In a new op-ed for @disabilitylab.bsky.social, CDT's Ariana Aboulafia argues that independent living means more than remaining at home. It requires autonomy, agency, and the ability to make choices without constant monitoring or surveillance.

Question: if you go to google.com outside the US, what "skin" does the Google logo have? I see a US football team logo and I think Google should give you the ability to choose the "skin" of your Google logo during the World Cup rather than them de facto choosing based on where you're logging on from

New from me and the inimitable @caitlinvogus.bsky.social for @theintercept.com! Age verification comes at a great cost to our rights and democracy, including by undermining the anonymity that is crucial for journalists and their sources to document and report on government abuse of power freely

Mandating age verification "effectively hands Big Tech and the government a skeleton key to the identities of every whistleblower, dissident, and investigative reporter who uses online platforms," FPF's @caitlinvogus.bsky.social and @aliyabhatia.bsky.social write in @theintercept.com.

When AI becomes the primary filter for the world’s information, what happens to our news, language, and knowledge? I spoke with @klaudia.bsky.social, @aliyabhatia.bsky.social, and Yanick Kemayou for our first episode of REAL Resistance to find out. Listen to the conversation here:

Catch the first episode with @klaudia.bsky.social, @aliyabhatia.bsky.social, and Yanick Kemayou here: www.themaybe.org/podcast/real...

"We talked a lot about how to navigate this complex world, both online and off. We considered the available access-limiting tools and whether to take on the burden of setting them up. Yet never once did I want the state to step in and make those decisions for us."

Read @immcouncil.org's statement on today's disastrous decision for asylum seekers here: www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/press-releas...

How can public sector AI systems be designed to serve everyone, incl. people with disabilities? Join CDT’s @arianaaboulafia.bsky.social & accessibility leaders from govt & industry for “Invisible Barriers: Disability Rights & Public Sector AI” on June 25 at 2 PM ET. Register:

"The data annotation workers — who are often football players themselves, or have extensive knowledge of the game — are largely in cities such as Manila, Cairo, Chennai, and Ternopil"

FIFA touts this World Cup as the most innovative and tech-savvy one yet. Behind the veneer of state-of-the-art football sensors and ref body cams are data workers from Brazil, the Philippines, Cambodia, and India tracking the play-by-play restofworld.org/2026/fifa-wo...

New from @annamaria.bsky.social and myself about the new approach to foreign aid, which be given “in a way that directly benefits the American people and directly promotes our national interest,” according to Secretary of State Marco Rubio www.propublica.org/article/trum...

What my algorithmic feed filled with Argentina national team inspired saris taught me about engagement-based recommender systems and youth safety...

Huge news for language preservation, expanding language representation for enhancing multilingual technology capabilities, and for multistakeholderism. Indigenous languages are systematically underrepresentated but this move will no doubt help fill critical gaps: www.unesco.org/en/articles/...

Indigenous creators have had to tone down posts, going from documenting systemic prejudice and institutional burdens to posting about local cuisine, to avoid takedowns and account bans on YouTube restofworld.org/2024/youtube...

Who is tracking the number of World Cup players who cite visa restrictions. Most recent: Vozinha, Cape Verde's goalkeeper, whose mother could not meet the financial reqs to be granted a visa. US tourist visa application includes submitting bank records to show that you have money to spend in the US

Keir Starmer keeps referring to the consultation as evidence for why the social media ban isn't a last gasp by-election gambit in his answers to the press. The consultation had 116,211 responses to 54 questions. The government has published a single percentage of answers to just two questions

Thousands of noncitizens are eligible and registered to vote in DC's mayoral election tomorrow, but fear is keeping them from doing so, dampening their willingness to engage in local election conversations at all, let alone cast a ballot: 51st.news/noncitizen-v...

Express VPN advertising in the World Cup stands... a sign of the times

“For the billions cheering on from a distance, one question is becoming increasingly unavoidable: How long will FIFA let Trump’s United States of America spoil a celebration that is not theirs to spoil? How long will we let one man ruin the world’s game?” www.newyorker.com/news/global-...

this @amnesty.org report is a must read!!

Who governs the infrastructures through which culture becomes machine-readable, whose knowledge is preserved within those infrastructures, and would future innovations remain anchored in a shared public domain? Important by: @aldebaran14.bsky.social: botpopuli.net/llm-extracti...

CDT is embarking on new research to understand how users in the Global Majority experience genAI systems, specifically popular AI chatbots, and how companies develop and enforce their safety policies to take their languages and use cases into context. cdt.org/insights/ass...

AI isn't making translation easier, it's actually making it more cognitively taxing for translators to review error-laden text, requiring more work in less time, and making them less money, reports Sarah O'Connor for the Financial Times www.ft.com/content/75bc...

“‘If we’re not going to get sensible guardrails for these systems,’ [CDT’s] Bowman said, ‘maybe we shouldn’t be using these systems at all.’”

"Under the cover of amusement, the site systematically works to construct migrants as an existential threat, to dehumanize them, to stifle empathy for them, and finally, it asks people to report 'suspicious aliens,' thus becoming complicit in the government’s effort to dispense with them."

New CDT research by Ruchika Joshi, Adinawa Adjagodjou, & Michal Luria, maps “dark patterns” in AI chatbots, showing how design choices like playacting, sycophancy, and emotional framing can blur the line between helpful interaction and manipulation. cdt.org/insights/dar...

In the new edition of #CODISignals, @cdt.org’s @aliyabhatia.bsky.social highlights the need for collaboration among industry, academia, civil society and others to advance multilingual AI. Read more: www.codi.global/newsroom/cod...

Age gating will require age verification — and that will change the internet as we know it. As I write in @theguardian.com, when users must identify themselves, they may self-censor: thinking twice before sharing opinions or memes fearing retaliation or stigma www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

At #CPDP2026 in Brussels presenting research on children's safety & rights. I'll share findings from my report with Michal Luria, Ph.D. — centering teens & parents on proposed safety measures that uphold rights, family autonomy & an open internet. cdt.org/insights/wha...

Incredibly important new research articulating the impact of "institutional influence" on LLM outputs. Important to view through the lens of LLM outputs in non-English langs where training data comes from state-sanctioned sources, incl. state media, govt agencies, and even state-selected literature:

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

"This is not the time to hand over more data about ourselves to tech actors." @aliyabhatia.bsky.social Indeed.

"Want to Google your symptoms, join an ICE watch group on Facebook or scroll Reddit? You might need to show ID," writes @aliyabhatia.bsky.social. "Age verification is coming to platforms near you. Worse, it’ll come at the expense of your rights."

We don't have to imagine an internet without intermediary liability protections like Section 230: in India, a YouTuber's review of a new Motorola phone has resulted in not only a takedown of the video but a civil defamation case against platforms hosting the review: restofworld.org/2026/motorol...

BREAKING: The Chinese government pressured Zambia to screen + exclude Taiwanese speakers attending @rightscon.org, leading to the largest international convention on digital rights being canceled a week before it takes place, the host org @accessnow.org tells WIRED. By @telliotter.bsky.social + me

Following our April 29 announcement, we believe it's important to be transparent about the context that led to the decision. We want to explain, where we can, why this was made on such short notice, only days before we were set to host RightsCon. Read: www.rightscon.org/rc26-stateme...

Happy birthday to #GoogleTranslate which turns 20 today! Google Translate has helped me in countless situations: from translating my grandmother's Gujarati WhatsApp forwards to helping me explain an ankle injury to a pharmacist in Guatemala. It's a tool, it's a game, it's essential.

TIL there is no sickle emoji on iMessage, tho the hammer and sickle emoji was approved by Unicode 1.1 in 1993. Give us the hammer and sickle emoji!! emojipedia.org/hammer-and-s...

Such a gutting day. I feel for the staff of @accessnow.org, all their partners and staff in Africa who have been pushing for a RightsCon to be held on the continent, and for human rights broadly. We're ready to support and show up whenever we get the chance next: www.404media.co/rightscon-hu...

What will it take to create a multilingual and participatory #AI that works for everyone? @aliyabhatia.bsky.social, Jhalak M. Kakkar, Dhanaraj Thakur and ECNL's @marle.bsky.social explain in this new @techpolicypress.bsky.social blog:

Deciding who gets to shape AI is closely related to deciding who benefits from AI. Marlena Wisniak, Jhalak Kakkar, Dhanaraj Thakur, and I articulate what it will take to build a paradigm for participatory, multilingual, and plural AI that truly works for all www.techpolicy.press/a-multilingu...

Also India is now the worst of the South Asian countries on this index.

"The State Department is excluding tech researchers from the United States because of their constitutionally protected work, and this newly disclosed memo only underscores the unbounded scope and unconstitutionality of the policy" -- @carriedecell.bsky.social knightcolumbia.org/content/knig...

AI is often marketed as a "miracle cure" for social challenges, but its success in the developing world depends more on human infrastructure than model sophistication https://restofworld.org/2026/ai-social-good-humans/?utm_campaign=row-social

One corollary of the current local LLM drive is that it puts the power to train and finetune new models into the hands of people outside big tech giants. The result? More representation of global majority cultures and language. My latest for @fastcompany.com www.fastcompany.com/91527477/the...

Always great to talk to @stokel.bsky.social. Developers and researchers around the world are building local LLMs that work in the world's languages. But barriers still remain. How do these approaches inform the big AI labs? That remains to be seen: www.fastcompany.com/91527477/the...

When companies underinvest in T&S in non-EN langs, they're only exacerbating existing vectors of risk posed to the communities speaking those languages. This is laid bare in @untoldmag.org on the coupling of online and offline risks to LGBTQ+ communities in Egypt untoldmag.org/egypt-lgbtq-...

Really cool new challenge from Adaptation Labs: a 2 week open data challenge to address critical gaps in data either in languages other than English and/or under resourced domains www.adaptionlabs.ai/blog/the-unc...