Missdiagnosed

📣📣💜👏

Erin Brockovich says growing public anger toward massive AI data centers is being fueled by a lack of transparency, as communities across the U.S. claim billion-dollar facilities are being approved with little public awareness or input. ⚠️

Brockovich argues that many residents only learn about nearby data center projects after construction plans are already moving forward, with concerns often centered around water usage, electricity demand, noise pollution, diesel backup generators, and potential environmental impacts. She has described the rapid expansion as something being “shoved down people’s throats,” claiming local communities feel excluded from decisions that could permanently reshape their neighborhoods. 🏭

The explosion of AI has dramatically increased demand for large-scale computing infrastructure. Modern AI data centers require enormous amounts of electricity and cooling systems to operate thousands of high-performance GPUs around the clock. In some regions, residents and activists worry this growth could strain local power grids, increase water consumption during drought conditions, and drive up utility costs for surrounding communities. 💧⚡

Supporters of these projects argue that data centers are critical for technological progress, cloud computing, national competitiveness, and future AI innovation. Companies also point to job creation, tax revenue, and investments in renewable energy infrastructure. However, opposition movements are rapidly growing in several towns and states where residents say approvals are happening too quickly and without enough environmental review. 🌍

The debate is becoming one of the biggest conflicts in the AI era: balancing technological expansion with environmental sustainability, public health concerns, and community consent. 🚨

Endometriosis on the Skin 🩹🔴

GENTLE REMINDER: I’m a husband learning alongside my wife, who lives with stage IV endo, adeno, and fibro. This is not medical advice but my own research and a wish to understand. THANK YOU! 💛

Skin endometriosis, also called cutaneous endometriosis, is rare but well documented. It often appears near a C-section or surgery scar, or sometimes the belly button, and may cause a lump that swells, hurts, changes color, or bleeds around your period.

If you have ever touched a painful scar and felt that something was wrong while others called it “just healing,” I am sorry. Your skin can hold stories too, and a scar that changes with your cycle deserves attention.

Scar endometriosis may happen when endometrial-like cells are moved into a surgical cut during an operation, though not every case follows surgery. The tissue can then respond to hormones, causing monthly swelling or bleeding.

Common clues include a firm lump, tenderness, bluish or brown color, pain that worsens before or during bleeding, or spotting from the scar. Some people describe it as a bruise that keeps returning on schedule.

It can be mistaken for a hernia, cyst, infection, keloid, suture reaction, lipoma, abscess, or tumor. That is why imaging and pathology matter, especially if the lump is growing or painful.

Diagnosis may involve ultrasound, MRI, clinical history, and biopsy or surgical removal. Treatment is often wide excision, meaning the surgeon removes the lesion with a clear edge to lower the chance it is left behind.

Please have any changing, bleeding, painful, or growing skin lump checked. Rare does not mean ignore, and “it only hurts on my period” is not a reason to dismiss it.

I made my FREE 130+ pages eBook "You Did Nothing To Deserve This!" for the moments when even visible symptoms still get minimized. You can grab it through the link in my profile/bio, and the physical, paperback version is available on Amazon when you type in the Amazon search tab: endometriosis validation.

Lucjan 🎗

My name is Catharina Doria, and I am an AI ethicist with over 580,000 followers, teaching millions how to stay safe in the age of AI. And guess what? On a warm, sunny day, an AI from Meta deactivated one of my Instagram accounts.

The stated reason?

My account was allegedly in violation of “community standards.”

Yep.

(An AI ethicist going against community standards… makes it make sense!)

Since I haven't gotten any proper answers from anyone (Meta, their safety team, or an AI chatbot), I decided to share my story: the story of how an AI might destroy my life.

Let's get going, shall we?

It all started when I adopted my dog, Miss Petunia (or, as I call her, Miss P!).

Miss P. is a 2.5 kg Chihuahua I adopted one month ago.

Until then, she had spent her entire life locked in a cage, used as a breeding dog on a puppy farm. As expected, living in precarious conditions and being hurt every day left her deeply traumatized.

On her first day home, she would pretend to be dead, squish herself on the floor, and urinate out of fear. Even when I fed her, she would overfill her little mouth with food, like a little hamster or a squirrel. She would run to a corner, spit out her food, and eat in peace, afraid I would take it away from her. Truly, Miss P. was afraid of her own little shadow.

Granted, adopting her made me really angry with the horrible humans who hurt her AND with the MANY OTHER HUMANS who hurt other dogs just like her. With all that bottled-up anger about animal cruelty, I started sharing her story with my 580K followers.

To my surprise, I received the kindest response ever. Everyone loved Miss P. and wanted to learn more about her story. I was then kindly asked by thousands of my followers to create an Instagram account just for her so everyone could see her progress and her adaptation to her new, very spoiled life.

Creating an account for Miss P. sounded like a wonderful idea.

What could go wrong, right?

Well, everything.

The moment I pressed “Create Account,” her account was deactivated.

Why, you might ask?

According to the email I received, my new profile was not adhering to their “community standards on account integrity.”

Which ones?

Well, I have NO idea because they didn't tell me.

Mind you: I did not have time to write a bio or add a profile picture. I wrote her username () and shared some of MY personal details, and that was it. On my end, I truly cannot understand what could have caused my account to be deactivated.

And before you say dogs can't have Instagram accounts, creating one for a dog does NOT violate the community guidelines. In fact, there are MANY dog influencers on Instagram with millions of followers.

The only thing I could think of is that an “AI” tasked with finding spammy accounts flagged my dog’s profile.

But of course, that's speculation, since NO ONE [no email, no AI, no chat] could tell me what I did wrong.

So I tried appealing.

Again, something was clearly wrong, and it was obvious that an AI had made a mistake. I pressed all the buttons: I shared my face, my name, and my passport. I wrote a blurb explaining the entire situation, how this was all a big mistake, hoping someone would see how unfair it was.

The result?

A big sack of nothing.

A few minutes later, I received an email saying that, upon “closer inspection”, I was REALLY violating the community standards.

“What does that mean, Catha!?”

I have no clue.

From my side, I can tell you AGAIN:

I checked everything there was to check. There’s no community guideline stating that a dog cannot have an Instagram account. I didn't write the bio. I didn't have time to add a picture. I couldn’t (and still can't) understand what I did wrong. So even if I did something wrong (by mistake), no one could tell me what happened. So I did what any normal human being would do: cry it out in pure frustration.

And then things got exponentially worse.

THE DOMINO EFFECT
Maybe you don't know this, but if ONE of your Instagram accounts is deactivated, ALL OF YOUR OTHER ACCOUNTS in your account center are deactivated as well. Plus, you’re NOT allowed to create any new Instagram accounts ever. You get banned from everything!

And that happened to me.

Three weeks later, my book club account, where I teach thousands of people critical AI literacy (The AI Survival Club) and where I make most of my living, was banned.

The stated reason?

I had ONE “violating” account in my account center.

Yep.

Miss Petunia's account.

And this was the moment I realized I was in big trouble.

Why?

Because now I have TWO banned accounts in my account center, which means my MAIN account with 580,000 followers could and can be banned at any moment, too, for the same reason: a dog account that was deactivated the second it was created. And now a SECOND banned account, a book club account, was banned because a dog's account was banned.

Talk about a catch-22! 🙃

Long story short, what was supposed to be a wonderful story about an adopted dog became a true nightmare.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like a sick joke from the Universe. I’m an AI ethicist who talks about the dangers of opaque AI, and I got banned because a random AI decided that my dog’s account violated community guidelines, with no transparency.

Of course, if I am trying to see the glass as half full, this only underscores the importance of my work (and that of other wonderful AI ethicists pushing for fairer AI systems) and shows how AI systems TODAY are making life-altering decisions about people, with no transparency, no human in the loop, and no real appeals process. It sort of beautifully proves the point I make every single day as an AI ethicist.

AI is making life-altering decisions about our LIVES with no accountability, responsibility, or transparency.

But it's not because this is proving me right that I am happy (if you know me, you know I love to be right, but not at the cost of losing my livelihood to a non-transparent AI)

If I am being completely honest with you, I am angry.

Nay, I am pi**ed.

And what bugs me the MOST is that:

1) I’m an AI ethicist,
2) I talk about AI harm every single day,
3) I have THOUSANDS of followers, MILLIONS OF VIEWS,
4) I have media coverage (thank you, BBC, for covering this case!)

AND I STILL GOT NO PROPER REPLY FROM ANYONE.

If an AI ethicist with almost 600K followers and press coverage on BBC for a banned account STILL cannot get a clear answer from Meta, what hope does anyone else have?

This opens a bigger conversation.

BIG TECH HOLDS TOO MUCH POWER
How can corporations hoard so much power over people’s lives? How can an artificial intelligence system make life-altering decisions about my life—deciding whether I’ll have a job next week and whether I’ll be able to pay my rent—with ZERO transparency, zero accountability, zero anything?

How can AI decide, do, and be done?

I have savings, thank God.

But imagine the people who don’t. Those who rely on Meta or other platforms for monetization.

What happens to them?

As an AI ethicist, I find it absurd that a content creator who posts +15 videos a month and treats it as a full-time job can, in a way, be “fired” for no reason (or, if there is a reason, not know which one).

Right now, I worry every day that my account will be destroyed. I am having emergency sessions with a psychologist and taking medication to help me relax. This has completely disrupted my workflow.

My life became a living hell.

And since my life is now a living hell, I want to make this a learning experience for ALL of us.

THE LESSON I’VE LEARNED (AND I HOPE YOU LEARN IT TOO!)
The biggest lesson I've learned from this is that I (and we) can't rely on them for anything. Social media platforms, in general, have repeatedly shown how little respect they have for their content creators and the people working full-time on their platforms.

That is why I am here today to say we shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. If you create content and have an audience there, please, I urge you to build an audience on a platform that lets you build a mailing list. That is the ONLY way to “own” your audience and ensure THEY can't take them away from you.

Please. Build. Your. Email. List.

And I know, now you might be thinking:

“But Catharina, you are an AI ethicist… You didn’t think of this before?”

Of course, I knew this in theory; I just somehow never thought it would happen to me. I know it sounds ridiculous to say this out loud (or in writing), but I somehow thought that if I played by the rules of the game, the game wouldn’t screw me over.

I was clearly wrong.

Lesson learned.

LEARNING THROUGH LOVE, PAIN, AND OBSERVATION
You see, my dad (may God rest his soul) always told me that people learn in three ways: through pain, love, or observation.

Love is when someone tells you something kindly, and you accept their advice.

Pain is when you don't listen, get hurt, and learn your lesson.

Observation is when you look around, see what happened to others, and learn from it.

For example: one day, your mom tells you NOT to touch the hot stove because you could get hurt. You can…

1) accept her advice because she's your mom (love)

2) put your hand on the hot stove, burn yourself, and never do it again (pain), or

3) see your sister put her hand on the hot stove, burn herself, and decide not to do it yourself because you saw how badly she was hurt (observation)

If it's not clear, I am your sister who burned her hands, and now you get to learn from my burn. I had to learn the painful way that I cannot trust social media platforms. Now is your chance to learn either through love (if you trust me) or by observing, rather than repeating my mistake.

Please don’t procrastinate on this decision and build your mailing list.

MY SUBSTACK JOURNEY STARTS HERE
Okay, what does that mean in practice? Well, from now on, you will see me here on Substack. I will put the same effort here as on my Instagram. If they censor me there and remove me from their platform, I will be here, standing and talking about ethical AI and teaching people to protect themselves from this technology (and from the people behind it).

I hope you will stay with me here, too.

Today, if you are receiving this email, it is because you filled out a form to join my mailing list or saw my stories and chose to follow me here as well. If you haven't subscribed yet and have read this far, now would be a good time to subscribe. I hope I can be worthy of your trust.

ALL IN ALL: WE KEEP FIGHTING!
As a final note, I want to thank BBC News for covering this story; journalist Luiz Fernando Toledo for pushing Meta for answers; Caio Vieira Machado for his expert advice; and my digital rights lawyer, Bruna Oliveira, for helping me navigate the right legal channels.

I am still here, and I am not going anywhere without a fight.

And to every creator, small business owner, journalist, activist, or ordinary user who has had their account wrongfully closed by an algorithm with no recourse: I see you. I stand with you.

Companies need to be held accountable for their AI shenanigans ASAP.

I truly hope policymakers, lawmakers, grassroots organizations, and everyone can work together to ensure these companies are held accountable and liable for their actions.

Until laws change, we, the public, have to keep fighting. And rest assured, I will continue to fight.

------

By Catharina Doria, see comments for sources and to support.