Newsletter: How to Fight for Civil Rights in the Age of AI

Good morning!

I’ve just returned from Brussels, where I had the chance to attend CPDP, a long-running conference that encompasses a range of tech policy issues and attracts a significant number of Tech Policy Press contributors and readers.

During the conference, contributing editor Mark Scott hosted a discussion organized by the Knight-Georgetown Institute on platform data, governance, and accountability, and senior editor Ramsha Jahangir cohosted a session organized by the Coalition for Independent Technology Research on the threats faced by civil society organizations, researchers and regulators involved in the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) implementation.

Those threats come from both sides of the Atlantic. In a must-read piece this week, Tech Policy Press contributing editor Dean Jackson gathered evidence of European Parliament efforts to undermine the DSA—efforts that align with criticism from the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

(We're cohosting a virtual event on barriers to data access and threats to researchers on June 17 with Columbia World Projects and the Center for Digital Governance at the Hertie School featuring Mark Scott, Brandi Geurkink, and Courtney Radsch. Register here.)

AI and the fight for civil rights

It’s been a busy month of conferences. On Tuesday, May 12, I traveled to Washington DC for the Center for Civil Rights and Technology’s 2026 annual convening, “All Eyes on Tech: Power, Protection, and the Fights for Civil Rights in the Age of AI,” hosted at the Mayflower Hotel. The Center is a joint project of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and The Leadership Conference Education Fund. Launched in September 2023, it engages in advocacy, education, and research on issues at the intersection of civil rights and technology policy, with experts working on AI and privacy, industry accountability, and broadband access.

That Tuesday morning, Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference, gave opening remarks. She expressed anger and frustration—shared across the coalition—about the Supreme Court decision just days prior in Louisiana v. Callais. The Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The decision further weakens Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a law that is regarded as one of the most significant achievements of that era’s civil rights movement but that has been hollowed out by previous court decisions. And it immediately opened the door to more redistricting across the country, bolstering Republican efforts to control Congress.

Wiley connected her broader concerns on voting rights and democracy to the themes of the event. “Because ultimately,” she said, “what we're talking about is do the people get to decide the shape of society, and does everyone in society get the opportunity to then help shape it?”

She then introduced Dr. Ruha Benjamin, who gave the morning keynote. Dr. Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab and she’s written and edited multiple books, including 2019’s Race After Technology, 2022’s Viral Justice, and 2024’s Imagination: A Manifesto.

In her remarks, Dr. Benjamin said that the “conversation about technology and civil rights is part of a much longer freedom struggle, that there's a legacy of freedom fighters who thought critically and creatively about the role of science and technology in advancing or thwarting social liberation.” She called on the audience to unlearn the “narrative of inevitability” around tech, and to challenge the dystopian and utopian narratives that both follow “techno-deterministic logic.” She asserted the problem is not rooted in “a handful of discriminatory technologies, but rather a fundamentally corrupt ideology of power and governance.” She said we must cultivate “both our critical and our creative capacity to pierce through the illusions swirling around emerging technologies—not only identifying the harms, which is our critical capacity, but also envisioning alternatives.”

After her remarks, I sat down with her alongside Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president of the Center for Civil Rights & Technology. At the event, Montoya-Boyer launched a new report finding that AI will likely amplify the racial wealth gap rather than narrow it. You can listen to the audio from the conversation in this week’s Tech Policy Press podcast.

We had another particularly complementary piece this week. In the aftermath of Louisiana v. Callais, Cecilia Marrinan, tech policy associate at the Kapor Foundation, writes that given the difficulty of passing voting rights legislation and data-broker regulation at the federal level, states must enact their own laws to prohibit vote dilution while also enacting guardrails for algorithmic redistricting that uses third-party data brokers. “Social and digital technologies have been, and will continue to be, used to produce partisan outcomes. Race cannot be considered a disparate metric,” she writes.

And echoing some of Dr. Benjamin’s themes, Tech Policy Press fellow Petra Molnar highlights the AI Resist List: a new global database documenting acts of resistance to the AI industry. From legal challenges and worker organizing to artistic interventions, the project seeks to challenge the “scale at all costs” development of AI. “The list is organized around the Countering AI Inevitability Framework, four overlapping modes of resistance: Resisting, Refusing, Reclaiming, and Reimagining. The taxonomy matters because it expands what counts as resistance,” she writes.

We published a number of other items this week on issues at the intersection of AI, civil and human rights, and democracy:

• Repression no longer stops at borders. AI is helping states surveil, intimidate and silence dissidents, exiled journalists and diaspora communities worldwide—often invisibly. In a new piece in Tech Policy Press, Ana Sofia Harrison, a recent fellow on AI governance and human rights at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), and Marlena Wisniak, head of digital at the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law (ECNL), map the tools, the harms and the policy gaps.
• For the first time since the birth of the Internet, the world is confronting not merely a new technology in artificial intelligence, but a new operational status quo. The question is whether governance can evolve before security fears harden into permanent fragmentation, writes Konstantinos Komaitis, senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Democracy and Tech Initiative. “The instinct to control AI capabilities is understandable but isolation is not a durable governance strategy,” he writes.
• Tech hype isn't just marketing and PR—it's also alarm, paranoia, and propaganda. Fabian Muniesa, a professor at the École des Mines de Paris and a member of the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation, argues today's hype matches what scholars Adorno and Horkheimer called reason's collapse into fascist madness. The piece is part of our ongoing series on Hype Studies.
• AI companies are now getting accommodations that disabled people spent decades fighting for. Jonathan Zong, an assistant professor of information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, and Frank Elavsky, an assistant professor of data science at Cal Poly, argue this reflects a broader pattern, where accessibility gains become politically possible only once industry needs the same changes.
• India showcased bold AI ambitions at the AI Impact Summit in February. But execution tells a different story: slow fund disbursal, fragmented investment and unresolved policy tensions risk undermining its long-term AI plans, write Anoushka Roy, public policy consultant, and Shweta Kushe, a corporate lawyer.

Platform and market regulation

• A civil society group's successful bid to intervene in Apple's challenge to EU interoperability rules illustrates how enforcement of the Digital Markets Act is being shaped beyond the Commission, writes Megan Kirkwood, a researcher and writer specializing in issues related to competition and antitrust.
• Apple and Google are rolling out end-to-end encrypted RCS between iPhone and Android. Billions get instant security gains — and the "interoperability undermines security" argument both companies pushed for years just got much harder to defend, writes Mallory Knodel, founder and director of the Social Web Foundation.

Child online safety

• After a wave of lawsuits linked AI chatbots to teen self-harm and suicide, Congress is advancing two bills to regulate them. Danai Nhando, global advisor at the Atlantic Council's Freedom and Prosperity Center and AI and new engagement strategies campaign director at a global non-profit, examines how the GUARD Act and CHATBOT Act seek to address the mounting concerns over chatbot harms. “The introduction of two bipartisan bills within six months reflects a genuine cross-aisle consensus that the status quo cannot continue, particularly one in which platforms enable chatbots to form emotionally dependent relationships with minors and treat crisis protocols as discretionary product features,” she writes.
• For two decades, teens were the crash-test dummies for social media, says Bruce Reed, head of AI at Common Sense Media. He argues we can't afford to repeat that mistake with AI — and that’s why Common Sense unveiled a new Youth AI Safety Institute to help prevent it. The Institute is backed by a $20 million annual budget to “rigorously test AI products." I spoke to Reed about the initiative for the podcast.
• Recent jury verdicts may mark a turning point for platform accountability in the US. But litigation alone cannot define safe design, argue Megan Shahi, director of technology policy at the Center for American Progress and a Spring 2026 Tech and Public Policy Visiting Fellow at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, Gregory Shelby, Master of Public Policy student at Georgetown and an organizer at the Network on Emerging Threats, and Helena Monsivais, Master of Data Science for Public Policy student at Georgetown and vice president of the McCourt Student Association. Courts can identify harm after the fact; policymakers must build proactive rules to reduce risk systematically.

Synthetic media

• Kenyans are already being arrested under existing law for AI-generated material in political posts. A new AI Bill that adds criminal penalties without a satire exception could expand that pattern as the 2027 vote nears, Liz Orembo, a research fellow at Research ICT Africa, writes.
• AI detection systems are optimized to identify manipulated humans, not synthetic environments, disasters, or infrastructure, write shirin anlen, AI research technologist and impact manager at WITNESS, and Zuzanna Wojciak, program associate at the Technology Threats and Opportunities team at WITNESS. As generative AI increasingly permeates climate-related misinformation, this limitation will become more visible and more dangerous.

What we're watching

In the US this week, Meta agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by Kentucky’s Breathitt County School District, which alleged that Facebook and Instagram were designed to be addictive and contributed to youth mental health harms. The case had been scheduled as the first federal bellwether trial among roughly 1,200 similar lawsuits filed by school districts nationwide seeking compensation for the educational and mental health costs associated with student social media use. Settlement terms were not disclosed.

We welcome contributor perspectives on the implications of the settlement and on what kinds of settlement terms could produce meaningful changes, beyond just financial compensation.

I wish you the best for the week ahead-

Justin