Today’s big topic: Harmful content is exploding, but Instagram and Facebook are removing less
What’s happening?
Donald Trump, it turns out, was not necessarily just on the receiving end of spin and slick talk when Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, announced in January 2025 that Instagram and Facebook would ease up on content controls.
»We’re going to tune our content filters to require much higher confidence before taking down content. It means we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down«, Meta’s top executive said in January 2025, as he railed against the E.U.’s tech legislation, which he called »institutionalized censorship«.
A new Danish study of how the biggest social platforms moderate content shows that Meta has put action behind its words.
Throughout 2025, the tech giant has sharply reduced the volume of posts, images, videos, and audio files that are moderated or removed in the E.U.
Why it matters!
Instagram has gone from averaging just over 86,000 moderation actions a day in the first quarter to just under 22,000 a day in the last quarter. Those actions range from deletion to restricting content to an older age group or so-called algorithmic downranking, making it less visible in feeds and search results.
»The numbers show that, fundamentally, it has become even more unsafe to be on social media. Everyone in this field is reporting rising volumes of abuse material, harmful and illegal content, so we should be seeing markedly more moderation, not less. And it’s beyond the pale when organizations and authorities have been pointing to these problems for years«, Ask Hesby Holm said.
Most recently, Unicef and Interpol have warned of an escalating volume of A.I.-generated sexualized imagery of children. Across 11 countries, at least 1.2 million children in the past year have experienced their images online being manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes.
Still curious? Read the full article here.
In other news
– »Denmark’s cooperation with the Taliban is a betrayal«
»The Taliban is a regime that has killed our soldiers and that clearly shows it stands against everything Denmark has fought for in Afghanistan«. Yasser Ghanbari, chairman of the Hazara-Danish Association, which represents Afghanistan’s persecuted Hazara minority, is deeply outraged that the S-SF-M-R government wants to begin cooperating with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in order to deport more Afghans from Denmark by force. »Do people really think the Taliban will cooperate out of the goodness of their hearts? I fear that we are giving them a kind of leverage over Denmark that we do not want them to have«, Yasser Ghanbari says. Cooperation with the Taliban regime is an initiative built into a bill for a deportation reform that the government presented to Parliament on Thursday and that will be put to a vote after the summer.
– Heat waves take a toll on our mental health
The heat wave of the past few days has turned Danes’ bedrooms into little saunas. And even if we do everything we can to cool our bodies down, it isn’t only our physical health we need to keep an eye on. The heat strains not just our sleep and our bodies, but our mental health, too.
»A heat wave puts the body under physical stress. That can take a mental toll«, said Ásthildur Árnadóttir, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen who has studied how climate affects health. »Heat waves affect our mood and can cause mood swings. During a heat wave, for example, you may find you have a shorter fuse and feel more irritable or more impulsive than usual«, she said. Beyond affecting mood, heat waves can also worsen mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. Several international studies suggest that heat waves can increase the risk of suicide because of the heat, as well as mortality among people with substance use problems, particularly alcohol.
– A Danish company will invest 1 billion kroner in new charging stations
The Danish charging network Clever will invest an additional 1 billion kroner this year to expand and develop its charging network in Denmark. The company said so in a press release on Monday. That will include, among other things, 3,000 new public charging stations spread across the country. The company, together with its owner, the energy group Andel, has invested more than 3 billion kroner in building its charging network over the past five years. According to the company, more than 90 percent of Danes choose an electric vehicle when they buy a car today. That is also confirmed by monthly tallies from Mobility Denmark, the auto dealers’ trade association. That is why nationwide charging infrastructure is needed, the company says.
Talk of town: Politiken has mapped it out: See the USA’s rusty and toxic legacy in Greenland
The United States wants more military bases in Greenland. But what have the Americans left behind at the at least 36 bases and military installations the United States operated during World War II and the Cold War?
To a large extent, the United States abandoned the bases without cleaning up.
Wreckage, oil drums, batteries, cables, machinery, and much more lie abandoned across an area of several hectares near the fjord, where icebergs drift by. Locals say the waste is buried in multiple layers.
Asbestos sheets from the old U.S. military hospital are scattered throughout the area. Danish researchers have previously warned both Danish and Greenlandic authorities about the asbestos. But the asbestos is still there.
»Bulldozers have spread rocks and gravel over buried scrap metal — wires and other metal sticking out of the ground«, says Mikkel Myrup, area manager at the National Museum of Greenland.
Following pressure from Greenland, the Danish government decided in 2018 to launch a cleanup at several of the U.S. bases in Greenland. Very few bases have been cleaned up.
Still curious? Read the full article here.
This newsletter features stories originally published in Danish. AI was used to shorten and translate the articles into English, after which a member of the editorial staff reviewed and refined the content.