Month: May 2025

From the BBC World Service: The Panamanian government has declared a state of emergency in one province. It comes after U.S. banana giant Chiquita Brands laid off about 5,000 workers following a strike that had stopped production. Prosecutors in Brazil are suing the Chinese EV giant BYD, accusing it and two contractors of human trafficking and slave-like conditions at a factory site. And we take a look at Europe's biggest plant for processing the rare earth minerals a lot of modern technology relies on.

In late April, details came to light about a covert experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Zurich on unsuspecting Reddit users on the debate forum known as r/changemyview. They used AI chatbots posing as real humans on the forum to test their powers of persuasion and invented backstories like a rape survivor or a Black man opposed to Black Lives Matter. What they didn't have was consent. The experiment violated Reddit Terms of Service, forum rules and, critics say, academic research standards. The researchers who notified Reddit of the experiment after the fact have since apologized and said they won't publish the results. Reddit says it's increasing efforts to verify users are human. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke to Mohammad Hosseini, a professor at Northwestern University's medical school, about the potential harms that could come from a study like this one.