How we Fight for the Future in 2024

đŸ”„ Victories ↓
Priorities ↓
Fans protesting MLB's use of facial recognition outside a Phillies game.
Campaigner Caitlin Seeley George on PBS News.
Campaigner Sarah Phillips organizing an open letter to Lizzo on TikTok.
A mobile billboard promoting our "Slack Isn't Safe" campaign to add end-to-end encryption to the Slack app.
Fans protesting facial recognition outside a John Mayer concert.

At Fight for the Future, our power doesn’t come from being buddies with billionaires or cozying up to Congress. It comes from all of you. We’re known for being creative, strategic and ruthless. If we believe in something, we’ll put everything on the line to fight for it––even if it pisses off powerful people or gets us “in trouble” with politicians or big dollar donors.

The only reason we can do that is because millions of everyday people like you take part in our campaigns. It’s all of you––calling your Senators, crowdfunding epic media stunts, sharing our campaign pages, videos and op-eds––that actually moves the needle. Lawmakers and corporate CEOs might hate us. But thanks to you, they can’t ignore us.

This past year, with your help, we beat back an avalanche of dangerous Internet censorship bills that everyone in DC said were “definitely going to pass.” In the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, we successfully pressured one of the largest tech companies on earth to finally encrypt everyone’s private messages, despite massive pushback from police lobbyists and bureaucrats. We organized hundreds of prominent musicians to boycott venues that use facial recognition, garnering high profile coverage in Rolling Stone and the New York Times. And we overcame an industry lobbying blitz to begin the process of restoring net neutrality.

Our team is stronger than ever, and we’ve had some huge victories this year. But looking ahead, the threats we face to our most basic human rights are multiplying exponentially. Big Tech is only getting bigger. The explosion of artificial intelligence threatens not just to put many of us out of a job, but to automate and exacerbate injustice in almost every aspect of our lives. Governments have never been more intent on restricting online speech and expanding their ability to monitor and control us. There is so much work to be done. We can’t afford to slow down even for a second.

Our promise to you is this: when we say we are fighting for the future, we mean it. We would sooner shut this organization down before we’d compromise on our core values or cave to pressure from funders or political parties. We will always speak truth to power, no matter what the consequences are.

But that kind of fiercely independent activism is only possible with your support. We know not everyone can give. We know the world is on fire, and there are so many urgent causes asking for your donations at this time of year. But we also know that if you’re reading this, you understand that the world needs Fight for the Future. So please, sign up today to become a monthly donor. Even just $3 / month makes a huge difference for an organization of our size.

With your help, we’ll keep pissing off the powerful, while defending everyone’s most basic rights, in the digital age.

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2023 Victories

Engaged hundreds of thousands to stop bad internet bills that everyone in DC said were sure to pass

This year, we waged a fierce battle against a tornado of policies we bluntly termed “bad Internet bills.” This included the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), EARN IT Act, the RESTRICT Act, and other bills that would undermine encryption, digital privacy, and free expression in online spaces. We were most concerned about the momentum behind KOSA, a censorship bill in disguise. It had bipartisan support and backing from Majority Leader Schumer and President Biden, so we knew we’d need a large coalition of human rights groups and plenty of grassroots pressure to keep it from passing. In July, our whole team joined forces for a bad Internet bills Week of Action, during which we engaged LGBTQ+ creators, young people, fanfiction writers and readers, and other communities who depend on social media for access to life-saving and vital spaces. These groups made KOSA content go viral on TikTok, with the hashtag hitting 400 million views by the end of the year. We published op-eds, organized parents of trans kids, hosted Q&A’s, made informational content, worked with creators, and partnered with artists. We mobilized the Internet in every way we knew how.

In total, we drove more than 500,000 actions to Congress opposing KOSA and other bad Internet bills this year. The flood of calls and emails to Congress from our engagement with marginalized young people pushed representatives like Senator Ed Markey (MA), Senator Peter Welch (VT), and Senator Maria Cantwell (WA) to acknowledge the problems KOSA presented to LGBTQ+ youth. The youngest member of Congress, Representative Maxwell Frost (FL) also came out hard against KOSA, speaking up for the young people he represents in Florida, who are already dealing with the repression, censorship, and rightwing attacks on LGBTQ+ youth that KOSA would exacerbate. 

We did what Fight does best: engaged directly with the people most affected by legislation and rallied the power of communities on the Internet. With the power of the people, we halted a bill that traditional DC logic said was destined to pass, and engaged thousands and thousands of young people who are gaining awareness about what censorship bills look like and why we have to push back against them.

Campaigns:

Sounded the alarm about how AI is already causing harm

There is a growing coalition of civil society organizations pressuring Congress and the White House to enact meaningful safeguards around harmful uses of artificial intelligence. Fight for the Future is doing what we do best: bringing grassroots firepower to ensure that our allies can’t be ignored.

We’re already seeing results. In October 2023, the Biden Administration released major policy plans on AI, including an Executive Order and a set of policy proposals from the Office of Management and Budget. These set up aggressive timelines for government agencies to create plans around AI, and we’re engaging in these processes to ensure agency rules prioritize protecting civil rights—not the profits of industry. We built stopAIharms.org, a simple tool that enabled thousands of people to submit an official comment to what would have otherwise been an obscure, industry-dominated process. When we learned that notorious facial recognition vendor Clearview AI had been invited to participate in one of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s roundtables, we pushed back and alerted the press, generating significant backlash.

To inject some more thoughtful demands into the conversation around Generative AI specifically, we organized an AI Day of Action alongside the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers pushing back on copyright maximalists and arguing that while artists should be free to experiment with AI tools, large corporations should not be able to copyright AI generated works. 

We root our work on AI in the lived experience of everyday people. Decisions about this technology can’t be made in closed door meetings between academics, politicians, and industry lobbyists. We’ll work to ensure that everyone has a say in what tech we build, and what the rules governing it are.

Campaigns:

Won big on post-Roe campaign to get Facebook Messenger end-to-end encrypted by default

For over a decade we’ve been pushing platforms to implement default end-to-end encryption to keep users safe, and this year we scored a major victory in that fight. In response to the disastrous Dobbs decision, knowing draconian anti-abortion laws would be prosecuted with digital information including unencrypted messages, we launched a campaign to Make DMs Safe—because people need safe ways to communicate about abortion, as well as anything else they damn please. When law enforcement got access to the Facebook Messages of a teenager and her mom in Nebraska and used them to prosecute and sentence both to jail time under the state’s anti-abortion law, we made Meta a major target for our work.

In December, we won! Meta announced the launch of default end-to-end encryption for Facebook Messenger text and voice calls. This is a huge victory, and greatly due to our relentless pressure campaigns—organizing meetings with our coalition and calling out the company at every opportunity we got. This is a win for abortion seekers, providers, and facilitators, as well as Black communities, Muslims, immigrants, activists, and journalists who have all been targets of state surveillance.

Successfully pressured Apple to adopt more end-to-end encryption to keep photos and messages secure

We’ve won a few Make DMs Safe victories against Apple to greatly improve user privacy. At the end of December 2022, Apple announced that it would end-to-end encrypt iCloud backups, a huge victory for users’ privacy and security, and a demand of our campaign. The fact that iCloud backups weren’t encrypted was a gaping hole that put abortion seekers, journalists, and activists, among others, in danger.

Then this November, Apple announced plans to adopt RCS (Rich Communication Services)—another one of our Make DMs Safe demands! This move will pave the way for messages between iPhones and Androids to be end-to-end encrypted. This is huge progress from last year when Tim Cook dismissed the importance of interoperability between iPhone and Androids and told a journalist to just ‘buy your mom an iPhone.’ This is especially meaningful after a year in which many states have passed anti-abortion and anti-trans laws, and governments worldwide have tried to pass anti-encryption legislation.

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Pressured Google to stop collecting and storing so much cell phone location data – and won!

It’s no secret that Google collects tons of data about our movements via Google Maps. This information is a huge target for law enforcement geolocation warrants and other data requests, which is why we launched a campaign after the reversal of Roe to demand Google stop endangering people seeking abortions by halting the unnecessary collection of location data. We got more than 50 organizations signed on and echoed the calls from more than 40 lawmakers.

Initially, Google responded saying it would just delete peoples’ visits to sensitive locations, but we weren’t buying that plan (in part because experts said this wouldn’t really work, and turns out it didn’t). So we kept up the pressure—and it worked. This December, Google announced they would give individuals control of their location history data by storing it on their own devices. Now this is what we’ve been calling for—Big Tech companies like Google must collect less data so that when law enforcement or anyone else asks for it, they don’t have it. Less data collection is the best way to protect user privacy and security, full stop. While this doesn’t solve every problem with Google’s data collection practices, it’s a big step forward and will definitely provide a layer of necessary protection for people visiting sensitive locations.

United artists, fans, and venues to fight facial recognition at live events

At the very end of 2022, news broke that a mom had been kicked out of a Radio City Music Hall Christmas performance she was attending with her kid’s Girl Scout Troop. It turns out that James Dolan, the owner of Radio City, Madison Square Garden, and other venues across the US, was using facial recognition to target lawyers from firms engaged in legal actions against his company, and the mom happened to work for one of the law firms. This is a clear example of the discrimination and abuse that facial recognition makes possible—and why, for years, we’ve been saying it should be banned. We quickly mobilized to rally against the use of facial recognition at event venues, and organized a coalition of more than 100 artists and venues, including Tom and Zack of Rage Against the Machine, Boots Riley, Jill Sobule, Mirah, Bedouine, Yacht, Downtown Boys, War on Women, as well as House of Yes in Brooklyn, the Black Cat in DC, Junior High in LA, and the Columbus Theater in Providence RI. We also organized an action outside MSG during a John Mayer concert and collaborated with New York City Councilmembers to introduce ordinances that would ban private companies from using facial recognition on the public. 

Our campaigning against facial recognition at live events continued in the fall, when we cried foul over Major League Baseball’s plan to roll out facial recognition ticketing at stadiums, and protested outside a Phillies game after delivering a letter signed by civil rights organizations to the League. We’ll continue calling out the use of facial recognition wherever we see it, at the local and national levels.

Campaigns:

Stopped foolish and unconstitutional attempts to “ban” TikTok

We’re guessing you didn’t miss the headlines about the Biden Administration and members of Congress calling for a nationwide TikTok ban this past year, claiming the app’s ties to China endangered Americans. While surveillance by the Chinese government is a real risk, banning a single platform doesn’t even come close to solving the problem. TikTok does collect a ton of data on users, but so does Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and pretty much any app on your phone. It’s also misguided to call out China when there are other governments (including the US) that spy on us via these apps. Singling out TikTok reinforces xenophobic tropes and threatens free expression online. This particularly impacts young people who use the app for news, entertainment, and activism on issues like climate change and gun violence. Our take: lawmakers should stop feeding moral panic and pass a real data privacy law to stop all Big Tech companies from harvesting and abusing our personal data for profit. 

To stop this TikTok ban frenzy, we launched dontbantiktok.com to help organize creators and their communities. We also joined a coalition of advocacy groups including the ACLU, PEN America, and the Authors Guild in a joint letter opposing the ban. We built up a strong counter narrative with an op-ed in CNN and other press coverage, and made inroads with progressive lawmakers like AOC. When the RESTRICT Act was introduced in Congress under the guise of regulating TikTok, we pushed back again and got thousands of people to take action against a bill that clearly violated the First Amendment.

We succeeded in eroding support for the ban, and have stalled the Restrict ACT for now, but we know this is not the last we’ll see of this fight. As long as Congress keeps resorting to censorship and violations of our First Amendment rights, we’ll be there with the real answer to data abuse: privacy.

Campaigns:

Overcame industry lobbying and FCC deadlock to move forward on restoring net neutrality

If you’ve followed Fight for the Future for any amount of time, you know that we helped organize some of the largest online protests in human history to defend net neutrality, the basic principle that says your Internet company shouldn’t be able to control what you see and do online. Big Telecom companies have mounted serious opposition to our work, and as a part of our principled campaigns we’ve called out any lawmakers who take money from these companies while selling out their constituents. Senator Ted Cruz even shouted out our tactics that target Republican and Democrat lawmakers for political corruption during a hearing this year. And while he might have meant it as a negative, we take it as a compliment, especially when we’re talking about an issue where the majority of Americans from both major parties support it.

In 2023, we finally won a fully staffed FCC. This came after a years-long, ugly battle to confirm Biden’s original nominee, public interest champion Gigi Sohn, which included a telecom-funded smear campaign and even homophobic attacks. Sohn eventually withdrew her nomination after Senate Democrats failed to stand up to the industry attacks. This was a significant blow, but the Senate ultimately confirmed Anna Gomez, marking the first fully staffed FCC under the Biden Administration. We immediately went to work, calling on the FCC to reclassify broadband access to Title II and restore net neutrality. As the FCC rulemaking process kicked off, we dusted off Battle for the Net, our coalition hub for grassroots actions in support of net neutrality, and have already generated tens of thousands of comments in support. The predicted astroturf campaigns have tried to argue that there is no need for net neutrality, but we’re vigilantly countering this false narrative. We’ve already staved off an attempt by the Chamber of Commerce and other lobbyists to delay the proceeding. But the industry attacks aren’t going to stop, and neither are we. We will continue to push towards a future where the critical resource that is Internet access is not restricted by companies that put their profits ahead of peoples’ rights.

Campaigns:

Pushed the FTC to sue Amazon Ring – and they did

For years we’ve been sounding the alarm about the harms posed by the endless stream of data that Amazon collects from its Ring surveillance network and the security vulnerabilities of Ring devices. Finally, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken action. Two years ago, we launched a campaign with nearly 50 racial justice, worker advocacy, and anti-surveillance groups to pressure the agency to address the privacy and security threats that Ring devices pose to consumers and the public at large. This year, the FTC sued Amazon Ring for violating consumer privacy and failing to put in place meaningful protections to prevent employees and third parties from accessing users’ video. Amazon Ring settled the lawsuit with FTC agreeing to pay $5.8 million. This is an important milestone in the fight to stop Amazon’s widespread surveillance-driven data collection and the harmful impact it has on our lives.

We also launched local Ban Ring campaigns with grassroots organizations across the country in our continued fight to end Amazon’s Ring surveillance partnerships with over 2,000 local police departments. In collaboration with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP) and the Athena Coalition, we introduced an ordinance that would prevent corporations from sharing warrantless data en masse with law enforcement via the Ring-police partnerships. We’ve formed a coalition with over two dozen groups to provide campaign and media support to local campaigns in an initial seven cities, including Oakland and Portland. We believe local communities can and will put an end to these dangerous Ring-police partnerships.

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Secured victory when Wired rescinded its Amazon Ring recommendation

During our multi-year Rescind Ring campaign, tech review outlets like CNET, Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, and Gizmodo all withdrew their recommendations of Ring cameras, or added data privacy as a part of their product test process. Some even put pressure on Amazon to change their law enforcement policies.

We kept pushing, and now Wired has joined the list. Their article, Why We Don’t Recommend Ring Cameras, says, “[we] occasionally end up with products that can be dangerous to you, or to society in general, which we believe to be the case with Amazon-owned Ring and its relationship with law enforcement.” The article echoes concerns mentioned throughout all of our Ring campaigns––including Ring’s police partnerships, the Ring feature that allows users to forward footage directly to law enforcement, and the camera’s technical shortcomings–as reasons to look for alternatives. We love to see tech reviewers like Wired publicly come out against Ring, and we plan to keep adding outlets to our list.

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Built consensus that the problem is Big Tech’s monopolistic, anti-privacy business model

Big Tech’s business model is incongruous with human rights. These giants abuse their gatekeeper status to censor content, distort democracy, abuse our personal data, and stifle competition. To truly take on these behemoths, we need policies that address surveillance and corporate concentration, like comprehensive data privacy and real antitrust legislation. After 2022’s bruising loss on the bipartisan antitrust bills and lack of action on data privacy, it was painfully clear that we are on a longer path to victory, and that it will require an even bigger army of civil society and businesses, backed by even more grassroots support.

In 2023, we didn’t miss specific opportunities to advance these smart policies. Our Dangerous Road Ahead campaign and robust website detailed how Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon are trying to infiltrate the auto industry, utilizing their anticompetitive and anti-privacy playbooks. We called on the FTC to step up its review of the Big Four’s actions in the auto industry — and to initiate rulemaking to prevent them from doing the kind of damage to the auto industry that they’ve already done in so many other sectors. 

When it became clear that Rep Correa, the new chair of the House antitrust subcommittee, was more interested in protecting Big Tech giants than moving forward sensible antitrust policies, we took a step few organizations could and called for House leadership to remove him from his post. And after Congress proposed a slew of bad Internet bills aimed at combating Big Tech abuses by restricting users’ Internet rights, we created Data Privacy Now to refocus efforts on real solutions.

Another role we’ve taken on in 2023 has been to help build bridges between the child protection and consumer groups and civil liberties organizations in order to find common ground on how to regulate Big Tech. We’ve gotten into the weeds about specific policies like how to regulate design without running afoul of the First Amendment and why directly regulating content will create more harm without fixing the issues. As a movement we have succeeded in making Big Tech politically toxic across the political spectrum, so it’s critical that we find the specific areas of policy that we can work together to advance.

Campaigns:

Organized Reproductive Justice and LGBTQ+ Advocacy Orgs to Make Slack Safe

In 2023, continuing the momentum from our Make DMs Safe campaign, we launched a targeted effort to get Slack to make direct messages end-to-end encrypted, and to provide additional safety features like blocking and reporting. As a part of this push to make Slack safe we organized a letter to the company from more than 90 reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, and digital rights groups; we placed prominent sidewalk decals around Slack and Salesforce headquarters in San Francisco and Denver and a billboard in San Francisco; and we put paid ads on Google and Facebook aimed at Slack workers. We also led on-the-ground actions with our friends at Mozilla Foundation with mobile billboards running around Slack offices in Denver and San Francisco. In the wake of our campaign, Slack announced they would soon be introducing some blocking features. This is good but not nearly enough, so we will continue to exert pressure on them to implement end-to-end encryption and to make user security a priority.

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Rallied against Big Tech’s attempts to control your books

In 2023, digital book bans and nefarious mechanisms for implementing them reached new heights. Once again, we stood with the Internet Archive in their battle to ensure that libraries around the US can have censorship- and spyware-free options for digital books. We organized a rally on the steps of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, Califiornia to demand the right for libraries to own and preserve digital books. This led to a resolution of support from the City of San Francisco that highlighted the historic role of libraries as safe and inclusive book loaners and preservationists. We also published an op-ed and sent a letter to Congress from groups representing civil rights, LGBTQ+, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, immigration, labor, and antimonopoly interests, calling for an investigation into Big Tech and Big Publishing’s overreaching control of the content, reader data, and very existence of digital books. 

In today’s climate of book bans and amid the growing reader-to-data-broker pipeline, from which Big Tech and Big Publishing are greedily profiting, it’s never been more important to defend libraries’ historic reputation as anti-surveillance champions of access to knowledge and information.

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Built the human rights case for defending decentralized technologies and fighting financial surveillance

Financial data reveals some of our most sensitive personal information, including our interests, the causes we support, and our plans for the future. This makes financial surveillance particularly dangerous, and like all surveillance, it disproportionately targets vulnerable communities. This year, we raised awareness about the insidiousness of financial surveillance and drew attention to some of the worst instances of its abuse. We called out payment processor Wyre for financial discrimination against sex workers, condemned the police raid and opposed RICO charges targeting an Atlanta bail fund supporting Stop Cop City organizers. We also brought together front-line activists from abortion and gender-affirming care funds with pro-privacy tech builders to discuss the kinds of alternative tools that might be developed to  address the challenges activists face. 

As one of the few progressive organizations working to inject human rights values into conversations around how to regulate cryptocurrencies and other decentralized technologies, we organized more than 35 privacy-preserving projects in a letter to Congress calling on them to prioritize privacy when crafting crypto regulations, and launched Give Us Privacy, where users of open source, free, and decentralized technologies took action to support privacy and alternatives to Big Tech.

The possibility of greater financial privacy in decentralized, community-owned, and open source technologies continues to be a focus in our response to Congressional and agency actions on cryptocurrencies. When the US Treasury proposed regulations on the sale and exchange of digital assets by brokers, we helped mobilize thousands to submit comments opposing the plan which would force builders and software developers exploring this technology to aid in government surveillance under the threat of being shut down. And when Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced misguided legislation that attacked privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, we cried foul and highlighted how these bills threaten abortion seekers, sexworkers, and families seeking gender-affirming healthcare.

Campaigns:

Provided support for local groups fighting surveillance including Automated License Plate Readers

Often the best opportunities for real progress are at the local and state level, which is why we work to support as many of these campaigns as possible. Working with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project and NYC Council Member Shahana Hanif we rallied support for and strengthened the draft legislation of two bills in NYC that would ban facial recognition in private businesses and residential buildings and supported a statewide version of the legislation. We pitched in on getting an anti-surveillance resolution across the finish line in Portland, OR. by igniting a local news blitz and pointing out the communities most vulnerable to the encroachment of such surveillance and the harms to the everyday lives of Portland residents and visitors. Additionally, we supported a coalition effort to successfully kill a terrible pro-facial recognition bill in California while rallying support for a good facial recognition policy. And we’ve engaged our members in Massachusetts to support a strong privacy bill and a visionary bill that would ban the sale of cell phone location data.

We’ve also been supporting local efforts and organizers across the country fighting the spread of Automated Licence Plate Readers (ALPRs). These dragnet surveillance systems allow police, private businesses, and local communities to track and trace the movement of anyone who drives a car, infringing on our right to move freely, while fueling the numbers-based policing that preys upon Black, brown and poor people and helping to criminalize people exercising their right to bodily autonomy.

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Launched a new video series about algorithmic bias with the studio behind The Social Dilemma

Because of our reputation as a badass advocacy org, we were asked by Exposure Labs (the studio behind The Social Dilemma and Chasing Ice) to help launch a new video series about algorithmic bias. To ensure the videos included an advocacy component, we created TakeBackOurInternet.org, a campaign that calls for Good Internet Bills, like legislation that protects digital rights, data privacy, and free speech on the Internet, eliminates discrimination, and mandates protective measures like end-to-end encryption. We premiered the videos and are sharing the campaign as a tool to promote the types of liberatory bills that can unleash the positive potential of the Internet and technology.

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Pressured Big Tech to stop censoring Palestinians

For many years, Fight has worked to address the systemic over-moderation of marginalized people’s speech, including Arab and Muslim individuals in the MENA region, sex workers, LGBTQ folks, and Palestinians. That work has been driven by research and journalism showing impacts on these groups of platforms’ uneven or sometimes outright biased moderation practices.

In the last few months, Palestinians and Palestinian advocates have reported a concerning spike in censorship, discriminatory content removal, shadowbanning, and account suspensions across social media platforms, but especially on Instagram and Facebook. In collaboration with Palestinian digital rights organization 7amleh and a coalition of media justice and rights groups, we launched Meta: Let Palestine Speak, demanding that Meta address the censorship and discrimination that Palestinians and Palestine advocates are facing on Meta’s platforms, and that they fully implement the policy recommendation from the 2021 independent human rights due diligence review of the platform’s Israel/Palestine content moderation policies.

The petition has gathered over 20,000 signatures in just a few weeks, received coverage on TheHill.com, and helped push Senator Elizabeth Warren to speak out about the issue. The energy of this moment presents a critical opportunity to push forward real policy changes.

Campaigns:

Launched a Substack

Starting an email newsletter has been on our to-do list for a long time, and this year we checked it off. It’s an enticing idea: more space than the short-form sites, more latitude than our general email list. So we launched Touch Grass. 

Touch Grass thinks a lot about tech, but also the conditions that make tech possible: it’s an online newsletter with an offline bias. It’s run by Anna Bonesteel, who used to manage our rapid response campaigns and, like most of us, comes from a creative, omnivorous background. 

So far, we’ve published insider takes on Internet censorship bills, a call for all the parking meters to break, an interview with a wireless spectrum legal scholar, a discussion about AI and healthcare insurance algorithms and much more. It’s a really exciting addition to our platform and we’re excited to grow it in the new year.

You can subscribe to Touch Grass for free and if there’s something Internet-y that’s not getting the coverage it deserves, or you want to break a story with us, reach out!

Campaigns:

Adapted and Expanded Our Social Media Presence

We’ve expanded our presence to more online spaces in order to make sure we’re reaching as many people as possible. Follow us in any of these places:

2024 Priorities

Artificial Intelligence

The explosion of artificial intelligence affects every single human on earth. We’ll build the tools, campaigns and messaging necessary to ensure that ordinary people have a voice in the development of AI policy, so that the future of this tech can’t be decided in closed door meetings with think tanks, lobbyists, and politicians.

2023 was the year that *everyone* started talking about artificial intelligence. But Fight for the Future has been sounding the alarm about the ways that AI can automate and exacerbate systemic injustice for years. Tech CEOs and pundits are trying to dazzle and confuse us with highly theoretical discussions of “existential risk” and self aware killer robots. But our work stays rooted in the ways that AI is already impacting people’s lives: from the use of facial recognition surveillance in retail stores and airports to dangerous and discriminatory “productivity monitoring” algorithms used on delivery drivers and Amazon warehouse workers.

In the coming year, we plan to dramatically expand our campaigning and educational work around artificial intelligence. We know too well that all of the public attention on AI won’t necessarily translate into action unless we build power and political will. We’ll focus on channeling the ambient anxiety around AI into real political power. We don’t have a ton of faith in Congress to act quickly, but we think we can make real headway by pressuring the Biden Administration and federal agencies like the Department of Education and Health and Human Services. We’ll also expand our high impact corporate campaigning, directly pressuring corporations and institutions to back away from adopting harmful uses of AI. 

As we approach the next election, we plan to launch a major campaign calling for a ban on the use of AI generated images and video in election advertising. We think this has the potential to be bipartisan and, while it’s just one small piece of the AI puzzle, it would be a good line to draw in the sand early on. We’ve had a lot of success pushing back against corporate and government use of facial recognition. Now we need to do that for a wide range of other harmful AI use cases. Let’s go!

Campaigns:

Online Free Expression

As governments lurch toward authoritarianism and the Internet becomes more privatized and centralized, free expression has never been at greater risk. We’ll lead the charge against dangerous censorship bills and demand policies that address harm while protecting freedom of expression and human rights, particularly for marginalized people.

From book banning to the criminalization of drag performances to student groups being doxxed, freedom of expression has never been in more danger. Online is no different: we’re facing an avalanche of dangerous legislation that would unleash widespread Internet censorship, and constant misguided calls for social media platforms to simply “remove more content faster” rather than focus on human rights. But we’re fighting back, and we’re winning.

We’ve built a massive and growing coalition of human rights, LGBTQ+, youth empowerment, racial justice, and civil liberties organizations that have formed a sort of free speech “firewall,” beating back the most dangerous pieces of legislation like KOSA and the EARN IT Act. In 2023 we helped more than half a million people, mostly young people, speak out about Internet legislation that affects them, and organized dozens of meetings with key lawmakers. This coming year we hope to double those numbers, and continue building out our network of artists and creators who can mobilize in a rapid-response fashion to stop bad bills and demand more accountability and transparency from tech companies.

Everyone is talking about young people online, but we’ll continue to build tools and campaigns that make sure they actually get a say. We’ll keep giving the mic to young people across the country who are activated and ready to defend LGBTQ+ and other vulnerable perspectives online. We’ll continue to fight the onslaught of bills that erroneously equate child safety to censorship. 

We refuse to allow Trumpist grifters or Big Tech lobbyists to co-opt freedom of expression to advance their own interests. We recognize that Big Tech’s surveillance-driven business model is fundamentally incompatible with basic human rights and democracy. So we’ll continue doing the hard work of advocating for policies that will actually help address harm, rather than policies that will lead to censorship and do more harm than good.

Campaigns:

Corporate Surveillance of Vulnerable Groups

While pushing for better laws to protect our privacy, we’ll partner with groups on the frontlines of reproductive justice fights, LGBTQ+ rights and more on campaigns to pressure companies including Discord, Slack, and Google to adopt better privacy preserving practices, like minimizing the amount of data collected and retained, and end-to-end encryption of direct messages by default.

Data sharing between government and private entities has made corporations complicit in the criminalization of people exercising their human rights, a partnership that is facilitated by data brokers who are more than happy to profit off the sale of our personal information. In order to address the surveillance-fueled threats to abortion seekers and providers, LGBTQ+ communities, Immigrant communities, and others, we must continue to rapidly respond with immediate harm reduction tactics, while pushing for policy changes from companies and federal agencies. 

In 2024, we’ll get more companies to Make DMs Safe by adopting end-to-end encryption for messaging (so that only the sender and intended recipient can view messages), while continuing to fight bad legislation that threatens end-to-end encryption. We’ll also organize more pressure to demand data privacy protections and highlight how companies collect, retain, and share too much of our data. And there is still a big opportunity to get the FTC to move its corporate surveillance rulemaking forward to ensure there are more protections against data abuse. Lastly, we’ll take on the data broker industry, which accumulates far too much personal data and then sells it to whoever can pay for it—including government and law enforcement agencies. We’ll partner with organizations on the frontlines of these battles and support their work to defend human rights.

Campaigns:

New campaign area at the intersection of LGBTQ+ liberation and tech

Working at the critical intersection of tech and LGBTQ+ rights, we’ll expand our partnerships to track and counter detrimental legislation and corporate policy that leads to dangerous content regulation, censorship, and algorithmic harms for the LGBTQ+ community.

As a queer and trans women-led organization, we have been a leading voice in drawing direct connections between important tech battles, such as data privacy and encryption, and LGBTQ+ rights and safety. We have also long recognized the impacts of tech on the LGBTQ+ community, in particular as it concerns content regulation, censorship, and algorithmic harms.

With so many anti-LGBTQ+ bills currently advancing or already passed across the US, including efforts that would lead to the suppression of online speech or prevent life-saving access to online community resources about gender-affirming care, the movement’s capacity is overwhelmed and many frontline organizations lack specific expertise in the nuances of tech policy. 

In 2024, Fight will launch a new plank of our work focused specifically on the intersection of tech and LGBTQ+ rights. We’ll hold companies accountable for their impacts on LGBTQ+ people, push back on Big Tech pinkwashing campaigns, and call them out for lobbying against policies like privacy legislation that would protect queer people’s bodily autonomy and security. We’ll keep directly engaging with LGBTQ+ youth, sharing our playbook with youth-led efforts, and building a network of LGBTQ+ organizations who want to engage more effectively on tech policy issues that affect the communities they serve (queer youth, BIPOC youth, youth experiencing homelessness, etc). Our goal is to amplify their voices in the tech justice fight so that they can directly challenge the discriminatory technology and legislation that imperils all of our lives.

Data Privacy

While we build out a coalition of the masses to support comprehensive federal data privacy legislation, we’ll engage activists in campaigns that build momentum, pushing federal agencies and states to enact privacy-protecting policies.

Comprehensive privacy legislation has been stuck in a quagmire, but there is potential to move the needle and build support for the privacy legislation we need. We plan to use 2024 to build consensus that data privacy should be a movement priority and work to broaden the coalition of organizations to include those that work across a range of issues. We’ll also continue to engage in rulemaking processes at the FTC and CFPB, mobilizing our supporters to call on these agencies to address the collection and sharing of data. And we’ll be looking for opportunities to support strong privacy bills in states like Massachusetts because we know that states can continue to lead the way and create pressure for federal action.

We’ll use 2024 to push for policies that regulate surveillance, not speech; design, not content; and we’ll rally around antitrust work to break up monopolies to ensure there is space for privacy-preserving or community-owned platforms and tools to grow.

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Net Neutrality and Internet Access 

The Battle for the Net is on, and in 2024 we’ll rally individuals, artists, creators, businesses, veterans, first responders, and everyone who relies on the Internet to fight off Big Telecom astroturf efforts and push the FCC to restore net neutrality!

For over a decade, Fight has organized for Internet access and basic oversight of the telecom industry. We built the tech and led messaging for the 2015 net neutrality victory, and mobilized millions of actions to the FCC and Congress to ignite an unprecedented backlash after its repeal in 2017, resulting in the House passage of the Save the Internet Act. In 2024, we’re ready to do it again. Our campaign hub, Battle for the Net, will organize grassroots actions and power to oppose Big Telecom astroturf and ensure that the FCC acts to reclassify broadband access as a Title II service and restore net neutrality.

It should be easier going this time around, with a pro-net neutrality majority at the FCC. But we’ll still need to keep up a steady stream of grassroots pressure, debunk false narratives in the press, publish op-eds to keep the commission on track, and mobilize quickly if there are any issues or shortcomings with what the agency ends up doing.

We are also leveraging this power to shore up long-term support in Congress for Title II. Net neutrality has been one of our longest organizational focal points because we believe it is crucial for an open Internet, expanding access, privacy protections, and public safety.

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Government Surveillance

We’ll support good bills to rein in government surveillance in the U.S., and implement our tried-and-tested grassroots power campaigns that generate hundreds of thousands of emails and calls from everyday people to pressure Congress to act on Section 702 reform, facial recognition restrictions in airports, and new AI policies.

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was scheduled to sunset at the end of 2023. Instead of using this opportunity to reform this policy and close its backdoor search loophole (via proposals like the Government Surveillance Reform Act and the Protect Liberty and End Warrantless Surveillance Act), lawmakers—including Democrats—supported its reauthorization and even efforts to expand its powers! Ultimately, Congress passed a short-term reauthorization that will keep this fight going into 2024. With this extended timeline we see an opportunity to get more allies in support of limiting the surveillance powers of the US government—and we’ll activate folks to call their lawmakers to demand reforms that end mass warrantless surveillance. 

Beyond Congressional action on government surveillance, we see opportunities to push for agency action. The Office of Management and Budget’s guidance on government use of AI could address ways that the government is able to use various technologies, and we’ll push for rules that preserve privacy instead of expanding surveillance. Government use of facial recognition technology continues to be a concern, and we’ll keep up support for the strong facial recognition moratorium (and to oppose weaker regulatory approaches), while also pushing for legislation to address specific use cases like facial recognition in schools, federal housing, and airports. We’ll also continue to support legislation like The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act, which would keep law enforcement and intelligence agencies from subverting our rights and buying information about people from data brokers.

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Facial Recognition and Biometric Surveillance

To stop the spread of biometric surveillance, we’ll organize mass comments to federal agencies that amplify the alarm about its dangers, launch large-scale campaigns that empower thousands to pressure companies to reject facial recognition and other biometric surveillance tech, and we’ll mobilize support for strong legislation (like the new bill that would ban facial recognition in airports).

In 2024, we’ll push back on the use of facial recognition and other biometric surveillance technology. The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security are accepting comments on ways to address privacy and civil rights concerns with their use of facial recognition and other biometric and predictive technologies. But the only way they can “address” our concerns is by not using these technologies at all. We’ll use this opportunity to continue to rally opposition to law enforcement use of facial recognition and other tools of biometric surveillance.

We’ll keep up the pressure on Congress and the Biden Administration to prioritize addressing the harms of facial recognition—which actively endangers people—in their discussions about regulating AI. Additionally, as government agencies work to address the steps laid out in the Executive Order on AI and the OMB Guidance on AI, we see an opportunity to ensure the inclusion of facial recognition, particularly in its application within schools, housing, healthcare, and law enforcement. And we’ll lobby and organize to support good pieces of legislation, like the new bill that bans facial recognition in airports.

In addition to these policy opportunities, we’ll continue our successful strategy of pushing industries to reject facial recognition tech, like we have with music festivals, sports and event venues, and retailers. When companies consider using facial recognition, we’ll organize a flurry of opposition to pressure them to put the rights of their customers first and reject the tech.

While facial recognition continues to be a primary focus in our work to rein in abusive surveillance tech, we have also expanded our focus to include other emerging types of biometric technologies. Amazon palm scanners were implemented in hundreds of Whole Foods locations in 2023, and we anticipate the company continuing to push its scanning devices to other retailers in 2024. We’ll also continue to push back when companies try to roll out emotion recognition tools that rely on biometric data and threaten our privacy and rights, like we have in the past with Zoom and Spotify.

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Amazon’s Surveillance and Data Abuse

We’ll keep working to expose Amazon’s surveillance empire, zeroing in on the many ways it hurts local communities, fighting for local bans on Amazon Ring-police partnerships and pressuring the FTC to protect delivery workers and innocent bystanders from the company’s constant surveillance.

Over the past several years, we’ve fought and won campaigns that have mitigated some of the harms caused by Amazon’s surveillance network. Now that we’ve established a regulatory precedent—that Amazon Ring devices do in fact violate users’ privacy and are unsafe—we are doubling down on the fight to protect the public at large from Amazon surveillance.

We are campaigning for regulatory agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission, to use their authority and protect bystanders, delivery workers, and others whose data is captured without knowledge or consent. Though these individuals have no commercial relationship with Amazon Ring’s surveillance dragnet, they face the same vulnerabilities posed by the network to those that do, including misuse of their data, data discrimination, criminalization, and other harms associated with data breaches and data brokers.

Additionally, we are continuing our work with local groups and elected city officials to ban Amazon’s Ring surveillance partnerships with local police. Implementing a ban will go a long way to protect the privacy of individuals recorded by Ring devices and prevent police departments from conducting unwarranted mass collection of residents’ data.

Through these efforts, we’ll also pressure elected officials and regulators to put forth policies that address at large the abusive corporate surveillance and invasive data collection done by corporations like Amazon and others.

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Copyright, Libraries, and Internet Freedom

From Congress or courtrooms, we’ll rally book lovers, artists, and content creators to take on copyright maximalists and their army of lobbyists and to defend the Internet Archive and its mission to safeguard digital books, civil rights, and surveillance-free reading.

We will continue to stand with the Internet Archive and further their mission to safeguard digital books and protect library and Internet freedoms. In our letter to Congress from groups representing civil rights, LGBTQ+, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, immigration, labor, and antimonopoly interests, we call for an investigation into the overreach of Big Tech and Big Publishing in controlling content, reader data–even trying to obstruct the existence of digital books. We’ll keep pushing Congress to investigate these companies.

In 2024, we will continue to flex our PR chops, and dogfight copyright maximalists and their armies of lobbyists, over the very real threat that the Hachette v. Internet Archive case poses to civil rights and the core democratic principle of surveillance-free reading. At the same time, we’ll be tracking AI policy conversations that have copyright implications, especially if copyright maximalists try to exploit AI panic to pass terrible legislation.

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Advocating for human rights-centered crypto policy 

We’ll continue to inject human rights values into conversations around how to regulate cryptocurrencies and other decentralized technologies, building coalitions that garner support for financial privacy across new constituencies, spinning up rapid response campaigns to specific cases of financial surveillance, and pushing for recognition of the right to build community-owned and -governed alternatives to today’s mainstream Big Tech and banking systems.

In 2024, we’ll stay on the lookout for bad policymaking that threatens human rights and financial privacy, or impedes the development of decentralized alternatives to Big Tech and banking systems. We’ll keep pushing back against harmful legislation, including the Crypto-Asset National Security Enhancement (CANSEE) Act and Digital Asset Anti-Money Laundering (DAAMLA) Act, which disguise intrusive measures as tools to combat money laundering, and demanding better from policymakers and businesses alike. In addition to calling for thoughtful regulation to protect everyday people and crypto projects, we will also be highlighting scams and failures on the part of crypto and decentralized projects to live up to the ambitious goals for freedoms and permissionlessness they say they represent.

We will continue to build coalitions and support for financial privacy among new constituencies and make the case for alternative, privacy-preserving financial systems. We will respond to situations such as the case where PayPal data was used to justify a militarized raid on a bail fund supporting Stop Cop City organizers in Atlanta. Alongside Color of Change, we are working on a letter from mutual aid organizations including bail funds, abortion funds, disaster relief funds, and gender-affirming care funds that calls on Congress to defend our right to financial privacy, and affirm the right to build community-owned and -governed alternatives to the abusive surveillance of today’s mainstream Big Tech and banking systems.

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