Media Bits and Bytes — April 14, 2026
- Pushing Back Data Centers
- Countdown to Encryption
- Rejecting AI’s Future for Journalism
- Beware the Facial Recognition Revolution
- Protests? What Protests?
- Slopaganda
- Public Radio Stations Sue for Funding
- France Gives the US a Digital Digit
- Campaign Against—and For—The Voice of Hind Rajab
- The Right to Cartoon
By Liz Mineo, The Harvard Gazette
In this interview, Ben Green, assistant professor in the University of Michigan School of Information and Public Policy and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, discusses the impact of data centers on communities, the factors behind their rapid expansion, and the potential for regulation.
By Erica Portnoy, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Google moved up its estimated deadline for quantum preparedness in cryptography to 2029—only 33 months from now. That’s earlier than previous deadlines, and they proposed the new post-quantum migration deadline because of two new papers that comprise a big jump in the state of the technology.
Rejecting AI’s Future for Journalism
By Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket
Another problem with relying on AI is that there’s no way of knowing where the program you’re using has “learned” this knowledge, nor can you know what is paraphrased versus straight-up lifted from another writer’s work. That became painfully clear this week when the New York Times had to issue a mortifying correction to a book review.
Beware the Facial Recognition Revolution
By Petra Molnar, openDemocracy
As techno-fascism takes hold, the polycrisis is increasingly dominated by surveillance. From robo-dogs at the US-Mexico border to facial recognition at sports stadiums across much of the world and algorithms deciding what we do and don’t see online, our lives are curated and sharpened by automation, digitisation and artificial intelligence.
By Media and Democracy Project
The same influential media institutions—such as the the New York Times and Wall Street Journal—that are sanewashing President Trump and failing to accurately communicate the urgency and gravity of democracy under siege are also insufficiently covering the pro-democracy movement and mass demonstrations.
By Mark Alfano and Michał Klincewicz, The Conversation
Slopaganda can be understood as a special kind of AI bullshit, but its unique features become clearer when we look at its use in campaigns such as the Iranian Lego videos. This is not just bullshit. No one is misled into thinking Trump can pilot an F-16 and drop faeces out of it. No one (we hope) believes plastic Trump Lego figurines are in cahoots with a plastic Satan figurine.
Public Radio Stations Sue for Funding
By Lucy Schiller, Columbia Journalism Review
Three Colorado stations signed on to a lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s defunding of NPR and PBS. It’s too late to recover lost funds, but their court victory sets an important precedent.
France Gives the US a Digital Digit
By Zack Whittaker, TechCrunch
France is trying to move on from Microsoft Windows. The country said it plans to move some of its government computers currently running Windows to the open source operating system Linux to further reduce its reliance on U.S. technology Linux is an open source operating system that is free to download and use.
Campaign Against — and For — The Voice of Hind Rajab
The Wire
More than 90 filmmakers, journalists, academics and activists from India, Israel and elsewhere have issued a statement condemning the Central Board of Film Certification’s ban on the Oscar-winning documentary The Voice of Hind Rajab in India. This ban, they argue, “continues a worrying pattern of Indian censorship of Palestinian and progressive Israeli voice”.
By Hank Kennedy, FAIR
Perhaps Donald Trump’s Pentagon saw itself as acting in the Patton tradition when it eliminated comics from Stars and Stripes. US servicemembers have now been saved from the woke, subversive influences of Doonesbury, Pearls Before Swine and, perhaps worst of all, Beetle Bailey.