Dear Citizens,
We don’t often agree with U.S. Republican Governors, but when Utah Governor Spencer Cox said this week that “Social media is a cancer on our society right now…And I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community,” he may have been on to something. Yet again a shooter took a life and their motivation grew out of a politically jumbled mix of conspiracy theories, gaming memes and discord chats. Extremism expert Nathan Pemberton called the shooter's information intake “a machine more than capable of constructing false realities and corroding our lived experiences.
Here’s what else to read, watch and do this week.
🇮🇳 ONE WATCH: Surviving a “Culture of Fear” 🇮🇳
This is generally a “voiceless” unauthored newsletter. But man, when shit hits the fan, not many people make better sense of it for me than Arundhati Roy. And for those who don’t know, The Citizens have worked extensively to call out techno-authoritarianism in the U.S. and India, and fought suppression by the Indian government.
That makes Arundhati Roy’s conversation this week with the New York Times so stunning - initially “talking about her mother and her memoir but ended up discussing the cost of speaking out and the parallels she sees between India under Modi and America under President Trump.” Her full interview, “How to Survive in a Culture of Fear,” is a must-watch:
🎵ONE READ: “The Largest IP Theft In Human History” 🎵
Pretty wild stuff in Billboard this week, who report that “Some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI and X, scraped copyright-protected music from millions of songwriters, composers and artists to train generative artificial intelligence systems”
Meta? Behaving badly!? The litany of allegations is weird, wild, 11 bullets long and … even ensnares Ed Sheeran. Bad Habits indeed! Billboard’s Richard Smirke writes -
“This is the largest IP theft in human history. That’s not hyperbole. We are seeing tens of millions of works being infringed daily,” says ICMP director general John Phelan. “Within any one model training data set, you’re often talking about tens of millions of musical works often gained from individual YouTube, Spotify and GitHub URLs, which are being collated in direct breach of the rights of music publishers and their songwriter partners.”
Read the whole investigation here.
Bonus read: Starmer’s race to AI-fy public services
📝ONE ACTION: Share a Link to Fight Gender-Based Violence 📝
Our friends at Paradigm Initiative are conducting a survivor-led study on Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) in six African countries: Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. This initiative seeks to document and amplify the lived experiences of victims of online abuse, such as sextortion, non-consensual image sharing, cyberstalking, impersonation, and other forms of digital harm.
They need a global community that's all in to help. Your one action this week:
Share the survey link in your newsletters, WhatsApp groups, or private networks
Post on social media using the hashtag #ClicksThatHurt
Encourage relevant communities, especially survivors and advocates, to participate
Share the survey link directly with survivors and communities you support who may have experienced TFGBV;
The link is here. Think you won’t reach anyone relevant? You’d be surprised.
That’s it for this week.
Team Citizens