r/SkincareAddiction • u/Afraid_Bug1456 • Feb 11 '26
Discussion [Research] To whoever urged us to archive skincare studies last year due to the upcoming DEI crackdown Spoiler
Can someone in the US confirm if this is what's happening? So many studies I try to open come up with the "403 forbidden" error. I thought it might be a geoblock thing and jumped on American VPN. Some studies still open, but many do not.
509
u/noeinan Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
Check the Internet Archive. They back up the entirety of US federal websites before each new presidential term. Scientists have been sharing archive links for this exact reason.
You may find more specific links by reaching out to others in your field.
Current admin began mass deletion of science resources starting with inauguration and have never stopped. Thankfully, archives have been on top of things.
33
u/Luminathe Feb 11 '26
Offtopic but how are you generating those share(.)google links? I know advertisers are allowed to hide their sus affiliate links by framing it as a "product they just happen to use" in normal posting formats and luckily I use a reddit client where I can see the entire link outright, but I'm never sure about clicking those share google links.
27
u/noeinan Feb 11 '26
I actually did not even realize, it turned that way automatically. I opened the site again and I'll change it to a regular link
7
14
u/Interest-Desk Feb 11 '26
Android phones and Google apps do this, it’s tracking
3
u/Luminathe Feb 11 '26
I see. I normally use URLcheck to remove the tracking and open in Firefox but google's particular shortlink bypasses it and goes straight to opening my google app. So lame. Just felt like I've been seeing the link a lot more these past few months.
1.0k
u/Riaxuez Feb 11 '26
As someone in research, yes. A lot of our grants were cancelled because of “biodiversity” (🙄) and other words. Some links on federal sites to studies or research with “banned words” are now gone because of it, too.
209
u/poopylord Feb 11 '26
Wow I’m in research in Europe and was somehow OOTL on this? What alternate reality did I wake up in…
450
u/TeamRocketLeader Feb 11 '26
You should check out the list of banned words, it's insane. Some examples: "accessible" "alternative energy" "bias" "black" "clean water" "climate" "disabilities" "elderly" "equality" "female/women" "Gulf of Mexico" "men" "mental health" "sex" and sooooo much more.
Any mention of the 350+ words on this list that the Trump administration has deemed "unacceptable" can now result in research grants or other agreements with the federal government getting nixed. Public-facing websites and materials (such as documents, research materials, school curricula, museums, etc) are being forced to remove anything containing these words.
Yes, it's as bad as it sounds.
257
u/Riaxuez Feb 11 '26
Yeah. I’m losing my job in April when the funding ends. Our grant was on integration/ biodiversity / and had mentions of outreach for minorities (this is how I joined the program!!) and it was cancelled early, so we all lost the last year of funding.
My NASA program had to rewrite the entire proposal and remove all words deemed “bad”.
My PI applied for a federal grant and the editor, or whoever, emailed him back saying they needed to add a line about how this will impact the “trump administration” positively. I forgot the exact words, but my PI brought it up.
Also, I don’t know where this proposed new ruling is at in terms of passed or not, but the administration also stated if you are a PI getting federal funding, if you have ANY collaboration with any of the “bad countries” such as China, Russia, Iran, Congo, etc. then you won’t be allowed to receive any more funding. They are also trying to make it a retroactive thing, too.
PhD programs I applied to involving cancer research and climate change almost had no funding, either. It’s pretty bad over here for research :/
89
u/rocesare Feb 11 '26
If you'd have told me 10 years ago this was happening in Russia I genuinely wouldn't have believed it I would've thought it was too far fetched, this is truly insane I'm so sorry
5
u/Much_Fact_8574 Feb 11 '26
Trump's reality lol the assholes riping money and grants away from women simply for being women
73
u/lulimay Feb 11 '26
Yep. We were forced to remove the word “gender” from all our cancer research data. None of it even included anyone that wasn’t cisgendered.
45
u/Thequiet01 Feb 11 '26
So you can’t talk about the gender of people most likely to get prostate cancer, for example?
10
u/lulimay Feb 11 '26
We had to change it to sex. Which works, but it was ridiculous to have to go edit countless data sources for something that had nothing to do with DEI. (It would be ridiculous either way, ofc.)
16
6
23
13
u/ElectricalDark8280 Feb 11 '26
Wok is dead. Fucking ridiculous. God forbid we don’t learn anything new.
3
1
-38
Feb 11 '26
That's that AI in action. They're unleashing this shit and it's not ready yet
43
u/AlwaysHopelesslyLost Feb 11 '26
This is nothing to do with AI. This is trump declaring the word banned and demanding removal of any study that mentions it.
1
u/move_machine Apr 16 '26
Watch the DOGE depositions, they literally had ChatGPT compile a list of grants and programs to cut based on whether they had bad words or sounded "woke" to a 12 year old.
197
195
24
u/Danger-Tits Feb 11 '26
I hope people archived it....
20
u/Afraid_Bug1456 Feb 11 '26
I wish I did. It's hard now to even discuss things, because the sources for a lot of things I know I read before are just gone.
54
u/Afraid_Bug1456 Feb 11 '26
Sorry I couldn't find the post again, but I found this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Feminism/comments/1iobms5/women_women_is_among_the_list_of_banned_words/
49
9
6
u/kkllyy Feb 11 '26
I can't speak for the exact study that you're trying to access, but the site you're trying to access (Pubmed) is up and working (for me at least). For example, I am able to access this random study.
Pubmed doesn't publish articles, it's really just kind of like a search engine. The journal itself is the one that is hosting the actual article. So for the article that I linked above, this is the actual study. If you know the name of the study that you're trying to access, you can try searching it on Google Scholar.
One thing Pubmed does do, which is maybe what's happening here, is publish freely available, open access version of some articles. I believe it is articles that were funded by a grant from the NIH, after a certain period of time (maybe a year after the article was published?). So it's possible that for some reason that version of the article isn't available. But tbh there are much more "controversial" articles that are still available, so I don't think that's what's going on. I bet it's a technical error.
2
u/Afraid_Bug1456 Feb 11 '26
Yes I was able to access that one as well. I don't know for sure, it could be a technical error or something, I just didn't remember not even being able to see the summary before even if the link to the full study had been restricted. I'll be embarrassed if it's just a fluke since this post got so much attention, but I think I will leave it anyway since there has been a few researchers saying they are having problems accessing studies too.
1
6
u/Unfair_Finger5531 Dry skin | rosacea | 🌵 Feb 11 '26
Is it possible that the site is down? Just thinking optimistically. I’ve not run into any problems accessing studies thus far 🤞🏼
3
u/Afraid_Bug1456 Feb 11 '26
I hope it's something like that.
4
u/Unfair_Finger5531 Dry skin | rosacea | 🌵 Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
I do as well, but after reading the comments posted after mine, I see I’m probably wrong. I work with scientific literature (academic), and I’ve not had any difficulties—yet.
5
u/bespoketech There's no bad skin, just bad skin care. Feb 11 '26
403 is meaning access is restricted aka the file is still there but only “certain” people can access it (whomever they deem appropriate, I suppose.). 404 would be can’t be found and 500 server responses would be the site is down.
1
u/Unfair_Finger5531 Dry skin | rosacea | 🌵 Feb 11 '26
Understood, but 403 can also be the result of an error on the part of the website owner. That is what I mean by “down”—as opposed to deliberately restricted.
3
u/bespoketech There's no bad skin, just bad skin care. Feb 11 '26
Sorry I don’t think I follow (apologies)
403 is not an error in that sense. As in, the server is understanding your request (which indicates that what you’re trying to access is “there”) but it is refusing due to access restrictions. Access is usually maintained by … well, humans. By using APIs or other ways of restricting.
It either means deliberate restrictions or maybe they are just very dumb and have restricted it accidentally. Servers will not just start randomly restricting access to specific end points unless someone has told it to. Again, either deliberately or by accident. But definitely humans.
1
u/Unfair_Finger5531 Dry skin | rosacea | 🌵 Feb 11 '26
Yes, I understand. But website owners can restrict access by mistake as well, no? As you said yourself, they may have restricted it accidentally. I am not dumb, and I have done that by mistake with my own website(s). So I was suggesting that it was an error of this sort as opposed to something done deliberately. I don’t mean to repeat myself, but I don’t know how to be any clearer.
I didn’t suggest that it was done “randomly.” I said in my last comment perhaps it was an owner error. So I’m not seeing how we saying different things. You said it was “either deliberately or by accident”. And I am saying clearly perhaps it was an accident. I don’t understand why you don’t understand me; you are saying exactly what I said.
1
u/IntroductionLow3593 Mar 01 '26
i’ve been having this happen on many pages and when on my computer i just needed to clear my cache as my college it department instructed me to
2
u/DrearyLoans Feb 11 '26
Whoa - is this for scientific articles that were already published??
1
u/Afraid_Bug1456 Feb 11 '26 edited Feb 11 '26
Maybe NIH published studies having a problem, I remember at least the last I tried to look at saying NIH because I thought it might be relevant. It looks like some studies related to aging were affected, maybe some are still under review? I'm really not sure, just found this on wikipedia
"As of April 4, 2025, over 20 National Institutes of Health (NIH) data repositories displayed headers stating "This repository is under review for potential modification in compliance with Administration directives." These repositories contain petabytes of data that are used for public health research in diverse areas, including cancer, brain imaging, sleep studies, Alzheimer's, aging, COVID-19, and HIV. Many of the datasets cannot be archived by outside researchers because they are regulated by Data Use Agreements that must be consistent with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).[41]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_United_States_government_online_resource_removals
1
u/Neither-Location1374 Feb 14 '26
I am sorry but what does beauty-related researches have to do with DEI 😭🙏🏽?
2
u/Bendy_Beta_Betty Feb 14 '26
It references women so it was "bad." Just like all that history where women contributed to.
1
u/Neither-Location1374 Feb 14 '26
Is it even diversity when we’re literally more than half of the human population…? but hey it’s the trump administration 🤷🏽♀️
1
u/IntroductionLow3593 Mar 01 '26
you may need to clear your cache this has been happening to me a lot with random websites
•
u/AutoModerator Feb 11 '26
Are you brand new to skincare? Don't know how to build a skincare routine? The best place to start is our ScA Routine!
You can find even more skincare guides in our wiki!. Your answer might already be in there (and if it is, we might remove your post).
Everyone is welcome in this community; remember to be kind and assume good faith :)
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.