Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and what reclaiming the internet really looks like.

This month, we’re catching up with Tawanda Kanhema, a journalist and product leader who’s worked across African newsrooms and driven innovation in Silicon Valley. A former Mozillian, he’s currently a board member at the News Product Alliance, where he’s helping empower newsrooms to thrive online. Ahead of the NPA Summit 2024: Tech & Trust, we chatted with Tawanda about his favorite internet rabbit holes (spoiler: creative coding!) and the importance of building strong online communities.

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

The News Product Alliance. It’s a community of product thinkers focused on shaping the future of news. We explore ways to empower newsrooms to strengthen relationships with their communities and design products that enhance how they reach audiences. There are many small newsrooms with limited resources coming up with innovative ways to use available technologies to expand their reach, strengthen their credibility and establish scalable business models.

What is an internet deep dive that you can’t wait to jump back into?

For the last 10 years, I’ve visited a site called Codrops once a week. It’s a community of animation designers and front-end developers sharing demos for others to remix or build on. It’s a great source of inspiration for me, especially when working on digital storytelling. Another site I love is threejs.org, a JavaScript library and application programming interface for creating 3D graphics. NASA even used it for their Mars landing simulation!

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

Honestly, I don’t really regret closing tabs — I use Pocket for everything. All my favorite resources from Codrops and three.js live there, so I can revisit them anytime.

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I’ve been obsessed with three.js and how it lets you create photorealistic animations with JavaScript and WebGL. For a while, I thought it might even replace some video production workflows, but video still leads in visual communication. Another tool I can’t stop talking about is A-Frame, a web framework that allows you to build 3D virtual worlds in the browser.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

I was part of Google’s Earth Outreach program, focused on how geospatial tools can be used to effect change, and enhance the representation of communities on maps. That led me to mapping projects in Zimbabwe, Namibia and Northern Ontario. It sparked my passion for mapping and documenting underrepresented places.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

I’ve actually started creating it with Unmapped Planet. It’s an interactive archive of my photography from mapping projects. The site allows users to experience virtual reality tours of the places I’ve mapped. My goal is to create a visual archive and eventually make it more community-focused.

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

I have a ton saved in Pocket, mostly around imaging technologies in the generative AI space. I recently completed a Stanford AI course, so I’m diving into articles on how AI is being ethically used in newsrooms. One example is The Baltimore Times’ initiative, led by Paris Brown, to use generative AI create audio versions of the publication’s text stories. This project has expanded access and made The Baltimore Times’ content more accessible to the the community.

With the News Product Alliance creating space for news product builders to connect, how do you think nurturing a community like this can help shape the future of the internet?

We design online experiences that create support networks and connect product thinkers worldwide.  And thanks to the power of the community, we are building programs that establish a cycle of support, like our Mentor Network (through which a few other mentors and myself are mentoring current and aspiring newsroom product managers). 

The internet has been shaped by the interests of private companies and governments over the last 15 to 20 years, with civic institutions and technology organizations playing the lead role in establishing standards, and communities mostly left out. If we want to change that, we need more diverse communities and change agents ensuring that online content is credible and representative of diverse voices. NPA’s network of over 3,000 professionals is one such community, offering skills development, inspiration and examples of how newsrooms are solving similar problems. For example, we launched a News Product Management Certification program to help people learn product management and apply it in their newsrooms. We’re helping bridge the gap between data-driven decision-making and traditional editorial judgment.

Tawanda Kanhema is a journalist and product manager with a background in reporting across Africa and leading product strategy in Silicon Valley. He previously worked at Mozilla on Pocket and Firefox, connecting millions of users to high-quality content. As a board member of the News Product Alliance, Tawanda focuses on fostering innovation and community among news product builders, helping newsrooms adapt and thrive in the digital age. 

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How do Twitch streamers connect with so many people on the internet while keeping their personal lives private? 

For those unfamiliar, Twitch streamers are content creators who broadcast live to audiences in real-time, covering everything from gaming to productivity. Viewer interaction is a huge part of the experience, but it also opens up streamers to risks like “doxxing,” where someone digs up and shares private info like real names or addresses.

As a writer and photographer, I thought I was prepared when I started streaming. I’ve had an online presence for years, and I’m familiar with the ins and outs of social media. But when you’re live, sharing your screen and constantly interacting with viewers, protecting your privacy becomes a whole new challenge. To figure out how the pros do it, I reached out to some streamers who’ve mastered the art of staying safe online.

I spoke with @sweetxsage, a cozy streamer who leads Twitch’s new Pride Guild, and @DANGERD0RK, a variety streamer focused on horror games. Here’s what they shared.

1. Dox yourself before someone else does

Before anyone else can dig up your personal information, look yourself up and lock it down.

You might be surprised by old social media accounts, blogs or posts that you forgot about. Take the time to track down and clean up these loose ends — it’s a proactive way to keep your personal details from falling into the wrong hands.

As @DANGERD0RK explains, “Due to the nature and risks the internet poses, you may end up putting not just yourself, but others, at risk by not protecting your personal information such as name, address, place of work, city you live in, phone number, social media accounts and your whereabouts when discussing your day with others.”

To protect yourself, banning personal keywords on stream is crucial. Twitch lets streamers set filters for specific words or phrases that viewers aren’t allowed to say in chat — like your full name, hometown or other private details. @DANGERD0RK also recommends ”creating separate social media accounts so others will not be able to look at your history of posts, tagged friends, family members or other information that can be used to dox you.”

2. Treat every online interaction like an open window — be mindful of what’s in view

Whether you’re streaming, sharing your screen in a meeting or posting on social media, it’s easy to reveal more than you realize.

“My primary content right now is productivity streaming! I am essentially ‘LoFi Girl’ but live,” says @sweetxsage. “So for me, I just have to be careful to not share my screen on accident, or show specific angles that might let people know what area I live in, and I also recently noticed I shouldn’t talk too much about ‘local’ food spots because it could help pinpoint where I live. Even casual conversations can reveal more than I’d like to share.”

Always imagine every moment of your stream or interaction as an open window into your life. What’s unintentionally being shared?

@DANGERD0RK says, “Clicking on a link may dox your private information, looking up a restaurant name may give away your location, and ‘autofill’ options [on your browser] may inadvertently show your information.”

3. Layer your privacy defenses like a pro

Think like a pro streamer and protect yourself with layers of privacy controls.

It’s important to use tools and settings that allow you to control who can see your information and prevent accidental sharing. Streamers often rely on a combination of software, hardware and privacy settings to keep their streams professional and secure. For example, as @sweetxsage shared, having the right setup allows for flexibility and enjoyment: “[A]s long as I can have [my core] things, my stream can be fun and entertaining.”

In addition to your streaming setup, using a privacy-focused browser can make a big difference. Firefox helps block trackers by default, giving you more control over your data and protecting you from tracking and unwanted access. (Firefox also comes from Mozilla, which is dedicated to maintaining user privacy, making the internet a safer place for all, and promoting civil discourse, human dignity and individual expression.)

If you’re worried about past data breaches, Mozilla Monitor is another tool that helps you stay ahead of potential leaks and keep track of any issues with your personal information.

Whether you’re streaming or just hanging out online, it’s all about finding that balance — sharing what you want while keeping the important stuff private. With a few smart privacy moves and some advice from streamers like @sweetxsage and @DANGERD0RK, you can keep things fun, safe and under control. After all, making connections doesn’t mean sharing it all.

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The post How to protect your privacy online like a Twitch streamer appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

In the world of entrepreneurship, one business owner’s journey proves the power of simple technology.

And group chats.

When Richelle Samy founded Culture of Stamina, a coaching service, she set out to create an online presence that was elegant and professional. She found what she was looking for when a group chat led her to Solo, Mozilla’s AI website creator for solopreneurs. After a few clicks using Solo’s generative AI (GenAI) tools, Richelle had a website for her brand with bold, sharp text and colors that perfectly captured her vision.

For Richelle, Solo enables her to focus more on empowering and training her clients instead of spending hours on her website. Other website builders weren’t as easy.

“Those tools are really nice, but I feel like you need a little bit of knowledge of what you want to do and how you want to put things together,” she recalled. “Whereas with Solo, I knew I was looking for a window for my business for people to contact me, and I only wanted a couple of pages. It was very easy to use something that was already pre-made, versus something I had to do from scratch.”

When Mozilla launched Solo in December, we were curious to see how people like Richelle would receive GenAI with website creation. Six months into this journey, we’re happy with the progress, and it’s time to reflect on what we’ve accomplished and learned along the way. We talked with the head of Solo at Mozilla, Raj Singh, about the AI website creator, its journey since the early stages, how it’s disrupting itself in the $2.1 billion website builder software industry with free custom domains and much more. Below is a snippet of our conversation. For the entire interview, follow along at our Innovations Projects blog.

To start, let’s talk about the first few months of Solo since its Beta launch in December. How big is the team, and how many websites have been published?

Solo started in May of last year with just myself and a part-time designer. We built a lightweight, clickable prototype and technical implementation to test whether generative AI could really work for website authoring. We also spent significant time surveying the broader landscape to make sure we had something that could differentiate and compete in an entrenched market.

After initial validation, we added one engineer and started the development process in June. By September, we had our first iteration that could create a website for a solopreneur with just a few simple inputs, and from there, we continued to refine the user experience. In October, we released an internal beta, and then in December, we launched our beta publicly.

Since then, our team within the Mozilla Innovation Projects group grew during this journey from just an engineer, a part-time designer and me, to three engineers, a part-time designer, myself and other part-time resources to support us.

We launched Solo 1.0 this past month, and in that period since beta, we’ve seen over 7,000 published websites across industries, from pool cleaners, to coaches, to immigration consultants.

When we started, our goal was to make it simple for non-technical solopreneurs to build their web presence and grow their business, and we believe we have accomplished the first step.

How do you compete with Solo in such a crowded market? How are you making Solo free?

When we initially conceptualized Solo, marrying GenAI with the service provider segment was an insertion point. Since then, and as expected, the incumbents have also built GenAI capabilities and improved their user experiences for the service provider audience.

In this situation, where we are the underdog, my approach is to look for maximum disruption, and we landed at the business model. Every competitor — that we are aware of, at least — charges for connecting and hosting your custom domain. This makes sense – 20 years ago, bandwidth wasn’t cheap and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates that enable an encrypted web connection cost money. Today, the former is near zero and the latter is zero.

We asked, “What if we just made this free?” This would be very disruptive, so this is exactly what we are doing. Not only is it disruptive, but democratizing the category is also in line with our mission to increase access to the web. We are making web hosting and connecting your custom domain free, similar to how Robinhood disrupted brokerages by eliminating trading fees. Many do not launch their website because they can’t afford or don’t yet have enough business to justify the cost. It also doesn’t help that many of these incumbents rely on hidden upsells and next thing you know, you’re spending $100 a month for your dog walking service. In this way, Mozilla continues to be a global public resource looking out for the interests of people.

How is it building Solo, a new product at Mozilla?

Building a new product at Mozilla, also known as zero to one, and probably any large organization, has challenges. I come from a startup background, so this is my comfort zone and I have some principles I generally abide by.

First, it’s important to be the top advocate for the product. This can be hard because things will pull you in different directions, whether other initiatives, shiny objects or your own self-doubt. Second, adopt the tools you need and optimize on speed — it’s easy to get stuck in administrative stuff. Third, resourcing can be slow, so optimize on generalists and make sure everyone is comfortable with grunt work. Fourth, make product decisions — many of them one-way — quickly. There’s just not enough time to get consensus or have everything be data-driven at the onset. The last thing is to take agency when you can. The five minutes here, the half day there, the follow-up meeting tomorrow cause delays and they compound.

Can you share details about how Solo fits into Mozilla’s overall mission?

In many ways, Mozilla has been at the intersection of the internet and the interests of the people, as opposed to big tech. With Solo, we are squarely within this vision. We are democratizing access to the web for solopreneurs, and we’re increasing equity by helping those that can’t afford to host their websites in emerging markets, or where English isn’t their first language, with writing, designing and curating their content.

For the entire interview, follow along at our Innovations Projects blog.

Ready to start creating?

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The post How Mozilla’s AI website creator, Solo, is shaking up a $2.1B industry appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Spotting unreliable reviews on TikTok’s trending products with Fakespot

Fakespot is a browser extension that is powered by AI to help millions of shoppers make better purchases. It analyzes product reviews in real-time across supported retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart, giving you the lowdown on which product reviews seem credible and when you should proceed with caution. Whether you’re seeking product pros and cons or highlights, Fakespot has you covered. It even provides seller ratings for eBay and Shopify stores so you can shop with confidence.

How to read Fakespot’s Review Grades

Here’s how Fakespot’s grading system works:

• A and B: Reviews you can trust.
• C: Mixed bag of reliable and unreliable reviews — approach with caution.
• D and F: Probably unreliable.

Top TikTok back-to-school product categories on Amazon and their reliability

We took a deep dive into top back-to-school categories and analyzed their Fakespot product review grades. Here’s what we found:

Laptops

Impressively, nearly 83% of laptop reviews on Amazon appear to be reliable. A safe bet, especially if you’re shopping with the Fakespot extension and sticking to verified retailers. The Lenovo Yoga 7i, a popular choice on TikTok, gets a Fakespot review grade of A. 

• Trending Product: Lenovo Yoga 7i
• Fakespot Review Grade: A 
• Review highlight: “For the price, you can’t beat it.” 

Water bottles

About 30% of water bottle reviews on Amazon appear unreliable. Staying hydrated? Just make sure you’re buying from verified retailers. The Thermos Hydration Bottle has been trending on TikTok and gets a B grade from Fakespot, meaning the product listing has pretty reliable reviews. 

• Trending Product: Thermos Hydration Bottle
• Fakespot Review Grade: B
• Review highlight: “Easy to grip, fits in car cupholders.”

Keyboards and mice

While 34% of Amazon reviews in the keyboards and mice category appear to be unreliable, one popular gaming mouse still earns a solid B from Fakespot, so you can be more confident in the reviews. 

• Trending Product: Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro Wireless Gaming Mouse
• Fakespot Review Grade: B
• Review highlight: “The razer deathadder v3 pro wireless gaming mouse ‘faker edition’ is a tribute to all gamers who seek excellence. It eliminates the shackles of wired gaming, allowing you the freedom to move and game as you wish without compromising on responsiveness or speed.”

Pillows

With 37% of Amazon reviews on pillows appearing unreliable, those trendy pillows still have potential. If you’re looking for a decorative dorm pillow, we found an option with reliable reviews for you to consider. 

• Trending Product: Wedge Body Pillow 
• Fakespot Review Grade: A
• Review highlight: “The item is well-made, very soft and comfortable. Even has a place to hold his cell phone.”

Backpacks

Fakespot detected concerns with nearly half – 47% – of the reviews on backpacks on Amazon. Despite this, we found a durable option with an A review rating from Fakespot. Nonetheless, before you snag any bag, let Fakespot give you confidence that those raves are reliable.

• Trending Product: Laptop Backpack 
• Fakespot Review Grade: A
• Review highlight: “It was light but sturdy and has many pockets for storage.”

Chargers

Those fast chargers blowing up on TikTok? They might not be so fast after all. About 53% of Amazon reviews for chargers seem unreliable. However, this listing for a popular wireless charging dock gets an A from Fakespot, so you can be more confident in the reviews.

• Trending Product: Belkin 2-in-1 MagSafe Wireless Charging Dock
• Fakespot Review Grade: A
• Review highlight: “The base is heavy enough that you don’t pull it around while taking your phone off the charger — it feels like quality material.”

Earbud headphones and computer accessories

In the earbud, headphones and computer accessories category on Amazon, more than half appear to be unreliable reviews (58%)  – so take a beat before you buy. But these noise-canceling headphones, a TikTok favorite, still get a B grade from Fakespot, meaning the reviews are more reliable. 

• Trending Product: Sony WH-1000XM4
• Fakespot Review Grade: B
• Review highlight: “I love blasting my music. I enjoy barbershop music, and you can hear each individual voice so very well in great quality. I’m stunned.”

If you’re one of the millions of students gearing up for the new school year, don’t waste time scrolling through endless product reviews. Download Fakespot today, and spend your time soaking up the last bits of summer instead.

Shop confidently with Fakespot

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The post Fakespot’s guide to trending back-to-school products  appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Dr. Erica Brozovsky is a sociolinguist, a public scholar and a lover of words. She is the host of Otherwords, a PBS series on language and linguistics, and a professor of writing and rhetoric at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. You can find her at @ericabrozovsky on most platforms. Photo: Kelly Zhu

The internet is ubiquitous: on our desks, in our pockets, even in the air around us, as radio waves transmit between devices so we can be online on the move. It’s a sprawling web of interconnectivity, linking people and gadgets around the world. When computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for a hypertext project called WorldWideWeb in 1989, there’s no way he could have known the impact his invention would have on billions of people across the globe, which he confirmed in a 2014 Reddit AMA. 

In the 35 years since the invention of the World Wide Web, an explosion of new internet words has emerged. As new technologies develop, we adopt words or create novel ones to fill in the linguistic gaps. For example, to describe one of the advancements of the Industrial Revolution, the word train was extended from its older definitions as a procession or sequence of objects in a row. And the steam-powered vehicle pulling a train of railway cars? That brand new technology needed an innovative name: locomotive. People often incorrectly think locomotives and trains are synonymous, and are similarly mistaken with the internet and the World Wide Web. To keep the transportation analogy going, the internet is the railway system, the data that moves between sites or sends emails is the train, and the World Wide Web is the scenery and points of interest along the route.

As far as names go, internet and World Wide Web make sense. The words visualize interconnectedness. Other internet terms like bookmark, which functions digitally the same way as a tangible piece of material is used to denote a place in a book, and email (an abbreviation of electronic mail), show clear parallels in meaning to their analog counterparts. Websites are locations, or sites, on the web. Domains are subsets of the internet under the control of a single authority, much like a physical territory that a ruler would have dominion over. And if you know that the prefix hyper- means above or beyond, you’ll understand that hypertext and hyperlinks essentially go beyond the constraints of normal text and links. But not all internet words are so etymologically evident, and some even come with stories. Let’s start at the very beginning.

When you access the internet, you open a browser (which first appeared as the acronym BROWSER for BRowsing On-Line With SElective Retrieval) and begin to navigate around, otherwise known as surfing the internet. The term is often attributed to librarian Jean Armour Polly, who wanted a pithy metaphor for the fun and chaos of navigating the online world for her 1992 article’s title. Polly wasn’t the only one with a penchant for riding waves online: a 1991 comic book “The Adventures of Captain Internet and CERF Boy” published by CERFnet depicted a superhero who literally surfed around on a surfboard answering internet cries for help.

Keeping it oceanic, the term phishing is attributed to hacker Khan C. Smith in the mid 1990s, allegedly based on the homophone fishing: trawling for sensitive information from a sea of internet users. The alternative spelling is a nod to phreaking, which was a way of hacking telephones (hence “ph”) to avoid paying long-distance phone charges (remember those?). And speaking of pesky things, the word spam comes from an iconic 1970 Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch wherein a horde of Viking cafe-goers repeatedly sing the menu item Spam, drowning out all other conversation.

That’s not the only internet food you’ll encounter. It seems like every website you access will ask you to accept cookies in order to personalize your experience, but weren’t we all raised not to accept sweets from strangers? So where did the name come from? Programmer Lou Montulli got the idea for the web version of cookies from the Unix data token term magic cookie, which sounds even more questionable to accept. There has been no confirmed origin of “magic cookie,” but three main theories prevail: drugs, fairy tales, and literal cookies. Perhaps it comes from the 1960s comic strip “Odd Bodkins” that uses magic cookie as a euphemism for LSD. Or maybe much like the Hansel and Gretel crumb trail, browsing the internet leaves a stream of cookie data in your wake. Or potentially the connection is less imaginative: cookie jars store cookies the way browsers store information.

When you go to delete cookies on your machine, you’ll also be asked if you want to clear your cache. Cache has been around since the turn of the 18th century as a hiding place for goods and treasures, from the French cacher meaning “to hide.” The word was first applied to computing in 1967 by IBM Systems Journal editor, Lyle R. Johnson. Apparently no one had any suggestions for a substitute for the clunky phrase “High Speed Buffer” so Johnson sat down with a thesaurus and came up with cache. 

Another cache on your device is the download cache. Downloading was originally used in military contexts to refer to unloading people or goods from various military vehicles (and uploading was the reverse). By 1968, the US Air Force extended the meaning to computers, as discussed in a quantitative study that referenced downloading records from the IBM 305 RAMAC computer to the newer IBM 1050, which took almost two weeks.

“While we stare at our phones and computer screens, it’s a nice reminder that the intention behind these technologies was to connect us together.”

Dr. Erica Brozovsky, sociolinguist

Thirty years later, Jorn Barger coined the term WebLog, a portmanteau of web and log, to refer to online personal journals. In 1999, perhaps as a joke, Peter Merholz posted in the sidebar of his own website: “”For What It’s Worth, I’ve decided to pronounce the word “weblog” as wee’- blog. Or “blog” for short.”” And now blog has generated other new words like vlog, blogosphere, and blogger. 

Avatar derives from the Sanskrit avatāra, meaning “descent,” which in Hinduism referred to the manifestation of a deity into an Earthly terrestrial form. The 1985 computer game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was the first application of the concept of an on-screen character as the digital incarnation of the human user. Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash popularized the idea, which continues to be applied across a wide variety of genres: video games, social media, virtual worlds, even Hollywood blockbusters.

Speaking of width, bandwidth was initially very literal in the 1800s (the width of a band of color or material) and then evolved significantly over 200 years. We can follow the logical progression to physics and mathematics (a range of values within a limited band), to physics and telecommunications (the difference between two frequencies which represents transmission capacity) to computers and telecommunications (data transfer capacity) to general life (emotional or physical capacity). It’s curious how the term moved beyond computers and technology back to the human experience.

We’re humans after all, and the internet and World Wide Web are tools for expanding our human experience. While we stare at our phones and computer screens, it’s a nice reminder that the intention behind these technologies was to connect us together. After all, Tim Berners-Lee said the thing he’s most proud of about the World Wide Web is “the wonderful global collaborative spirit of all the people who turned up to help build it and build things on it.”

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The post Browsers, cookies and surfing the web: The quirky history of internet lingo appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates. builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, ethical, responsible and inclusive.

This week, we chatted with Kay Lopez, a content creator dedicated to empowering Latinas by celebrating their heritage and accomplishments. We talk with Kay about the launch of her platform, Latinas Poderosas, what inspires her work as a creator, navigating social media exhaustion and more.

You mentioned in your video that when going to school, you felt you didn’t learn enough about your own culture. What things did you learn along the way that surprised you? 

So growing up in Texas, I feel like a lot of the education was very much focused on obviously American culture, right? The conversation was about pilgrims, Native Americans, colonies, the creation of colonies. The colonization of the United States was very much painted as it was a fun time, a great time, a perfect America, and I fed into it. I believed that was accurate history that I was being taught in school. But when I started to really dig in and watch documentaries on my own, I discovered the number of individuals that helped build America and their own stories. Whether they were inventors, or whether they had impacted the art scene, what we eat today, especially with the dishes — the grains, everything that we consume where it comes from — I just started to feel like that was in the shadows and when I started to learn more on my own about people that came to America and built America, I started to get even more inspired to want to learn more, and really started to share that history on my platform. So the creation of Latinos Poderosas was a lot for myself initially so I could learn about what it meant to be a first-generation American, and learn more about my culture and celebrate what my culture has brought to the U.S. from the perspective of a first-generation, and then along the way, I just felt like every time that I shared another piece of information and history, people started to follow or engage, or share, or get really, really excited. There’s something about learning a tad bit of history that you never knew. You get really prideful of your culture, and you start to share it, and you feel like you’re more connected to it. And you’re prideful. That was kind of my journey of self-discovery and learning, going beyond what I was taught in school and making the time and energy to go out and watch documentaries, go out to libraries, go to check-out books about everything about how the U.S. became to be what it is today.

Where do you hope to see Latinas Poderosas grow in the next few years?

Where I see it going, just going off of what I see on social media and the trends that I’m seeing, I see Latinas Poderosas becoming this like hub for hosting and holding a lot of like history and a platform where people can come and find things like businesses that are Latina-owned, recent moments in history that are being accomplished. I want it to become a hub. And what I’m seeing on social media is this younger generation is so proud to showcase their culture online, and that’s very different from the way that I grew up back in Texas. It was very much like you put your culture behind you, and you just kind of present yourself as an American, and now I’m seeing the reverse of people being very much like, “No, this is what I eat. This is what we eat in our culture. I’m very proud of it. This is the music that we listen to. This is some of the outfits that we wear.” So I see this moment online where people are going to be more proud to kind of share who they are fully and also showcasing their culture. So I hope Latinas Poderosas can be this hub that hosts a lot of that information, and a lot of those moments that people can just refer to whenever they feel like they’re in this moment of trying to figure out their identity of who they are.

I feel like a lot of the conversations that I personally have heard, and from my personal experience, a lot of people when they’re growing up, and they’re in their pre-teens and teens, they’re kind of confused trying to figure out who they are as an individual. And then when they hit their 20s, you wonder, “who really am I?” And it goes back into thinking of who are you? Culturally, your roots. How do you identify and navigate this world? So I hope that when people are at that stage of their lives, when they’re trying to figure out how they can celebrate themselves and who they are fully, they can have a platform, an online space where they can be like, “OK, here’s where I can learn about myself. Here’s where I can learn about and support businesses from my community.” Maybe they don’t want to create their own platform, maybe they don’t want to create their own brand, but they’re like, “how can I support?” So I hope it becomes that type of online space where people can just find it whenever they’re in that moment of wondering who they are, how they can celebrate themselves and learn more about who they are and where they come from.

We’re definitely in a world today where it’s a lot more accepted to embrace your culture, especially in schools. 

And now you see people wearing like the traditional patterns or clothing. And it’s very in your face now, and you’re like, “Hey, where was this type of energy when I was in middle school or high school, and you were teasing me?” 

Who are some of the other creators you draw inspiration from to continue your work today?

I wouldn’t call out anyone specifically, I would just say again that it’s anyone who’s in the space of culture. I look at anyone who’s trying to amplify the voice of their communities to really showcase and educate, who are really trying to drive positive conversation. I think that’s the number one thing for me. There is a lot of trolling, negative conversations that can affect people’s mental health and very aggressive conversations when it comes to culture, and those are the conversations I tend to shy away from. Only because I really want to focus on how we can move forward progressively as communities of color within the United States. How can we just kind of focus on amplifying the positive and trying to break some noise and create positive impact? Long answer, but it’s just to say it’s really anyone who is trying to make a positive space online while amplifying culture.

What do you think is the biggest challenge we as a whole face in the world this year, on and offline? How do we combat it?

I would say it’s mental health. Social media exhaustion, I hear it so much. I’ve been in the social media space for 12 years. I started on MySpace, creating content for brands, so I’ve been in this space for a very long time. It can become a very overwhelming space with a lot of information. I do believe, despite me being in social media and working for brands on their social and having my own platform, that mental breaks are OK and they should happen. You should be able to walk away from social media. You should be able to walk away from your phone and be like, “Hey, I just need to connect with the real world for a little bit and then come back.” Because the way that it’s affecting people can be very negative. Like having someone step away from their phone or not having a phone on them causes panic in a lot of people, so being able to be OK with disconnecting, I would say, is something that should be a priority for your mental state when it comes to being online and knowing how to set your boundaries for your mental health.

What is one action that you think everyone should take to make the world and our lives a little better?

I feel like the quick answer is just be yourself. Embrace who you are and live proudly every day with that mindset. I think it just makes you a happier person as a whole, but then it also welcomes others to learn.

We started Rise25 to celebrate Mozilla’s 25th anniversary, what do you hope people are celebrating in the next 25 years?

That’s such a heavy question. Truthfully, something that I think about all the time is world peace. That we have solved the environmental issues that we are facing. That as a human species, we’re just in a better, healthier environment. And that history doesn’t repeat itself.

What gives you hope about the future of our world?

What gives me hope, I think, is just seeing what’s being created, whether that’s like advances in medicine, seeing people share history, just all of us working towards a better environment, working towards a better world. It just makes me hope that we are in a more positive existence and a better, safer environment. Despite the negative that is happening in today’s world, I do see that there are those who are really working towards a better tomorrow and I hope that we can see that in the next coming years.

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The post Kay Lopez on empowering Latinas through the use of social media, navigating online mental exhaustion and more appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and what reclaiming the internet really looks like.

This month we chat with Matt Klein, a researcher, writer and advisor who currently serves as Reddit’s head of global foresight. We talk to him about The Tiny Awards, which he co-created in 2023 to recognize small, independent projects that make the internet a more fun place to be. The Tiny Awards return this year with the winners announced this August.

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

My favorite corner is the one that I’m currently trying to garden with The Tiny Awards. Last year I helped fund the first annual Tiny Awards which are meant to celebrate the creators making the internet feel cozy, homemade and fun… just because. We received over 300 submissions of small, whimsical web-based projects and over 1,500 votes across our 16 finalists. (Rotating Sandwiches was our winner.)

We’re at it again this year with the same intent: to honor those nurturing a weird, poetic and human-first internet.

It’s easy to claim that the silly, creative web is lost or dead. I’d argue it’s alive and thriving. It’s just not easily found. The Tiny Awards is attempting to shine a small but important spotlight on those doing the important work.

What is an internet deep dive that you can’t wait to jump back into?

I’m an obsessive hobbyist. My hobby is essentially collecting hobbies.

Currently I’m deep into learning Texas hold’em poker. I knew next to nothing about cards a month ago and while I’m not surprised, I’m in awe of the amount of material that’s out there… especially for free. Clips of wild hands from pro tournaments are now go-to mealtime videos. Also shout out to the Reddit community r/MealTimeVideos.

It’s a cliché, but so true: It’s consistently mind-blowing how you can literally become an expert in anything thanks to a bit of time and an internet connection.

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

Gmail. I’m team inbox zero.

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I love unpacking the cultural implications of our memes. We often view memes as these throwaway jokes or use them in DMs or texts to remind each other that we’re thinking of them.

But memes are embedded with such rich information about the zeitgeist.

If we define language fluency as one’s proficiency to read, write and speak, then we constantly have to understand our memes in order to remain literate online. Language fluency continues to blur into media literacy.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

I remember getting super into eBaum’s World… maybe a little too young. That was my first exposure to the internet. Then came Homestar Runner. Looking back, as a kid, I always presumed the internet was this super strange, frivolous place. As if, that’s all it was. These weren’t really communities though.

The first “community” I got into was a forum for Roller Coaster Tycoon players. Those people were so intense.

In hindsight, this was a pretty solid internet diet to grow up on: the most absurd flash animations and guides to build amusement park empires.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

Like a few other “Corner of the Internet” guests, I feel really fortunate that I think I’ve nurtured my own little corner already.

Part of this has been through my writing via ZINE, a bit of a lighthouse for others thinking about cultural trends and technology in similar ways.

The beautiful thing about personal corners of the internet is that if you can’t find your niche community, all you have to do is put out the call by hosting the space and the others will inevitably come.

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

Like “inbox zero,” I try really hard to maintain “Pocket zero.” Every year, around the holidays when work slows, I spend a week catching up on everything I couldn’t get to throughout the year.

My white whale is Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky’s free course on Human Behavioral Biology. I’ve had that one in my Pocket for a while now. One day I’ll finally get to it. One day…

You recently wrote about a degrowth mindset in internet projects. Why do you think this is important for the future of the web?

In the context of climate breakdown, degrowth argues that an infinite expansion of the economy contradicts the limits of people and materials on Earth. Critics demand we require a shift in values.

I think the same can be applied to our content, attention and creativity online. Big ≠ Good.

We’ve adopted this new, unhealthy reflex where if we pursue a project or merely post something online, we strive for it to become a hit. We’ve become conditioned by virality-level metrics and the black-box of an algorithm. I call it Audience Capture. Instead of making what we want, we hand over control to the audience or platform and let them direct us. We’ve become captured. Too often, we sacrifice our creative integrity and sanity for “bigness.” Everything has to be monetizable, resonate with the global lunchroom table, enhance the personal brand, or lead to some other opportunity. 

As a result, play for play sake feels like it’s on the edge of extinction. That’s not good.

The tenants of degrowth center around 1. the sustainability of ecosystems, 2. useful production — make what’s needed, not what could be made, 3. circularity to avoid waste, 4. sharing and cooperation through positive-sum partnerships, 5. local production and consumption, 6. work-life balance, and 7. relationships over output.

By adopting these mental models, not only can we curb creator burnout and anxiety experienced by so many, but yield more fruitful, fulfilling and creative works.

Matt Klein is a researcher, writer and advisor to organizations seeking to make sense of our technology and media. As a global speaker, Klein advises the UN, investors, the press, and leading brands on how to think about our future, and his Webby-winning publication, ZINE, does the same by explaining overlooked social shifts. As a digital anthropologist, he is currently head of global foresight at Reddit and resident futurist with Hannah Grey VC.

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At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates, builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, ethical, responsible and inclusive.

This week, we chatted with Natalia Domagala, an advocate and global digital policy specialist fighting to make technology work for people and societies. We talked with Natalia about the power of algorithms, her favorite work projects, climate change, fighting misinformation and more.

The first question that I kind of wanted to ask you about was algorithms. I know you do a lot of work in that space. What do you think people overlook the most when it comes to knowing about algorithms on the internet?

Domagala: I think it’s perhaps the fact that these algorithms actually exist, because we know about this, but most people actually don’t. I think an average internet user never actually questions, what happens at the back end? How does the internet actually function? I don’t think many people ask themselves those questions. And then when they suddenly browse for a new item that they want to buy, and then suddenly they go online the next day, and they see a list of similar items suggested within their browser, or they open their social media account, they suddenly see all the relevant ads. I think a lot of people just think that this is some sort of magic, that suddenly the computer knows what they need and what they want. I think it’s a very key point to educate people about how algorithms are being used and to actually tell them that they are being used and what you see online doesn’t just magically appear in there. It’s actually there, because there are systems that are scraping your data and then analyzing your data and then feeding it back to you in a way that, for the most part, actually encourages you to buy something or give up more of your data as well.

What do you think are some easy ways that people can become more knowledgeable and become a little bit smarter about algorithms, and also data?

So I think the first thing is using a secure browser and using a browser that doesn’t necessarily store your data. I think the same goes for tools and apps that we’re using to communicate. So using apps that have higher standards of privacy, using apps that don’t actually store your data, that don’t use your data for anything. Another big one is not linking your accounts. I know this is quite inconvenient, because the way that the internet has developed is that now you can just log into so many services using one login from one social media portal, one website to everything — and that again creates that kind of feedback loop with our data that’s not very privacy-friendly. I think also using incognito mode, that could be a quick solution. The one that I think is really sort of a bit annoying, I think, to people, but is good is actually reading all the privacy policies. And if you go on a website and you’re prompted about cookies, instead of clicking accept all — which is the easiest way because that’s how the user experience is structured — actually going through it, unchecking all those cookies and saying “no, I don’t want you to store this data. I do not want you to collect this information.” There is something really important to be said about how our online experience is structured for convenience. But overall, I think just getting into the habit of not just closing those windows, but actually saying, “reject all.”

You’ve done a lot of work with algorithms and this type of privacy protection. What has been your favorite project to work on in the work that you do?

I think my favorite project was the algorithmic transparency standard, which I worked on when I was at the U.K. government. It was all about creating a standardized way for government agencies to share information about their use of AI. It’s all about making sure that this information is easily accessible and that you as a member of the public can actually go on a website and find out how the government uses algorithms about you, how this could affect you, or what kind of decisions, what kind of policy areas, what kind of contexts those algorithms are being used in. At the time when we were working on it, that was something that hadn’t actually been done on a national scale, so it was a very interesting, very exciting project because we got to create something for the first time. It was very much public facing. It was all about actually asking the people: what kind of information would you like to see from the government? How would you like this information to be presented? Is there anything else you would like to know? What kind of feedback loops should be put in place as well? So to me, that was really a way to educate the people about how and why government uses AI, but also a fantastic way for government departments to compare how they’re using this technology, and if there are any similarities, any areas for improvement, any kind of ways to actually involve external researchers into their work as well. I think it’s a win-win sort of project which I would love to see in other countries as well, but also in the private sector, because algorithms are everywhere, but we don’t actually know about this. We don’t have enough transparency when it comes to that.

What do you think is the biggest challenge that we face in the world this year on and offline, and how do we combat it?  

I think many of the challenges that we are facing, not just this year, but in the years to come, are intertwined. For example, for me personally, one of the most pressing challenges that we’re facing is climate change. And this is something that we can actually see unraveling in front of us. Already we see all the wildfires, we see the floods, we see the droughts, hurricanes and all that. You might ask how is this connected with the challenges we’re facing in the digital world? Well, I actually think in many ways, because there is an immense environmental impact of AI, especially training and running AI systems or any advanced computing systems on the internet. They all require a great deal of power and electricity, and this intensifies greenhouse gas emissions. This leads to an increase in energy consumption as well, and eventually, that also requires more natural resources. I think as the world gets more digitized, but at the same time our resources are becoming more scarce, this is something that we will absolutely have to address. Also, in the digital world right now, there’s so much AI-powered misinformation and disinformation. I think to continue with this climate example, I think there is a lot of content out there, a lot of lobbying from groups and parties that actually have no interest in reducing emissions, no interest at all in taking environmental action, and thanks to AI, it’s actually really easy for them. It’s possible to produce and spread misinformation and disinformation at the kind of scale that we hadn’t really seen before — scale and speed as well. AI makes it very easy, and this is not just related to climate, but we can take that pattern and look at it in every aspect of our lives really, including politics with things like election related misinformation and current affairs reporting and anything really. What we see on the internet shapes human behaviors on a large and a global scale, so it’s powerful and can be of interest as well. I think the second issue related to AI is deep fakes. Generative AI creates a whole range of new challenges that we need to address, and we need to address quickly because this technology is growing, and it’s being developed again at unprecedented scale. Things like how to distinguish fake content from authentic content, or there are challenges related to intellectual property protection. There are challenges to consent. There are challenges related to things like using someone’s voice or someone’s image or someone’s creative outputs to train or develop AI without their knowledge. There are so many stories in the media about writers whose work has been used without their consent, or musicians that had their voices taken to create songs that are actually not theirs. I think this is partially due to the insufficient governance of AI and the lack of appropriate regulations to manage the digital sphere overall. In terms of how to convert these challenges, I think they are too complex, I’m afraid, to have an easy solution. One step would be to start introducing regulation of AI and regulation of digital markets that’s actually fit for purpose, that has a specific emphasis on fighting misinformation and disinformation, that has specific areas that talk about creative outputs, intellectual property, deepfakes and how to deal with them as well. Another step is education and raising public awareness, especially when it comes to AI and how it can be used, how it can be misused, how it can be manipulated. A very simple thing is raising the public awareness of what we are seeing online and sort of trying to build this critical thinking and the ability to challenge what we’re seeing and question the content that we’ve been given. I think this is really important, especially in the era when it’s so easy to put out anything online that looks really credible. 

Where do you draw inspiration from in the work that you are currently doing? 

I think the world around me and just understanding what’s going on, in terms of what are some of the bigger trends that are happening globally. I think AI was something that I got into relatively early in the policy sphere, just because I found it just through research from talking to a lot of people. The same with transparency. Transparency has always been there, but I think now it’s more appreciated because people are understanding the risks and mistakes. For me, personally as well, I read a lot. I read fiction, nonfiction. Everything really. A lot of the inspiration for my work and for my life comes from just going to a library or bookshop and walking around, and sort of seeing what draws my attention, and then, thinking how I can relate that into my life or my work. Also, big conferences and gatherings, but especially the ones that bring in people from different areas. I think that’s where a lot of creativity and a lot of productive collaborations can actually happen if you just have a group of people who are passionate about something that come from completely different areas and just put them in one room, those kinds of meetups or conferences were something that I definitely benefited from in terms of shaping my ideas, or even bouncing ideas off other people. Traveling and looking at different parts of the world, I think, especially in the AI policy space. It’s really interesting to see how different countries are approaching that, but also just from a cultural perspective, what’s the approach to data and privacy? What’s the approach to sharing your information? What’s your level of trust in the government? What’s your level of trust in corporations? And I think a lot of that you can really observe when you travel. I did anthropology as my first as my bachelor’s degree, so I have a lot of curiosity in terms of exploring other parts of the world, exploring other cultures and trying to understand how people live, and what is it that we can learn from them as well.

We started Rise25 to celebrate Mozilla’s 25th anniversary. What do you hope people are celebrating in the next 25 years?

I hope that we are celebrating the internet that’s democratic and serves the interests of people and communities rather than big corporations. I also hope we are celebrating the existence of the kind of AI that makes our lives easier by eliminating the burdensome and repetitive tasks that are time-consuming that no one wants to do but the kind of AI that’s actually safe, well regulated, transparent, and also built and deployed with the highest ethical principles in mind that’s actually a positive part of our lives that makes our everyday experience move and freeze our time to do things that we actually want to do without compromising our data, privacy or our cybersecurity.

What gives you hope about the future of our world?

Mainly people. I feel like as the challenges that we are facing in the world are getting worse, the grassroots solutions that come from the people are getting more radical or getting more innovative and effective, and that gives me a lot of hope. Initiatives like Rise25 as well give me a lot of hope. You can see all of those wonderful people making things happen against all odds, really driving positive change in the kind of conditions that are not actually set up for them to succeed and people that are challenging the status quo in the work that they’re doing, even if it’s unpopular. That gives me a lot of hope. I’m also very impressed by the younger generation and their activism, the way they refuse to submit, and the way they unapologetically decide to fight for what they believe is right. I think that’s definitely something that millennials didn’t have the courage to do, and it’s incredible to see that now the generations that come after us are a little bit more ready to change the world the way that perhaps we didn’t. That gives me a lot of hope as well, the way that they just go for it and take action instead of waiting for governments or corporations or anyone else to fix it. They just believe that they can fix it themselves, and that’s really optimistic and really reassuring.

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The post Natalia Domagala on fighting for transparent AI, the power of algorithms, climate change and more appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn’t perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong — their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can’t get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and what reclaiming the internet really looks like.

This month we chat with Cassidy Williams, known as Cassidoo on X and TikTok and is the CTO of the AI company Contenda. We talk about the forums that shaped her career, building community online and off, and her favorite subreddit for niche drama.

What is your favorite corner of the internet? 

I have a Discord group through my Patreon [and] Twitch that I originally made for resume reviews and interview prep, but it’s turned into my absolute favorite spot to just chat with friends on the daily! I think in the pandemic it was a really good “third place” for myself and a bunch of other folks and we’ve become really good friends talking about tech but also just helping each other out and learning together!

What is an internet deep dive that you can’t wait to jump back into?

There’s a subreddit called r/HobbyDrama where folks share detailed stories about hobby communities and the drama that happens within them, and I absolutely love it. It’s usually really specific hobbies and communities that I rarely knew existed, sharing dramatic stories of people being jerks, or some twist of fate changing things, or something along those lines. So many times I’ve ended up going deep into learning about a hobby purely because I have a bunch of specific information now that makes it more entertaining!

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

The MDN docs, I feel like for all the years I’ve been a developer, I always find myself checking on specific syntax, there!

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

Walkability and mixed-use housing. I have been going *very* deep on that lately because I think countries outside of the U.S. are pretty good at building community outside of individual homes by not being too car-centric and by having it be the norm to walk everywhere, have easy access to public transit, and live in a place that has everything really close by. I sincerely think that it would improve nearly everything about our country in general if we focused on that more, and… I will not shut up about it, ha!

What was the first online community you engaged with?

Waaaay back in the early-to-mid 2000s, I was really active on some forums and message boards that taught me a ton about web design and tech in general. I don’t even remember how I initially discovered them, and most of them aren’t on the internet anymore, but those early forums of folks sharing knowledge totally changed the trajectory of my future career!

Also… Neopets, heh.

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

Outside of the Discord group I mentioned, I might have more of a content-sharing hub. I think we’re in a point on the internet where folks are very scattered, not all on Twitter, not all on Facebook, not all on Instagram, etc, and I would love to have a hub or feed of folks sharing with each other. RSS does fill that gap, a bit, so maybe a combo of chat + RSS? It sounds very old school!

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

The Manifesto for a Humane Web, and Maya Rudolph’s SNL episode!

In a recent blog post you compared living in Chicago to the internet of the past, where you made random but lasting friendships. What parts of the internet now make you optimistic about its future?

I do think that Discord servers right now are the closest things I’ve seen to tight-knit communities like that. Also, I *love* the series People & Blogs, where I’ve learned a ton about cool topics and writers I didn’t know before, and also the software and content from the folks at Good Enough!

Cassidy Williams is a Chicago-based software developer building the AI-powered talk-out-loud app Brainstory at Contenda. She’s also a startup advisor and investor, developer experience expert, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music and teaching in her free time. You can subscribe to her newsletter about the world of web development and play her word game, Jumblie.

The post Cassidoo, meme-maker and software developer, on her corner of the internet appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

At Mozilla, we know we can’t create a better future alone, that is why each year we will be highlighting the work of 25 digital leaders using technology to amplify voices, effect change, and build new technologies globally through our Rise 25 Awards. These storytellers, innovators, activists, advocates, builders and artists are helping make the internet more diverse, ethical, responsible and inclusive.

This week, we chatted with Sneha Revanur, an activist behind Encode Justice, an organization that aims to elevate youth voices in support of human-centered AI. We talked with Sneha about her current work at Encode, working with legislations for AI regulation, fighting against disinformation and more.

So, the first question that I wanted to ask you about is the work that you’ve already done at such a really young age, including, obviously, founding Encode Justice at 15. How did you become so knowledgeable about the things that you wanted to do right now and so passionate early on in your life?

Sneha Revanur: I say this quite a bit, but honestly, had I not been born in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, it’s totally possible, it would not exist. I think that growing up right there in the beating heart of innovation, being exposed to that culture from pretty much the day I was born, was really formative for me. I grew up in a household of software engineers — my parents both work in tech, my older sister works in tech. So I was kind of surrounded by that from a pretty young age. I think there was a point in my early childhood and middle school, probably when I myself thought that I would go and pursue a career in computer science. I think that it was only in and around early high school, when I began to think more critically about the social implications of these technologies and become more convinced that I wanted to be involved on the policy side of things, because I felt that was an area where we didn’t have as many voices who were actively involved in the conversation. So I definitely think just the fact that I was growing up in that orbit played a huge role, and I think that was really formative for me as a child. I think that at the same time, it was really helpful to have a background in working on campaigns. I got super involved politically around the 2020 election when I was in high school, I got involved working on Congressional campaigns. That was kind of around the time of my political awakening, and I think that learning the ropes at that point, building out that skill set and that toolkit of really understanding how to leverage the advocacy work, and better understanding how to apply that knowledge to the work that I was wanting to do in the AI world, I think, was really valuable for me. And so that’s kind of how it became a perfect storm of factors. And the summer of 2020 or so, I launched this initial campaign against a ballot measure in California that was seeking to replace the use of cash bill with an algorithm that had been shown in previous reports to be racially discriminatory. And so that was my initial entry point to a related advocacy, and that was kind of how the whole organization came to be following that campaign, and ever since, then the rest is the history — we’ve just grown internationally, expanded to think about all sorts of risks, some challenges in the age of AI. Not just bias, but also disinformation, job loss, so much more. And yeah, very excited to see where the feature leads us as well.

In what ways were you able to become more informative about AI and the things that you’re doing? 

So I think that when I was first getting started in the space, there were a couple of resources and pieces of media that were really helpful for me. I remember watching Coded Bias by Dr. Joy Buolamwini for the first time, and that was obviously an incredible entry point. I also remember watching The Social Dilemma on Netflix as well. I read a couple of books like Automating Inequality, Algorithms of Oppression, Weapons of Math Destruction. A lot of the classic text on like algorithmic bias, and those are really helpful for me as well. I actually think the initial entry point for me, the one that even got me thinking about was the ballot measure that I was working on in California and the risk of algorithmic bias in pre-trial tools, was an exposé published in ProPublica. I find that ProPublica and The Markup have great investigative journalism on AI issues, and so those are obviously fantastic resources, if you’re thinking about tech specific harms. So I think those are definitely some valuable resources for me, and ever since then, I’ve been expanding my repertoire of books. I also love The Alignment Problem, Human Compatible by Stuart Russell. I think so much literature out there on the full gamut of risks posed by AI. But yeah, that’s just a quick rundown of what I found to be most helpful.

A lot of younger people are growing up into this generation where AI is just a normal thing, right? How have you been able to see it become part of your daily life and in college as a young person?

I think over the past couple of years, the rate of AI adoption is just skyrocketed. I would say people probably use ChatGPT on a daily basis, if not like, many times per day — I myself use ChatGPT pretty actively. A lot of my peers do as well. I think there’s a whole range of uses. I think I find it really promising that my generation is becoming better equipped to understand how to responsibly interact with these tools, and I think that only through trial and error, only through experimentation can you figure out what kinds of use cases these tools are best equipped for what kinds of use cases they’re not as prepared for yet. And I think that it’s really helpful that we’re learning pretty early on how to integrate them into our lives in a meaningful and beneficial way. So I definitely think that the rate of adoption has really increased recently, and that’s definitely been a promising development. I would also say, it’s not just ChatGPT. Obviously, all of us are active social media users, or many of us are, and we’re becoming intimately aware that our online experiences on social media are obviously mediated by algorithms, the content that we’re consuming online, the information we’re being exposed to, whether that’s TikTok — even that’s under fire right now — or Instagram or Twitter, or anything of the sort. Obviously, like I said before, our online experiences are being shaped, governed, mediated by these complex algorithmic processes, and I think that young people might not be able to, in most cases, articulate the technical complexities of how those algorithms work, but they’ll understand generally that it’s obviously looking at prior data about them, and are becoming increasingly conscious of what kinds of personal information is being collected when they navigate online platforms. So I think that definitely in relation to social media, in relation to general generative AI use and the integration of generative AI in the classroom as well, I think that when it comes to general chatbots, for example, a lot of my peers were honestly quite disturbed by Snapchat’s My AI tool, which is like this chatbot that was just pinned to the top of your screen when you logged on, there was no opt out ability whatsoever. So I think that with the proliferation of those kinds of chat boxes that are designed to be youth facing tools like ChatGPT, all sorts of things, I just really seen it become a pivotal part of people’s daily lives.

I don’t think it is talked about enough how much the younger generation also feels that they should be included in being involved in the development of so much of the AI that’s coming along. What are some of the things that you are advocating for the most with legislators and officials when it comes to regulating AI?

There’s a whole host of things, I think. What’s become more challenging for us as we’ve grown as an organization is we’ve also realized there are so many issues out there and we want to be able to have capacity to take all of them on. I think in this year, especially, we’re thinking a lot about deep fakes and misinformation. Obviously, it’s the largest election year in human history. We’re going to have the governments of half the world’s population up for re-election. And what that means is that people are going to be marching to the polls under a fog of disinformation. We’re seeing how AI generates this information has exploded online. We’re seeing how deepfakes, not only in a political context, but also in the context of revenge porn, have been targeting vulnerable young girls and women, ranging from celebrities like Taylor Swift to ordinary people — girls in middle schools who are being impacted by these just because of their classmates being able to disseminate and make these like pretty sophisticated deepfake images on the spot. We’ve never had that kind of technology be so accessible to ordinary people. And so I think that people always compare it to like Photoshop, and it’s just not at all. It’s not. It’s not at all analogous because this is so hyperrealistic. We’re talking, not just photos, but also videos. I think we really are seeing some pretty concerning use cases already again, not just in the realm of politics, but in people’s daily and social lives as well. So I think that our top priority right now, especially in 2024, is going to be deepfakes and disinformation. But there’s so much else we’re thinking about as well. For example, we just had a member of our team return from Vienna, where they were hosting a conference on the use of autonomous swapping systems. We’re super concerned about the use of AI and warfare and some of the national security implications of that are obviously thinking a lot about algorithmic bias and job loss, especially as AI potentially begins to displace human labor. And of course, there are these growing debates over the potential catastrophic risks that could result from artificial intelligence and whether or not it could empower bad actors by helping people design bioweapons or helping launch cyberattacks. And those are all things that we’re really concerned about as well. So I think, yeah, full range of different issues here. But I would say the top thing we’re prioritizing right now is the disinformation issue.

What do you think is the biggest challenge as a whole that we face in the world this year, and on and offline? And how do we combat it?

Well, this is a challenge that isn’t just specific to AI, it’s one that I’m seeing on a society scale: It’s just this collapse of trust and human connection that I think is really, really concerning. And obviously AI is going to be the next frontier of that. I mean, whether it’s young people turning to chatbots in lieu of friends and family, meaning that we’re going to eventually erode the social bonds and sustained societies, or it’s people being exposed to more and more AI generated disinformation on social media, and people inherently not being able to trust what they see online. A couple of days ago, actually, I came across this deepfake recording of a principal in Baltimore, Maryland where he was allegedly saying all these like race, antisemitic things, and it was completely doctored, obviously using AI. If you hear it, it sounds like incredibly realistic. I wouldn’t have thought to second guess that or interrogate that if I heard it without knowing that it was generated by AI. And so I think that we’re really veering towards this state of almost reality collapse, as some have called it, where you don’t really know how to generate, how to sift through facts and fiction and understand what’s real and what’s not, and I think that again, that’s a larger problem that’s not just related to AI, but AI is definitely going to be a driving force, making things worse.

Where do you draw inspiration from the work that you do today? 

I think that a lot of the names that I mentioned before are some of the leading thinkers that I’ve been following in the space, and also like their books, their movies, things that have been super formative. But I would say, first and foremost, what I found to be most inspiring is just seeing how this like random issue that I was thinking about pretty much in a silo when I was 15 is now something that a lot more people my age are thinking a lot about now. It’s been really gratifying to see this movement grow from pretty much me in my like bedroom when I was 15, to like a thousand people now all over the world, and everyone’s super passionate about it, and it’s just so amazing to see people hosting events in their countries and running workshops and reaching out to legislators. And there’s so much excitement and agency around this that I find really, really inspiring. So I would just say, what keeps me going and what I find really re-energizing is just the spirit of the young people that I work with and seeing how immensely this network has grown, but also how deeply invested every single person is in the work, and how they’re taking ownership over this in their own lives, I think that has been really, really powerful for me to see, so that’s been really inspiring. In terms of direction and the issues and who I’m taking inspiration from in that sense, like I mentioned, some big influences have been Joy Buolamwini, Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio, some of the top AI thinkers who, I think, are thinking about a broad range of risks, and I think that getting that balance of perspectives has been really crucial for me and shaping my own views on AI.

Has anything in the last few years from when you started when you’re 15 surprised you that you maybe didn’t anticipate?

Well, I mean, I did not realize this whole like ChatGPT induced boom and public interest would take place. There was a time, I think maybe two years ago, where I was like, “am I just screaming into the void, what is going on here?” There was some interest in AI at that point, but definitely not at the level that it is right now, and I distinctly remember the feeling of going to lawmakers and feeling as though they would just be like, “Yeah, yeah, sounds good.” And then at the end of the day, they had like 20 other political priorities to get to. Obviously, there’s still a long way to go when it comes to getting Federal legislation on AI passed, but I think it was so inspiring coming out of a lot of the conversations around ChatGPT to have the same lawmakers who once ghosted us, reaching out to us, asking for briefings and wanting to get up to speed on the issues. And I think that just seeing that absolute reversal of fate was just absolutely stunning, and I think it was just really promising, of course, thinking about kind of being in a silo for a topic that was being discussed on campus in the dining halls with students and professors and people and seeing the conversation expand beyond the initial bubble. That has been really, really, really powerful for me.

What is one action that you think that everyone should take to make the world and our lives a little bit better?

There’s so many things that I could say. The first thing that I’m thinking about right now, especially in this critical deepfake and disinformation. So I would say, if you’re living in the U.S., call your member of Congress, ask them to pass deepfake legislation, urge them to pass deepfake legislation. I think it’s such an important priority this year, and unfortunately, it’s just not being prioritized, especially with so much else going on in the national political stage. So I would say call on your leaders to demand stronger AI regulation. I think that there are lots of ways that people can take direct action, whether or not you live in the U.S., or whether or not you know a lot about AI or have been exposed to AI issues in the past.

We started Rise25 to celebrate Mozilla’s 25th anniversary. What do you hope that people are celebrating in the next 25 years?

I hope that we’re celebrating a safer social media ecosystem where all users have agency and ownership over their personal data and their online experiences. I hope that we are moving towards a more AI literate world where people are prepared to navigate the surge of, for example, disinformation they’re going to experience, and understand how to navigate a world where you might be applying for a job and there’s an algorithmic screening tool that’s reviewing your application. Or you’re standing trial, and there is a risk assessment tool that’s assessing your level of criminal risk. I think people need to be aware of those things, and I hope we’re moving towards a more AI literate world in that sense. I hope that we have stronger international coordination on AI. I think that it’s truly a borderless issue and that right now, we’re seeing a lot of patchwork of different domestic regulations. We really need to harmonize international approach. And some sort of Paris climate agreement, but for AI. I would say those are a couple of things that I’m thinking about and hoping for the next couple of decades and years.

What gives you hope about the future of our world?

I’ve said this before, but I think what gives me hope is seeing the next generation so fired up thinking a lot about this. And I think it’s also really exciting to think about the fact that the next generation of people who are actually building the technologies are going to be approaching it with a much different mindset, and with a much different frame of thinking than the people who have been building these technologies in the past. And so I think that seeing that seismic shift has been really rewarding, definitely. And I mean, I’m excited to see how the next couple of years shake out. So I think it’s a mixture of optimism mixed with obviously anxiety for the future. But I think that first and foremost, the people that I work with, and my peers, have really inspired me.

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The post Sneha Revanur on empowering youth voices in AI, fighting for legislation and combating deepfakes and disinformation appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.