Before I get going this week, I need to let you know about our big fundraising push.

TBIJ is an independent non-profit newsroom. We aren’t at the mercy of clickbait articles, and we don’t put a paywall in front of our stories. Instead, we rely on donations from our generous readers, like you to fund our award-winning work that helps change the world. And in 2026, we plan to use those donations to ramp up our investigations and make sure every story we write has an impact on the decision-makers who govern us, the laws we live by, and the services we use.

If you’d like to help fund our work, then please donate to our Big Give crowdfunder. And, want to know the best part? Your donation will be doubled at no extra cost to you.

We’ve got just 3 days left to reach our target. Please help us get there and double your donation today.

Stories beget stories, I often say. Once a reporter puts their head above the parapet, all sorts of tips rush in.

That’s what happened for our new tech reporter Effie Webb recently. She’d just found out that kids could access an AI chatbot modelled on the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a story that, amid other reporting, prompted the platform hosting the bot to ban kids from its platform.

That’s when a source got in touch, sharing thousands of pages of internal emails and other documents from the likes of Meta, TikTok and Google. The documents gave an unprecedented insight into what the tech giants know about how dangerously addictive their products are.

The documents were from a lawsuit brought in California by 1,800 plaintiffs – including parents and school districts. Court cases like these are incredibly useful for journalists, because disclosure rules mean companies have to hand over internal documents, giving us a much better understanding of what the top bosses think and do than glossy press releases can. Effie tracked the documents back to the public US courts database, PACER, and downloaded the full bundle from there too.

The part that interested her the most was about Snap Inc, which owns Snapchat. That’s an app with a huge teenage audience – nearly two thirds of 13- to 17-year-olds in the UK have a Snapchat profile, according to Ofcom. And the company claims it has nearly a billion monthly active users.

One internal email from October 2020 hinted at Snap’s unspoken hopes to make Snapchat something kids couldn’t turn away from. “Not sure what to say about addictive endless scrolling,” an employee wrote. “We already have an endless scroll design in Discovery and I think we wish it was more addictive compelling.” They crossed the word addictive out. “Lol,” the email’s recipient replied. “Ur emails are so funny.”

Two features in particular stood out: Streaks, which counts how many consecutive days two users exchange a snap, and Lenses, the augmented reality filters that change your appearance, and which have become endemic to most photo or video-based social media.

Streaks essentially turn using the app every day into a visible number going up. Some kids use the app precisely so they can build up streaks stretching over many months. In 2017, a Snap employee described the habit in an email as a “mass psychosis”.

Lenses prompted more specific concerns internally. Employees worried that certain Lenses – including one developed by the company itself – promoted a narrow set of beauty standards. Given the platform’s popularity with teens, who are often already at risk of self-loathing, staff said it could harm users’ mental health. There were other issues as well: one Black employee noted a filter meant to make her look like a cartoon character also lightened her skin, narrowed her nose, changed the colour of her eyes, and smoothed away her braids.

Effie put one of Snapchat’s “beautifying” filters to the test and shared the before and after pictures with TBIJ readers.

Getting teenagers addicted to something that could harm them – it’s not exactly a new playbook. But the desperation they feel when they’re cut off is real. One email in the court files was from a girl who’d been locked out of her account. She wrote to the founder and CEO of Snap, Evan Spiegel: “Please, I’m begging you to help me.”

A mission with a difference

Before the Cop30 climate summit in Brazil, Grace Murray set herself a remarkable task. She’s an environment reporter and impact producer (that’s someone who helps make our journalism lead to better outcomes). And she wanted to publish 100 interviews with Indigenous people from around the world.

The point was to speak to the people most affected by the climate crisis, rather than just hearing from global leaders giving grandiose but dispiriting statements at the summit.

Here’s how she did it:

My team has been investigating deforestation in the Amazon and other ecosystems for over six years, and have reported with communities on threats tied to beef, soy, gold, even collagen. But ahead of this year’s Cop30 talks, I wanted to do something different.

The summit was being held in Brazil for the first time, on the edge of the Amazon rainforest. So I set out to interview 100 Indigenous people from the world’s tropical forests ahead of the talks. I wanted to hear about the challenges they face in defending ecosystems we all rely on, as well as their relationship with the forest and the support they need from the international community.

I knew it would be hard work. What I didn’t know is how it would change me.”

Factchecked!

Each week we reveal a fascinating fact from our reporting…

Did you know?

A UK council published an ad on an official government website for staff for illegal children’s homes. 

Find out more

Operating a children’s home that’s not registered with Ofsted is a criminal offence. And yet Cornwall council advertised a £6m contract – the first of its kind – to provide “staffing for unregistered places” across the county. 

It was forced to withdraw the ad after government officials and Ofsted intervened.

Read more here. 

Water palaver for megafarmer Avara

A new front has opened up in the battle between residents of the Wye valley and Avara Foods, the company responsible for several giant chicken farms in the area.

First Avara was accused of poisoning the River Wye with phosphorus. Now records suggest it’s been using more local water than it’s allowed.

Records from the Environment Agency show that Avara’s Gloucestershire factory has used too much water twice in the past five years. And in Hereford, on the English-Welsh border, the agency noted that even though water supplies are dwindling, an Avara abattoir is using a lot of it.

We’re not talking small amounts. The Gloucestershire factory took about 7,000 cubic metres extra – almost enough to fill three Olympic swimming pools.

Avara Foods is one of those companies you rarely hear about, but controls a part of our food supply. It’s part-owned by Cargill, the global agricultural company, and it supplies meat to Tesco, Nando’s and McDonald’s.

The water over-use is a double whammy when the company also faces a lawsuit for polluting the river. That case is a little more complicated, because it’s not just about the chicken farms, but also the land nearby.

When you raise millions of chickens on an industrial farm, you end up with an industrial amount of chicken poo. Until recently, that manure was spread on local arable farms – that is, crop fields. But chicken poo is high in phosphorus, and when rain washes runoff from the fields into the river via ditches and smaller waterways, it can lead to eutrophication – a phenomenon where a build-up of nutrients prompts some plants to grow excessively, depleting oxygen levels.

So, residents took Avara, along with its part-owner Cargill, to court earlier this year. (Avara, naturally, says the case is based on a misunderstanding.)

As a whole, the Avara saga gives us a good insight into how damaging industrial farming is. Sure, it’s been raining a lot this week, but water security is still a problem in the UK and a serious threat to biodiversity.

James Wallace, chief executive of the campaign group River Action, called for an urgent investigation into Avara’s water usage. “Having spent years poisoning the River Wye with nutrients from supplier chicken factory farms, it is shocking to see that Avara is also threatening water security for residents and businesses,” he said.

And there are also questions for the Environment Agency. It told us: “We’re committed to ending damaging abstraction of water from rivers and groundwater and we make full use of our existing powers to do so.” This includes amending or revoking existing licences when abstraction is damaging the environment, it said.