First post on the forum so be gentle.
TL;DR: The Spanish company Nueva Pescanova is planning to farm octopus and begin selling it on the market in 2023. They intend to sell 3,000 tons of farmed octopus per year, which amounts to several hundred thousand octopuses. This is concerning given that octopuses are highly intelligent animals; there are no released standards for how the octopuses are going to be kept and raised, nor for how they will be slaughtered. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of coordinated action against this yet.
Link to the article: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59667645
This isn’t directly related, but here is some background about popular sentiment and one kind of activism:
The Octopus farming event has gotten traction and reception in social media.
On Reddit (the basis for LessWrong/EA forum) the issue has a 92k upvoted post, which puts it among one of the top recent posts:
In addition to the popularity of the post, many of the top comments are also pro-octopus welfare. The post has are moderate toned discussions that try to persuade or inform people.
I'm unsure if there’s any connection to this particular post, but in the past, several people (near EA, but not funded by EA money) have worked diligently on Reddit communication.
What this means is more well received, top posts such as this for farm animals. It probably also means high effort comments, e.g. "nonviolent communication" and "emotional labor", that try to communicate and persuade, in a sort of EA way.
Over time, my guess is that popular discussion of farm animal welfare might have improved, with less heated, distracting arguments.
It's unclear if or how social media will stop this particular farm, but sentiment seems useful in other theories of change.
It's also good to know that in more than one way (senior EA academic leaders being the other), it's plausible that EA leaders and near-EAs might have helped moved sentiment.