This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss going into the woods, a "he admit it" moment, and a tofu sandwich.

JOSEPH: Thank you to everyone who came to Thursday’s FOIA Forum. It was a great turnout with a ton of really good questions. We spoke mostly about mining city council meetings for tips or context you can then use to fuel your public records requests. I’ll upload the video soon and put it on the site for everyone to watch.

The other 404 Media co-founders have been writing in Behind The Blog about disconnecting recently. I’m doing something related to that shortly: going to an Airbnb in the woods to do a makeshift ‘silent retreat’.

On Thursday, Google introduced a new AI feature into Google Earth which lets anyone fabricate all sorts of misleading or straight up inaccurate satellite imagery, from making it look like a specific place has suffered a drone strike to manifesting a nuclear plant in Iran.

Usually, Google Earth is an exceptionally useful tool for open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts to digitally monitor areas of interest and see how they change over time, say, during a conflict or disaster. Now, Google Earth can easily be used as a tool for disinformation. 

YouTube banned a wave of ASMR artists this week for violating the platforms’ rules against “sexually gratifying” content, leaving creators confused and angry.

Several creators received the same notice from YouTube about their channels being removed on Wednesday and Thursday. “We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our sex and nudity policy. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube,” the email said. 

So far, YouTube creators affected by the wave of bans who’ve spoken publicly about YouTube removing their channels include ItsBunniiASMR, Slight Sounds, Nananightray, Roseasmr, Simoneasmr, and Janina Wilhelmsen, all of whom had significant followings on the platform. There are still many ASMR creators on YouTube, making the bans even more confusing.  

ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, describes the tingling feeling that some people get when hearing certain sounds; it’s become shorthand for a genre of content where ASMR artists whisper, brush, tap or make other sounds near a microphone. A lot of ASMR content is meant for relaxation, mindfulness, and sleep.

“YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community."

"We terminated these channels for linking to content that violates our nudity and sexual content policy," a spokesperson for YouTube told 404 Media in a statement. "Our external link policies apply equally to all creators across YouTube, and this action was taken in accordance with our long-standing policies, not as a change in policy or targeting of ASMR content."

Slight Sounds, who has been making ASMR content on YouTube since 2013, told me that this has been her full-time career since around 2018. “This has been my livelihood and my career for eight or nine years now, so getting it removed and taken away from me without warning obviously affects me financially,” she said. “It's a part of my income. It's a part of how I get new people to follow me on other platforms, Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. It's how I get sponsorships, ad money. So a big part of this is this fear that I just lost income that I don't know how I'm going to get back. But I think the mental stress of building my own community and not having the option to have access to that anymore is really disturbing... Being told not only that you’re not going to make money on this, but also your archive, your life's work, videos that mean so much to me and so many other people are just gone, and I can't access that. That's something that's really hard to grapple with.” 

YouTube’s ban email to creators said: “We know this is probably very upsetting news, but it's our job to make sure that YouTube is a safe place for all. If we think a channel severely violates our policies, we take it down to protect other users on the platform - but if you believe we've made the wrong call, you can appeal this decision. You'll find more information about the policy in question and how to submit an appeal below.” Creators report that appealing didn't change the decision.

The email continued: “Explicit content that's meant to be sexually gratifying isn't allowed on YouTube.”

ASMR content creators have long asserted that their content is not sexual or pornographic. Erotic ASMR exists, but that’s not what these artists were doing on YouTube.

ASMR artist Bunnii’s channel was removed at around 227,000 subscribers and over 55 million views across hundreds of videos. She told me she started uploading content to YouTube because, unlike during her streams on Twitch, she didn’t have to rely on subscriptions and donations to earn money. The passive income she earned from YouTube meant she could offer that content without a paywall. “I've been so lucky to have such a supportive community but not everyone has money to spare to help make sure I continue creating content that they find comforting for anxiety and sleep. YouTube was a place I could direct people who wanted to offer support but couldn't directly,” she said. “I hate that the option is gone. There are people who really do depend on this kind of content to get a good night's sleep, deal with insomnia, or manage mental health issues like anxiety, PTSD, and depression (therapy and whatnot isn't exactly cheap or accessible to everyone). And in times like this when world issues feel so heavy and no one can afford anything, having a free, easily accessible option, where the creator can benefit from just views is so important.” 

"I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe'"

Being sexualized not just by people outside of the community who misunderstand it, but the platform where she’d grown an audience and made a living, is “incredibly disheartening,” Bunnii said, and she finds YouTube’s guidelines and decisions too vague. People are speculating about what she did to deserve removal, she said, even though she considers everything she uploaded to YouTube family friendly.

“YouTube deciding to ban my account and many others feels like they are siding with gross sexualization of ASMR from people outside the community. Making it feel like something that is intended to be comforting, is taboo,” she said. “And while this is uncomfortable for the creators, I can't imagine it makes the people who enjoy this content or consume it for sleep and anxiety feel comfortable with these decisions either. We're all trying to navigate a form of content where the boundaries aren't concrete but deleting channels with no warning is scary. I'm sure any of us would complied given one, and kept it in mind moving forward. It feels like they don't care for their creators.”

In 2019, YouTube added language to its terms of use that forbids content that is “meant to be sexually gratifying in nature.” Other platforms, like Patreon, have similar terms. This standard is incredibly difficult to define. In 2022, YouTube updated its terms to specifically mention ASMR: “We’ve strengthened our policies to better identify and action ASMR content that is sexually gratifying. ASMR videos with audio sexual sounds may be age-restricted or removed from the platform,” YouTube said in a policy update announcement. Creators faced a similar wave of bans following that change. 

When Slight Sounds started making ASMR content, she said, most people still didn’t understand what it was. “If you liked ASMR, you kept it to yourself because there was this judgment around it because people didn't understand,” she said. “One of the things that people would always say is like, ‘Oh, is that a sex thing? Is that a sexual thing?’” But for most people making it, there was no sexual connotation, she said. 

“I think because ASMR is very female-dominated — because it is a very intimate video style, and there is this sweet woman taking care of you and whispering to you — I think people, especially men, confuse closeness and intimacy with sex,” she said. Some ASMR is sensual, but sensual does not equal sexual, she said. “There is this inherent thing that happens when men interact with women online in a specific way, and there is this sexual energy that they feel, even if it's just closeness that they're feeling. I think that ASMR has always had this undercurrent of: No matter what you do as a woman in ASMR, someone is going to find it sexual. Someone's going to call it weird. Someone's going to fetishize it.” 

Some ASMR artists also upload content to adult sites like Onlyfans and Fansly, which are often kept separate from their other, more public platforms like YouTube. Slight Sounds started uploading content to these kinds of sites a few years ago. “I had thought about it for many years before, but didn't because of the judgment and the fear, and knowing that if I made that decision to make erotic content outside of YouTube, there would be so many people that would lose respect for me,” she said. “That would say all of the work that you've done, no matter how separate the two are, is going to undermine your life's work, you know, and that's really hard to to think about.” 

She made “a very big point” to keep these sites and links separate from her YouTube channel, she said. “Women will make a choice, an autonomous choice, to do something that doesn't even affect the other content they're making. It is a wholly separate experience. And we're still being told that we're sexualizing ASMR on YouTube, and we're being sexual,” she said. “I find it really disturbing to hear that, when I am making content that is looking into the camera and saying ‘you're okay, you're safe,’ and giving people a place to escape the world and just be with themselves and me for a little bit. My content has stayed consistently the same. I have not pushed any boundaries, and I am still, it seems, being punished for something that has nothing to do with my YouTube. It is really hard to think about.”

Updated 12:40 p.m. ET with comment from YouTube. Headline updated to reflect that information.

Following 404 Media’s reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it “a test of market interest.” 

On July 30, nine days after 404 Media’s reporting, ISBNdb added a note to its homepage and an update on its news page about the change. “We've seen the recent coverage about a marketing landing page on our site, and we understand the concern it raised. The facts: ISBNdb has never purchased, scanned, or sold a book — for AI training or anything else,” ISBNdb wrote. “We don't train AI models, and we never have. The page was a test of market interest; no such service was ever brought to life. We've taken the page down. Our job is helping people find books. For more than two decades, ISBNdb has been the card catalog of the book world — the data behind how bookstores, libraries, and reading apps connect readers with titles. Data about books, not the books themselves. That hasn't changed.” 

ISBNdb removed the landing page for “Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs” on July 28. “It was part of exploring demand, and we've chosen to pivot away from that direction. Our main ISBNdb (book metadata API) services are unaffected and running as usual,” the site says. 

ISBNdb replied to 404 Media's request for comment about the removed pages with the same note that's now on the homepage. The company has not replied to 404 Media's previous attempts to reach it for comment.

In one now-removed article on its site, ISBNdb said that printed books published before 2022 are ideal for AI training data because they don’t include AI generated text, and ingesting these books could prevent model collapse. The article also suggested that book authors who might be opposed to this use of their work could just write with manipulating and sabotaging AI models in mind. 

404 Media spoke to booksellers and saw reports online detailing a sudden uptick in sales recently. “It's not just the quantity, but the weirdness of the orders,” one bookseller told 404 Media. “The type of books [...] there's no rhyme or reason to it. Also, there's a total disregard for the price of the book. I've had some books that sold through this way that were [...] greatly overpriced. That's kind of a tell for AI because they have just so much money.” 

“Purchasing paper books at scale from the secondary market does not deprive any creator of income they would otherwise have received,” one of ISBNdb’s now-removed pages said. “These are books that have already fully discharged their financial obligation to their creators.” 

In January, book authors filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, revealing internal documents that showed Anthropic planned to obtain and scan millions of printed books and destroy them in the process. An investigation by the Washington Post found that Anthropic was buying books from a company called Better World Books, one of several marketplaces where libraries, retailers, and individuals sell books.  

In ISBNdb’s now-removed marketing materials, it admitted that getting caught destroying printed books during the scanning process would not be a good look. “The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site said. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”

Emanuel Maiberg contributed reporting to this story.

Scientists have proposed the existence of a fifth “dark dimension” that governs the behavior of both dark energy and dark matter—and which may be observationally detected in the near future, according to a recent preprint study. 

The dark dimension hypothesis could potentially provide an elegant solution to some of the biggest mysteries in science, including the nature of dark matter, an unidentified substance that makes up most mass in the universe, and dark energy, the term for whatever is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. 

The idea arose from string theory, a decades-old framework that suggests the universe contains many dimensions beyond the four dimensions that we can perceive as humans—time, and three-dimensional space. In a series of studies published over the past several years, a group of string theory experts have suggested that one of these dimensions could simultaneously govern dark matter and dark energy, and that this dimension changes over time. 

“The question was whether or not this extra dimension is frozen or can evolve,” said Cumrun Vafa, the Timken University Professor in the physics department at Harvard University and an author on these studies, including the newest preprint, in a call with 404 Media. “The fifth dimension is somehow related to the value of dark energy, so it's natural that when the value of the extra dimension changes, the value of dark energy also changes.”

When Vafa and his colleagues started to develop this idea, the conventional wisdom was that dark energy had a fixed value, according to the standard model of cosmology, a well-corroborated set of assumptions that explains most laws and phenomena in the universe.  

“We were scrutinized by our colleagues for predicting that string theory requires dark energy to change, whereas dark energy looks constant,” said Vafa. “This is not good for our field because you are predicting string theory is inconsistent with observation.”

But the assumption that dark energy has a fixed value, a central tenet of the standard model, has been challenged by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a major survey of the universe based at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, which released its first results in 2025. 

To the surprise of many scientists, the DESI release hinted that the value of dark energy may shift over time, a discovery that was in line with predictions of a dark dimension put forward by Vafa’s team.

“We didn't write a model to fit the data, but rather we had a model based on theory,” said Vafa. “Now that fits the data automatically. That is why I believe in it. It's easy to write a model after you know the data to try to fit it somehow. This is not what we did.”

“Our model is still the best model, as far as I know, that fits the DESI results,” he added.  

In their newest preprint, which is currently in the process of peer review, Vafa and his colleagues expand on the workings of this possible dark dimension in light of the DESI data. According to string theory, the universe has many dimensions that are “compactified” into subatomic scales that are not detectable by current instruments, which is why we have not discovered them. The hypothetical dark dimension, however, may be enlarged to a micron scale range. 

This would allow gravitons, which are the hypothetical particles that mediate the force of gravity, to spill over into the dark dimension, where they would become dark matter particles. In this view, dark matter is not made of some new form of exotic particle. Instead, it’s made up of gravitons that also exist in our familiar universe and have traversed into the dark dimension. 

“We are using the extra dimension to our benefit to explain what dark matter is,” Vafa said. “We don't need to introduce a new particle or particles. We are just saying it's the usual gravity.”

As this dark dimension evolves, so does the mass of these dark matter particles in that realm; Vafa’s team predicts they are becoming lighter. Likewise, the value of dark energy weakens over time. In this way, dark matter and dark energy—long thought to be likely unrelated—arise from the properties of the same extra dark dimension.

It’s a trippy and esoteric concept, and it may soon be put to the test. If a dark dimension does exist, then it should manifest as tiny deviations in Newton's gravitational force at micrometer scales. A team at the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information in Vienna is currently designing an experiment to test this idea, which could yield results in the coming years. 

Moreover, if dark matter particles are just gravitons that wandered into a dark dimension, then there should be some subtle observational hints of “a fifth force” in the dark sector. For example, scientists plan to test the hypothesis by closely watching the movements of stars in interacting galaxies, which are held together by dark matter halos, to search for a dark fifth force. 

When the galaxies come near each other, “the visible matter attracts the visible matter of the other galaxy, and dark matter of one also attracts the dark matter of the other galaxy as well,” Vafa explained. “But there's extra force between the dark matter compared to the visible matter because of this fifth force, so you get a more attractive force pulling the dark matter towards each other more than the visible part.”

“There are multiple fronts where things can come together,” he concluded. “Of course, the most exciting would be the confluence of all of these together, that somehow they agree. That would be really remarkable.”