- Fixing Google
- FCC and Deepfakes
- Digital Apartheid in Gaza
- LGBTQ+ on Public Media
- White Nationalists’ Immigration Surveillance
- AI Straining the Grid
- Misinfo Worse for Spanish Speakers
- Utah Mulls Social Media Age Limits
- Covering the War: The Cost in Blood
- Looking for Comics at the Whitney Biennial
By Cory Doctorow
Pluralistic
The court could order Google to sell off parts of its business, like its ad-tech stack, through which it represents both buyers and sellers in a marketplace it owns, and with whom it competes as a buyer and a seller. There's already proposed, bipartisan legislation to do this (how bipartisan? Its two main co-sponsors are Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!)
By Julia Conley
Common Dreams
A week after the Federal Elections Commission announced it would not take action to regulate artificial intelligence-generated “deepfakes” in political ads, more than 40 civil society groups called on the Federal Communications Commission to step in to ensure U.S. voters will be informed about fake content used by campaigns as they prepare to go to the polls.
By Paige Collings and Starchy Grant
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Without greater transparency, the public cannot tell whether U.S.-based companies like Google and Amazon are complying with human rights standards—both those set by the United Nations and those they have publicly set for themselves. We need the truth about use of their technologies in Gaza so that everyone can see whether their human rights commitments were real.
Documentaries and other programs about LGBT issues can still be found on public TV and local public radio stations. But producers attribute the decline of such programming to the growth of gay representation in other media and a shift in the political climate.
White Nationalists’ Immigration Surveillance
An anti-immigration nonprofit with ties to hate groups, NumbersUSA, is pushing GOP lawmakers to expand the use of a government website, E-Verify, designed to screen workers’ immigration status.
By Ayse Coskun
The Conversation
Data centers have had continuous growth for decades, but the magnitude of growth in the still-young era of large language models has been exceptional. AI requires a lot more computational and data storage resources than the pre-AI rate of data center growth could provide.
Misinfo Worse for Spanish Speakers
By Jessica J. González and Amy Kroin
Free Press
Spanish speakers are spending more time online and more time searching for culturally relevant news — but are finding less information that meets their civic-information needs. They’re also feeling the effects of social-media companies’ lack of investment in Spanish-language content moderation. This means that more hate, more lies and more harassment are getting through to them.
Utah Mulls Social Media Age Limits
By Emily Anderson Stern
The Salt Lake Tribune
As Utah’s children head back to school, the social media platforms they use to connect with friends have another deadline looming: They have until Oct. 1 to make sweeping changes to their websites to rein in kids’ use of their services — and, lawmakers say, limit social media’s negative mental health consequences — or face thousands of dollars in fines.
Covering the War: The Cost in Blood
By Mohamed Mandour, Doja Daoud, Ignacio Miguel Delgado Culebras and Samir Alsharif
Committee to Protect Journalists
In addition to the growing tally of journalists killed and injured, CPJ’s research has found multiple kinds of incidents of journalists being targeted while carrying out their work in Israel and the two Palestinian territories, Gaza and the West Bank. These include 52 arrests, as well as numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.
Looking for Comics at the Whitney Biennial
By Sean McCarthy
The Comics Journal
While the biennial has often included comics-adjacent work over the last couple decades, the only comics I could find among the 26,000+ works in the Whitney’s online collection database were one each by Chris Ware, Karl Wirsum, and Jim Shaw. Meanwhile, the representation of AI-generated work within the collection, the Biennial, and even solo shows at the museum, continues to grow.
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