When the Fakes Borrow the Trust
How Zambia’s 2026 election showed what happens to an information landscape when synthetic content becomes ordinary
Finding Her Digital Voice: Mahdokht on Skills, Agency and Telling Her Own Story
From Afghanistan to the Netherlands: a journey of resilience, learning and finding a voice
Media Sustains Democracies. Fund It. Understand It. Include It.
In the first piece in this series, we traced the different methods used to silence journalism, from the physical elimination of reporters to the infrastructural capture and control of digital media. We ended that piece with a question: whether Europe is willing to treat media viability and information integrity as strategic democratic priorities, rather than secondary values that get negotiated away when politically inconvenient.
The Rainbow Nation’s Broken Promise: Scapegoats, Scrolling and the Social Media Machine Fuelling South Africa’s Xenophobia
Anti-immigrant sentiment in South Africa is at a 22-year high. The evidence points less to a migration crisis than to a collapsing information ecosystem
‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ Could Not Escape The Existential Questions That Confront Journalism Today
What the movies tells us about media ownership, editorial independence, and the “sucking the soul out of everything original” vibe that has hijacked much of our media, culture, and society today.
A Note on Authoritarianism and the Silencing of Public Interest Media
Israeli forces boarded the Global Sumud Flotilla last week and detained Dutch journalist Gijs Sanders and his cameraman in international waters… This is not an isolated incident, but the latest expression of a deliberate pattern to suppress journalism.
Before the Algorithm: How Media Narratives Condition Online Hate
Online hate doesn’t start in the comment section; it begins in the subtle framing of the news. Drawing from her recent media research, Dr. Yasmin Osama exposes how language and narrative asymmetry reduce human lives to mere statistics, and why deleting a comment is like trying to fight a forest fire with a water pistol. Discover how we can move the intervention upstream to restore shared human dignity. Continue reading…
Machio: We Invite the Media to step Away From The Business Model That Depends on Outrage For Engagement
A poster keeps surfacing in my feed. It asks, simply, whether you know what it’s like for your rights to be up for debate every time there’s an election. I imagine it is a profound privilege to never have that thought cross your mind. For millions of minoritized and marginalized people across Kenya and Africa, this is not a hypothetical question. It is our lived reality.
All Eyes on Lusaka: How RightsCon’s Cancellation Exposed the Logic of Civic Suppression
There is a particular kind of paradox that defines the current moment in global civil society: the conferences we convene to defend our rights are themselves becoming targets of the very forces we gather to resist.