Science

How plagiarism-detection programs became an unlikely political weapon

Published

2 years ago

January 21, 2024

How plagiarism-detection programs became an unlikely political weapon

The plagiarism accusations first struck Claudine Gay when a right-wing activist published several examples of unattributed text from the Harvard president’s academic writings. Though insufficient attribution wasn’t the only controversy swirling around Gay — her response to congressional questions about antisemitism on campus played a much bigger role — it was the tipping point that forced her resignation this month.

The next volley hit Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor and the wife of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who had campaigned vigorously for Gay’s ouster. The publication Business Insider reported that several paragraphs and sentences from Oxman’s dissertation appeared to have been lifted from Wikipedia. Oxman apologized for the errors on social media.

In response, Ackman wrote on X that he would be getting into the plagiarism review game as well. Ackman said his review would cover all the published work of all of MIT’s faculty, its president, Sally Kornbluth, and the university’s board members — plus all the work of the staff at Business Insider, and possibly also the work of the faculties at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth.

“Vetting every publication from every academic over their career at a huge university like Harvard would take thousands of hours,” said Chris Caren.

He would know. Caren is the chief executive of Oakland-based Turnitin, the world’s largest provider of academic integrity software. The company’s products include Feedback Studio, a program designed for high school and college instructors, and iThenticate, a more rigorous offering favored by academic journal editors.

Students work in the computer lab at Cuyama Valley High School in New Cuyama, Calif.

(Christine Armario / Associated Press)

According to the company, 80% of U.S. college students attend schools that use Turnitin’s software to check student work for plagiarism. So do 50% of U.S. high school students. Nearly all of the leading scholarly journals use the company’s products to check submitted articles for misappropriated language and missing citations, Caren said. (Turnitin’s programs analyze only text, he noted, and won’t catch fudged figures, manipulated images or other data-related chicanery.)

The widespread adoption of plagiarism-detection software in higher learning over the last decade means the prospect of a “plagiarism check” for most college graduates under the age of about 30 isn’t much of a threat. Their essays, papers, theses and dissertations were almost certainly vetted in this way when they handed them in.

But for older academics, subjecting work to the software’s level of scrutiny could well reveal attribution errors — intentional or not — that have never come to light before.

And that’s what a small but highly motivated sector of Turnitin’s customer base is counting on.

“We allow anyone to use them — media organizations, political groups,” Caren said of Turnitin’s products. “If there are other firms that want to look into someone’s past, it’s the same technology, it’s just being used by people we didn’t design it for in the first place.”

The National Science Foundation describes plagiarism as “the appropriation of another person’s ideas, processes, results or words without giving appropriate credit.” Harvard and MIT define it in similar language in their academic integrity guidelines.

In academia particularly, it can be a devastating charge.

“People get jobs, grants, and a litany of other opportunities based on their research that by default is assumed to be original to them. If it is later found out to not be, it would then be saying that they got these opportunities effectively based on fraud,” said Christian Moriarty, a professor of ethics and law at St. Petersburg College in Florida.

That’s why “an accusation, unfounded or not, undermines their authority and position,” he said.

No one has accused Gay or Oxman of stealing data or high-level ideas. But some of their published works appear to contain expository sentences and paragraphs that closely match language in sources available at the time — the type of plagiarism that software can most easily detect.

Gay’s accusers highlighted multiple instances of prose that echoed other sources. For instance, two paragraphs in her 1997 doctoral dissertation closely mirrored text in a paper by researchers who were not cited anywhere in the paper. Harvard said Gay requested corrections to some of the works.

In Oxman’s case, Business Insider identified 15 nonconsecutive paragraphs in her 2010 dissertation that closely resemble language that appeared in Wikipedia articles at that time. Most are definitions of technical terms and concepts. The publication also found passages in her research papers that echoed other sources.

Neither Christopher Rufo, the activist who first raised allegations against Gay, nor Business Insider disclosed what software they used to identify the problematic text.

Turnitin programs were used to discover that parts of Melania Trump’s 2016 speech at the Republican National Convention matched Michelle Obama’s 2008 remarks to the Democratic National Convention, Caren said.

The CEO said he also believes that the company’s software was used to determine that Germany’s former defense minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, had plagiarized in his doctoral dissertation, a massive political scandal in that country that led to the star politician’s downfall in 2011.

Though Feedback Studio is only available to institutions, iThenticate can be licensed by anyone. The program digests the text of a book, research paper or article in minutes and returns a detailed report that flags the percentage of phrases and passages in the document that match those published online and in Turnitin’s database of academic journals.

The report has to be checked by a human to weed out legitimate uses of quoted material. Though the process is time-consuming, it’s much faster than an equally thorough review would have taken in a predigital age.

“It’s easier to search for plagiarism than ever before,” said Jonathan Bailey, a copyright and plagiarism consultant in New Orleans. “The easier something is to do, the more people are likely to do it.”

It’s easier to search for plagiarism than ever before. The easier something is to do, the more people are likely to do it.

— Jonathan Bailey, copyright and plagiarism consultant

The idea of using plagiarism accusations as a means to discredit rivals was around long before the invention of plagiarism-checking software, said Sam Bruton, director of the Office of Research Integrity at the University of Southern Mississippi.

“People have always had the ability to raise allegations of scholarly integrity for ulterior motives, be those motives personal (grudges, resentments), political or something different,” Bruton wrote in an email.

He challenged the idea that the spread of the software is primarily responsible for an increase in plagiarism accusations, attributing it instead “to the hyper-politicization that has engulfed so many American institutions.”

But many educators and academics who use such programs in their daily work said that seeing them employed for political ends has been disheartening.

The technology is designed to support instructors and help enforce proper citation guidelines, said Moriarty, who teaches other professors how to use such tools.

“People in the academic integrity field often don’t like it or appreciate it or think it’s appropriate to use academic integrity software as a means to punish for punishment’s sake,” Moriarty said.

Plagiarism-detection software can’t determine how or why language similar to other sources appeared in an author’s work, whether the issue violates an institution’s code of ethics or what the consequences of such an infraction should be.

For now, at least, only humans can do that.

“Human expertise is essential to maintaining the integrity of scholarly and academic work,” said Greer Murphy, director of academic honesty at University of Rochester’s College of Arts, Sciences and Engineering in New York. “But such has always been true — the sophistication of modern technology hasn’t changed things.”

Science

Video: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

Published

17 hours ago

February 9, 2026

Press Room

Video: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

new video loaded: Why Mountain Lions in California Are Threatened

Six subpopulations of mountain lions in California face mounting threats, including habitat fragmentation from highways, urban sprawl, and wildfires, as well as widespread rodenticide poisoning. Loren Elliott, a photojournalist for The New York Times, shows how he documents these elusive animals.

By Loren Elliott, Gabriel Blanco and Rebecca Suner

February 9, 2026

Science

Torrance residents call for the ban of ‘flesh-eating’ chemical used at refinery

Published

2 days ago

February 8, 2026

Press Room

Torrance residents call for the ban of ‘flesh-eating’ chemical used at refinery

Residents and advocates gathered Saturday to demand the ban of a chemical that’s used at a Torrance oil refinery and that they say has the potential to cause a mass casualty disaster.

Hydrofluoric acid is used in about 40 gasoline refineries across the United States, according to the National Resources Defense Council. The defense council states that “exposing as little as 1% of a person’s skin to HF (about the size of one’s hand) can lead to death. When inhaled, HF can fatally damage lungs, disrupt heart rhythms, and cause other serious health effects.”

The Torrance Refinery uses modified hydrofluoric acid, or MHF, which the refinery considers to be a safer alternative to HF, though the claim is disputed by advocates. Steve Goldsmith, president of the Torrance Refinery Action Alliance, which hosted the Saturday event, said that if MHF were to be been released into the air, it would create irreversible health effects within 6.2 miles of the refinery, trickling into other parts of Los Angeles County.

And in 2015, he said, this almost happened.

On Feb. 18, 2015, there was an explosion at the refinery, then operated by ExxonMobil, caused by the rupture of an eroded valve. The incident, which released flammable hydrocarbons, injured four workers and forced 14 schools into lockdown.

The Saturday event, held at North High School’s Performing Arts Center in Torrance, marked the 11th anniversary of the explosion.

Goldsmith described the chemical as “murderous.”

Audience members participate in a “peace clap” at North Torrance High as they listen to speakers against the use of hydrofluoric acid in the Los Angeles region and across the country.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“Torrance Refinery had an enormous explosion, and a piece of equipment the size of a bus came within five feet of the hydrofluoric acid, causing a near miss,” Goldsmith said. “We’ve been working to get rid of it.”

Residents like Christopher Truman say replacing MHF with an alternative option is the least that can be done. His parents live near the refinery.

“I’m born and raised in the South Bay, and my family lives in, effectively, what would be the blast radius if another accident happened,” Truman said. “So just in that aspect, I’m very worried about it.”

MHF is also used to clean semiconductor surfaces and produce pesticides and herbicides in the agricultural and pharmaceutical industries, according to the Torrance Refinery.

County Supervisor Janice Hahn said residents should not assume “they will be lucky” if another refinery accident were to occur.

“Only two refineries in California use MHF, Torrance Refinery and the Valero Refinery in Wilmington,” Hahn said. “MHF is simply too dangerous to use. It is a flesh-eating, low-crawling, toxic vapor cloud. Our communities will not be safe until this chemical is gone.”

Goldsmith said a Chevron refinery in Salt Lake City found an ionic-liquid alkylation process as an alternative to MHF. He added that the 2025 Chevron refinery explosion in El Segundo “would have been different if they had been using MHF.”

“They used another chemical that did not endanger the community,” Goldsmith said. “And that’s the thing about refineries, they have explosions. But that’s why you can’t have [MHF] around things that can blow up.”

U.S. Representative

Congressmember Maxine Waters appears on a video message explaining her legislation

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, (D-Los Angeles), who represents the city of Torrance, greeted attendees in a prerecorded message, in which she reintroduced her bill, the “Preventing Mass Casualties from Release of Hydrofluoric Acid at Refineries Act,” which targets plants using MHF.

“I originally introduced this bill in December of 2024,” Waters said in the video. “I faced considerable opposition, especially from the United Steel Workers Union, [who were] concerned that if refineries converted to safer technologies, some of the refineries might close, leaving workers without jobs. They agreed with me that hydrofluoric acid is dangerous. But they still would not support my bill. So I decided to go ahead and reintroduce this bill, [without] union support.”

The bill would give refineries five years to find an alternative to the dangerous chemical. Violators may be subject to fines up to $37,000 per infraction.

Supervisor Janice Hahn speaks out against the use of hydrofluoric acid in the Los Angeles region and across the country

Some residents stressed the need for transparency from local officials.

Ian Patton, a Long Beach resident, said most parts of the investigation into the 2015 explosion were withheld.

“Why can’t they not make this report public? The [Torrance Refinery Action Alliance] has been asking for it for years,” Patton said. “The next step was to look at litigation under the California Public Records Act. It’s not something that we want to do, but the public deserves to know whether these plants are safe.”

Science

TrumpRx is launched: How it works and what Democrats say about it

Published

2 days ago

February 7, 2026

Press Room

TrumpRx is launched: How it works and what Democrats say about it

WASHINGTON — The White House’s TrumpRx website went live Thursday with a promise to instantly deliver prescription drugs at “the lowest price anywhere in the world.”

“This launch represents the largest reduction in prescription drug prices in history by many, many times, and it’s not even close,” President Trump said at a news conference announcing the launch of the platform.

Drug policy experts say the jury is still out on whether the platform will provide the significant savings Trump promises, though it will probably help people who need drugs not commonly covered by insurance.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, called the site a “vanity project” and questioned whether the program presents a possible conflict of interest involving the pharmaceutical industry and the Trump family.

What is TrumpRx, really?

The new platform, trumprx.gov, is designed to help uninsured Americans find discounted prices for high-cost, brand-name prescriptions, including fertility, obesity and diabetes treatments.

The site does not directly sell drugs. Instead, consumers browse a list of discounted medicines, and select one for purchase. From there, they either receive a coupon accepted at certain pharmacies or are routed directly to a drug manufacturer’s website to purchase the prescription.

The White House said the reduced prices are possible after the administration negotiated voluntary “most favored nation” agreements with 16 major drugmakers including Pfizer, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.

Under these deals, manufacturers have agreed to set certain U.S. drug prices no higher than those paid in other wealthy nations in exchange for three-year tariff exemptions. However, the full legal and financial details of the deals have not been made public, leaving lawmakers to speculate how TrumpRx’s pricing model works.

What does it accomplish?

Though the White House has framed TrumpRx as a historic reset for prescription drug costs, economists said the platform offers limited new savings.

But it does move the needle on the issue of drug pricing transparency, away from the hidden mechanisms behind how prescription drugs are priced, rebated and distributed, according to Geoffrey Joyce, director of health policy at the USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics.

“This has been a murky world, a terrible, obscure, opaque marketplace where drug prices have been inconsistently priced to different consumers,” Joyce said, “So this is a little step in the right direction, but it’s mostly performative from my perspective, which is kind of Trump in a nutshell.”

Still, for the uninsured or people seeking “lifestyle drugs” — like those for fertility or weight loss that insurers have historically declined to cover — TrumpRx could become a useful option, Joyce said.

“It’s kind of a win for Trump and a win for Pfizer,” Joyce said. “They get to say, ‘Look what we’re doing. We’re lowering prices. We’re keeping Trump happy, but it’s on our low-volume drugs, and drugs that we were discounting big time anyway.’”

Where does it fall short?

Early analyses by drug policy experts suggest many of the discounted medications listed on the TrumpRx site were already on offer through other drug databases before the platform launched.

For example, Pfizer’s Duavee menopause treatment is listed at $30.30 on TrumpRx, but it is also available for the same price at some pharmacies via GoodRx.

Weight management drug Wegovy starts at $199 on TrumpRx. Manufacturers were already selling the same discounted rates through its NovoCare Pharmacy program before the portal’s launch.

“[TrumpRx] uses data from GoodRx, an existing price-search database for prescription drugs,” said Darius N. Lakdawalla, a senior health policy researcher at USC. “It seems to provide prices that are essentially the same as the lowest price GoodRx reports on its website.”

Compared to GoodRx, TrumpRx covers a modest subset of drugs: 43 in all.

“Uninsured consumers, who do not use or know about GoodRx and need one of the specific drugs covered by the site, might benefit from TrumpRx. That seems like a very specific set of people,” Lakdawalla said.

Where do Democrats stand?

Democrats slammed the program this week, saying it would not provide substantial discounts for patients, and called for greater transparency around the administration’s dealings with drugmakers. To date, the administration has not disclosed the terms of the pricing agreements with manufacturers such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca.

In the lead-up to the TrumpRx launch, Democratic members of Congress questioned its usefulness and urged federal health regulators to delay its debut.

“This is just another Donald Trump pet project to rebrand something that already exists, take credit for it, and do nothing to actually lower healthcare prices,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said Friday. “Democrats will continue fighting to lower healthcare costs and push Republicans to stop giving handouts to billionaires at the expense of working-class Americans.”

Three other Democratic senators — Dick Durbin, Elizabeth Warren and Peter Welch — raised another concern in a Jan. 29 letter to Thomas March Bell, inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services.

The three senators pointed to potential conflicts of interest between TrumpRx and an online dispensing company, BlinkRx.

One of Trump’s sons, Donald Trump Jr., joined the BlinkRx Board of Directors in February 2025.

Months before, he became a partner at 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm that holds a significant stake in BlinkRx and led the startup’s $140-million funding round in 2024. After his appointment, BlinkRx launched a service to help pharmaceutical companies build direct-to-patient sales platforms quickly.

“The timing of the BlinkRx announcement so closely following the administration’s outreach to the largest drug companies, and the involvement of President Trump’s immediate family, raises questions about potential coordination, influence and self-dealing,” according to an October 2025 statement by Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Both BlinkRx and Donald Trump Jr. have denied any coordination.

What’s next?

The rollout of TrumpRx fits into a suite of White House programs designed to address rising costs, an area of vulnerability for Republicans ahead of the November midterms.

The White House issued a statement Friday urging support for the president’s healthcare initiative, dubbed “the great healthcare plan,” which it said will further reduce drug prices and lower insurance premiums.

For the roughly 8% of Americans without health insurance, TrumpRx’s website promises that more high-cost, brand-name drugs will be discounted on the platform in the future.

“It’s possible the benefits will become broader in the future,” Lakdawalla said. “I would say that the jury remains out on its long-run structure and its long-run pricing effects.”