Dear ,
As the year ends, let’s take a moment to rewind and reflect on what we’ve accomplished together at MediaJustice.
In 2023, we fought for the rights of BIPOC and other marginalized communities to reclaim power over our narratives, media, and technology. With your help, we’ve also built a pipeline of organizers, journalists, youth, and media makers with a grounded racial justice analysis leading the next generation of media and tech justice fights.
MediaJustice trained over 135 people in our Unshackling Freedom electronic monitoring (EM) political education series, with an additional 250 people receiving necessary resources like case studies, organizing strategies, and toolkits about local EM fights.
Nearly 400 people downloaded our Copaganda Clapback: A Resource to Fight Back toolkit, and over 100 journalists and organizers were trained to teach other people how to identify and combat copaganda.
We graduated the second cohort of MediaJustice’s Network Fellowship, our paid eight-month political education and training intensive — their projects are fierce, game-changing, and rooted in one-of-a-kind research.
We regranted $46,000 in rapid response funding to grassroots media justice organizations in our network, providing crucial infrastructure support to sustain local programming.
We resumed in-person programming using People’s CDC Guidelines and disability justice principles to keep us safe.
Our bold advocacy changed policies that protect vulnerable communities’ privacy and digital security, holding powerful corporations accountable for their harmful practices. Just this year, MediaJustice secured these wins:
In August, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced its plans to limit data broker activity, a monumental win in securing our data from surveillance and corporate extraction.
In September, the FTC announced an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon focused on its monopoly practices in the e-commerce sector.
In October, the California Broadband Infrastructure Bill passed, ensuring consumers can submit their broadband speed data to shape more accurate maps of the digital divide.
Most recently, Meta announced it would encrypt Messenger data end-to-end after several years of pressure from MJ and allies seeking to protect activists and organizers from being criminalized for information shared on the platform.
There's still a lot of work to be done to develop strategies that challenge the Elon Musk social media era, protect activists and marginalized communities from criminalization, and ensure organizers have tools to fight unjust surveillance and harmful narratives.
