second novel, Turtle Beach (1982), won the Age Novel of the Year Award and the South Australian Government Award for Fiction.

d’Alpuget brought knowledge and insight from her years living in Asia to both books: Monkeys in the Dark is set in Indonesia and Turtle Beach is set in Malaysia.

The Hawke biography

Her fourth book – and second biography – Robert J. Hawke: A Biography – is arguably the best political biography in Australian literary history.

After a successful career as President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Hawke was elected to federal parliament in 1980, where he became a poorly performing Labor shadow minister under Opposition Leader Bill Hayden.

A heavy-drinking philanderer with little feel for effective parliamentary performance, Hawke was a man drifting towards an unfulfilled destiny, despite the best efforts of Labor’s NSW Right faction to install him in the Labor leadership.

d’Alpuget took a psychoanalytical approach but wrote in an accessible manner, giving the book a wide and enthusiastic audience as it zeroed in on – rather than avoiding – Hawke’s sins and shortcomings as a husband, father and man.

She confronted Hawke with elements of his life he had avoided through alcohol-fuelled carousing, and induced him to deal with his demons while she researched and wrote the biography.

“Only when they’d read the book did (people) realise he was actually a great man,” d’Alpuget said. “Because all they’d seen before was a drunken lout, a drunken larrikin.”

Hawke found salvation in d’Alpuget’s unusual approach, which enabled him to give up drinking and prepare seriously to occupy Australia’s top office. The biography was published in 1982, and in March 1983 Hawke won the election that made him prime minister.

“No-one has ever been as lucky in their biographer as Bob Hawke,” he said.

Loving (and rewiring) Bob Hawke

d’Alpuget and Hawke first became lovers when she interviewed him in 1976 for her biography of Richard Kirby, before whom Hawke had appeared as an industrial advocate.

Hawke, long married to wife Hazel with whom he had four children, proposed marriage to d’Alpuget in 1978.

He reneged in 1979 after deciding the potential political damage of divorce was too high a price to pay, driving d’Alpuget to both suicidal and homicidal thoughts.

Having bills to pay, and making no headway with a proposed biography of former ACTU president Albert Monk, d’Alpuget decided to write one of Hawke, which would be published with great success by independent Melbourne publisher Morrie Schwartz.

After launching the book with Hawke’s co-operation, d’Alpuget broke with Hawke and left Australia for some time. Her next book was a novel, Winter in Jerusalem (1986).

The relationship resumed later in life, and they married in 1995. d’Alpuget ceased writing for some time before resuming with a long series of historical novels based on the Plantagenets.

d’Alpuget will be remembered best for her extraordinary Hawke biography, which she described as “internally strong”.

“I was actually thinking of the architecture of a Congregationalist church I’d seen in South Australia when I was writing it: well-proportioned stone, four-square,” she said.

In her research and writing for the Hawke biography, d’Alpuget did a fair amount of rewiring of her subject, to his immense benefit. In the process she put her subject on firm psychological foundations for one of 20th-century Australia’s most successful prime ministerships.

Chris Wallace has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/blanche-dalpuget-leaves-a-lasting-imprint-on-australian-literature-and-politics/

For decades, Sweden has fostered a self-image as something of a world record-holder for peace, celebrating more than two centuries since it was last at war. But this record involves some creative accounting. The narrative, for example, excludes Sweden’s participation in modern-day military operations in Afghanistan and Libya.

Nor has Swedish “peacefulness” been entirely pacifist. The country operated one of the world’s largest air forces during the cold war, for example. But less well known is how far Sweden progressed towards developing nuclear weapons of its own. Despite never producing a bomb, the history of its unrealised nuclear weapons programme offers important insights for understanding security policy today.

Back in 1945, just months after the US had dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Swedish military researchers began investigating this new weapon. In 1948, the defence staff asked the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOA) to examine the possibility of producing atomic bombs in Sweden.

We think we know Sweden – a peaceful nation grounded in social democracy, natural beauty, IKEA and Abba. But in 2026, is this still the real Sweden? Ahead of the country’s general election on September 13, The Conversation UK has teamed up with its Swedish partner universities for a series of articles examining why this small nation remains so fascinating.

The plans progressed rapidly. During the 1950s, FOA – with assistance from the state-owned nuclear energy company AB Atomenergi – conducted detailed studies of nuclear reactions and bomb design. Experimental facilities were built. By the mid-1950s, Swedish researchers believed they knew enough to construct a bomb.

Historian Thomas Jonter has argued that Sweden achieved a “latent” nuclear weapon capability. The main obstacle was access to weapons-grade plutonium and the industrial infrastructure needed to produce it.

Why would Sweden want nuclear weapons?

Behind Sweden’s determination was deterrence. Since the country’s principal strategic threat came from the Soviet Union, and since Sweden could never match Soviet conventional forces, nuclear weapons seemed to offer something compelling for a small state: the possibility to inflict disproportionate damage on a much stronger enemy.

By the end of the 1950s, the commander of the armed forces and much of the military establishment supported the idea. The defence minister and large parts of the political opposition were also in favour. Prime minister Tage Erlander was (cautiously) in favour but for years the issue was deliberately left unresolved. The government refrained from making a commitment, while the military kept its research and technical competence up to scratch in order to to keep the door open.

Opposition, however, grew rapidly. The Federation of Social Democratic Women and the party’s youth wing (SSU) were staunch critics, and foreign minister Östen Undén opposed the programme from within government. Writers, academics and peace activists mobilised external opposition.

Their campaign exposed what many saw as the dark logic of deterrence. If Sweden intended to use nuclear weapons, it had to assume that nuclear weapons would also be used against it, perhaps in a pre-emptive strike.

By the early 1960s, domestic opposition was reinforced by a changing international environment. Negotiations for arms control advanced, and the US opposed proliferation. At the same time, Swedish leaders received informal guarantees from the US in the event of a Soviet attack, which reduced the strategic case for a Swedish bomb. By the mid-1960s, the plans had effectively been abandoned, and when Sweden signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1968, the door finally closed.

But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 transformed Swedish security policy, culminating in Nato membership in 2024 along with rapidly rising military expenditure. It has also changed Sweden’s relationship to nuclear deterrence. For Nato, nuclear weapons are a central component of its deterrence strategy.

The consequences are already noticeable in Swedish defence planning. The government’s defence policy for 2025–2030 states that Sweden is now part of Nato’s nuclear deterrence and must participate actively in the alliance’s work in this field. It also calls for Sweden to build knowledge about the role and function of nuclear weapons, echoing the build-up of knowledge from the early cold war.

This time, Sweden has no plans to build its own nuclear weapons – but the developments bring renewed attention to that dark logic of deterrence. After all, nuclear weapons promise security by threatening potential enemies with destruction.

One particularly sensitive question concerns the possibility of stationing nuclear weapons on Swedish territory. Sweden joined Nato without a formal domestic decision on this matter, although the government has stated that it sees no reason to do so in peacetime. For now, the issue is hypothetical.

But history suggests that it may not remain so forever. Seventy years ago, the prospect of Swedish nuclear weapons provoked fierce political conflict and public protest. If nuclear weapons were ever to be based on Swedish territory, the controversial idea of deterrence might stir emotions once again. Provided, of course, that the plans become known to the public.

Björn Lundberg leads two research projects funded by the Swedish Research Council: “Preparing children for war: Swedish preparedness education in transition 1945–2000” (No. 2024-05475) and “Children’s rights and participation in Swedish civil preparedness” (no. 2025-03604).

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/09/peaceful-sweden-once-sought-nuclear-weapons-that-legacy-still-shapes-defence-planning/

The federal government has released an exposure draft of its long-promised digital duty of care.

The headline feature is an “off switch”. Social media platforms would have to ask users, through prompts that appear from time to time, whether they want to keep a personalised, algorithm-driven feed, or instead see mostly the accounts they have chosen to follow. The Prime Minister calls it “My feed, my way”.

Communications Minister Anika Wells has been careful to say plenty of Australians appreciate the algorithm and will keep it. She argues big tech should offer them the choice in the first place, and should respect it.

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor says the Coalition has not seen the bill and wants parents to have more control over what their children see, but he has warned the government against censoring speech online.

But Shadow Treasurer Tim Wilson was more blunt, accusing the government of trying to “censor and silence Australians”.

One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson is opposing the plan, saying “Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not building the Orwellian machinery for it”.

Nationals Leader Matt Canavan also has reservations, telling ABC News Radio:

I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government, whether I was in charge, or Anika Wells is in charge, I’m deeply sceptical of giving any government the power to decide what you read on your phone.

But is that really what’s being proposed in this policy?

Read more:
‘Digital duty of care’ laws will force tech platforms to look after users

Why do we need laws for this?

If algorithms cause harm, why do we need a statute? The obvious answer is negligence.

Someone who owes you a duty of care and fails to take reasonable care is liable for the damage that follows. This is a basic common law principle dating back to the early 20th century.

The problem is that negligence was built for disputes between two identifiable parties about one identifiable injury.

Algorithmic harm does not work like that. It is spread thinly across millions of people. It is a matter of probability rather than certainty because no single recommendation causes the damage.

Australian courts are also reluctant to open the door to claims where the number of potential plaintiffs is impossible to determine, particularly where the loss is purely financial. A claim against a platform would very likely fail on that ground before it got anywhere near the merits.

A statutory duty sidesteps the need for individuals to take cases to court. It’s owed to users generally, it looks forward rather than back, and it’s enforced by a regulator instead of by individual litigants.

Is an ‘off’ switch censorship?

The off switch is not censorship in any ordinary sense of the word. Turning off recommendations does not delete a post, suspend an account or stop anyone publishing.

Everything lawful stays lawful, and everything you follow still arrives.

The larger concern is about reach. The effect of changing how content is distributed changes who gets heard the most.

That is fair, but it cuts both ways. Your feed is already curated by a private ranking system you did not choose and cannot inspect. Giving the user that decision looks closer to the opposite of censorship.

Censorship is an authority deciding what may be said. This is an individual deciding what they will be shown.

A global fight about speech

The censorship framing lands at a moment when the platforms themselves have swung from harm reduction towards free speech absolutism.

Meta ended third-party fact checking in the United States in January 2025 and loosened parts of its hateful conduct rules.

X cut its trust and safety capability after 2022 and went to court against the eSafety Commissioner over a removal notice.

YouTube wound back election integrity policies and restored accounts it had previously banned.

American politics has amplified this. A House Judiciary Committee report accused eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant of censoring Americans. Republican members of Congress wrote to the US Trade Representative on September 1 seeking a trade investigation into Australia’s News Bargaining Incentive: a policy that would see tech companies pay for Australian news.

Free speech is now both a corporate defence and a trade lever. That is why an Australian safety law is being fought, particularly by the large platforms, as a speech law.

What censorship actually looks like

Real internet censorship has a recognisable shape. The state defines forbidden content, filters or controls the infrastructure, orders deletions on short deadlines, requires accounts to be tied to a government identity document, and punishes the speaker with little chance of review. China, Iran and Russia are the working examples.

The duty of care does not match that pattern. It creates no new speech offence. It does not punish users. It regulates systems rather than individual posts.

Two features still deserve close scrutiny.

It is important that businesses know what the law and the regulator expect. This helps ensure that large penalties do not give platforms a reason to remove too much, which produces censorship by private proxy rather than by government order.

It is also important that there is no scope creep. The legislation must be based on clear principles. For example, by defining the categories of harm, such as harm to children. Once that is done, the categories can’t be changed by the regulator.

If the minister adds a category, it is a “disallowable instrument”. This means the Senate can review the minister’s decision and vote to overturn it. The regulator enforces against harms that the parliament has agreed.

Those are the parts to argue about. The off switch is not one of them.

Rob Nicholls is a member of the University of Sydney Centre for AI, Trust, and Governance. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/09/08/australians-may-soon-be-able-to-switch-off-social-media-algorithms-is-that-censorship/