If you are in San Francisco trying to follow the goings-on in your neighborhood or within city hall, you may have come across The Dissent. The website brands itself as “an AI newsroom” with work “reported, edited, and produced by named agents.” Its founder and publisher Dakota Carrasco — a real person, and, incidentally, an analyst at the notorious investment firm BlackRock — published text on the site’s “about” page saying, “Local journalism has been quietly consolidated and hollowed out.” Carrasco’s statement did not note the role of Carrasco’s own industry in that decline, nor did it acknowledge the irony in choosing this name for a website based on a technology that steals and repackages the intellectual output of others.

The Dissent’s website, which currently appears to be down, even included a masthead with bios for its non-human “staff” (the AI agents whose names appear alongside articles). Neighborhood “reporter” Casey Wong (who is not a real person) has a bio that reads, “I notice the texture of a block — who’s been here 30 years, who’s just moved in.” Of course, there’s no mention of how an AI agent might glean that information, but (actual) news outlet Mission Local has noted that, to fill its pages, The Dissent relies heavily on summarizing the work published in other sites by real human journalists.

Once, The San Francisco Standard reported, The Dissent did appear to follow up on a tip in a Reddit thread to break a story about a business closing, but “the agent appears to have hallucinated the claim that it had reached out to the owner for comment.”

The development of an AI newsroom in San Francisco, which is home to many of the tech billionaires attempting to reshape society, is certainly concerning for those of us who care about journalism. But The Dissent is not the only news outlet to have tried using AI to crib the journalism of real human workers. These AI newsrooms get a decent share of attention, and their harms are critical to point out. But they are also part of a broader problem: the undermining of how we share and receive factual information.

Earlier this year, Google made an announcement that could further destabilize the already precarious journalism industry by using its infamous search feature to prioritize AI summaries from Google Gemini, rather than directing people toward external links to news outlets like ours.

You might not have noticed the deep scale of this change, but you probably have noticed what writer Cory Doctorow refers to as the “enshittification” of Google search — the preponderance of spam, the push toward sponsored results, and the overwhelming sense that the internet no longer works the way it once did.

On June 9, when we sounded the alarm about the increased AI implementation within Google’s search function and the suppression of journalism that would surely result, it was too early to know exactly how much these changes would impact Truthout. Google had announced the changes on May 19 and we were still collecting data.

Before the change, our traffic from Google was 27 percent of our overall traffic: Exactly 2,604,280 people visited Truthout via Google in 2025. Given our experience with Facebook traffic abruptly declining by 90 percent in 2018, following sudden changes in the social media platform’s algorithm (including for example, Facebook’s decision to no longer regularly show Truthout’s posts to the more than 800,000 people who had followed Truthout’s page out of a desire to see them), it seemed reasonable to worry about losing as much as half our Google traffic. In our June op-ed, we wrote, “If even half of that 27 percent disappears, it will have a devastating impact on our journalism.”

At the time, we were hopeful that it wouldn’t be that bad. After all, wasn’t Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil”?

We later learned, however, that Google has quietly stepped back from its infamous motto, even removing it from the opening lines of its Code of Conduct while its parent company, Alphabet, Inc., ignores it entirely.

We now have three full months of data since Google’s change, and the numbers are worse than we anticipated. Overall readership that comes to Truthout through Google is down 54 percent against last year. The number of new readers who discover Truthout via Google searches is down 49 percent, and returning users from Google are down 51 percent.

We lost 15 percent of our readership overnight. This was a readership we painstakingly built over decades, and it vanished because Google chose corporate greed over a healthy democracy.

At Truthout, we anticipate a loss of roughly $500,000 in online revenue as a result of this massive traffic plunge in the next year alone.

We know Truthout is not the only news organization taking a massive hit amid Google’s abrupt decision to prioritize showing internet users AI summaries instead of relevant news articles. Our peers in independent media and beyond — including among grassroots base-building organizations that depend on traffic — are struggling to stay above water.

As we wrote when Google’s AI changes were first announced, nobody wants this. People have overwhelmingly said they’d rather not get their news through an AI chatbot, and they recognize that there’s a pretty good chance the information they get from chatbots is not accurate. In fact, U.S. voters dislike AI as a whole, poll after poll has found. But Big Tech is increasingly treating its users as potential sites of profit and subjects to be managed, rather than people looking for the information they need to function as informed members of society. And they’re able to get away with it because, for so long, the importance of factual information and the people who ensure we have access to it have both been devalued by our political and economic systems.

A dystopian infringement on our access to information isn’t just some looming threat — we’re actively living through it.

The repercussions of this devaluation become more relevant by the day. As people try to find and share truthful, accurate information about the many crises that have been unleashed on us — foodborne disease outbreaks, vaccine science, disasters induced by the climate crisis, and immigration policing raids in their communities, for starters — they may be greeted with a torrent of loose facts or outright disinformation. Corporate news outlets and those owned by billionaires have repeatedly shown their willingness to capitulate to Donald Trump. Paywalls and subscriptions, which some outlets need in order to survive, mean that critical reporting is put behind a fence. A dystopian infringement on our access to information isn’t just some looming threat — we’re actively living through it.

Journalism has always been a crucial node of democratic practice; after all, how can we make decisions about what our society should look like if we don’t actually know the facts of what’s happening around us?

The AI-ification of news is making that increasingly clear. When AI “news outlets” and AI summaries are not busy plagiarizing real journalists, they are often instead regurgitating information from company press releases.

Is this the future of news that we imagine? Can we trust a website created by a BlackRock analyst to accurately report on the company that employs him? Can we trust Google’s AI search to accurately tell us about privacy controversies concerning Gmail, or about safety ratings for Google-owned Waymo self-driving cars? Limiting our avenues for finding accurate, factual information is a real threat to democracy.

Yet we are rapidly tunneling toward that future. Searches on Google for the term “Google Zero” have increased by 190 percent. The term, coined by tech journalist Nilay Patel in 2024, imagines a time when Google acts solely as a direct answer machine instead of an index of the web. Using Google’s own tools to analyze Truthout’s traffic, we can see that traffic from Google is currently at “Google 46,” meaning that we’re now seeing only 46 percent of our pre-AI Google traffic numbers.

We’ve seen the way tech companies’ devaluation of journalism has impacted our ecosystem in the past. Eight years ago, Facebook made up over 40 percent of Truthout’s traffic. Over the last decade we’ve seen that number decline to under 3 percent — not because the urgency or professionalism of our journalism decreased in any way, but because Facebook decided to stop showing our articles to the people who had expressly signed up to read them. We know from our experience with Facebook that once democracy and journalism are in the crosshairs of corporate greed, circumstances only get worse. We fully expect to be staring down Google Zero in the next couple of years.

Given these mounting, overlapping AI crises, how can we take action? We’re the first to admit that sometimes, this issue can seem so overwhelming and all-encompassing that one’s first reaction is an assumption of inevitability. That line of thought goes: AI (even in its most damaging forms) is here to stay, so we must simply get used to it. However, this mindset is exactly what tech companies are counting on to fuel the AI takeover. Rejecting it is the first step to pushing back.

When it comes to Google Search and Google’s default reliance on AI summaries for news and information, a full recognition of the inadequacy and danger of the problem is urgently necessary. An AI summary drawn from a few mainstream sources — plus Reddit, Wikipedia, and corporate press releases — will inevitably leave out crucial truths and perspectives, particularly those of marginalized and oppressed groups, resistance movements, independent and firsthand sources, and those critical of the tech companies responsible for AI’s harms. Similarly, relying on Meta-promoted posts for the latest on what’s going on in the world places a crucial lever of democracy — our ability to read, process, and discern current events — firmly in the hands of the algorithm (and, thus, mega-powerful corporations).

What might a broad and honest recognition of these realities lead to? We imagine it might lead to a different way of reading the news: one that won’t look entirely unfamiliar. What if, instead of relying on notifications and scrolling, we returned to bookmarking our favorite news sites and reading their homepages each morning?

What if we discerningly subscribed to trusted news sources, whether over email or in print, and read their publications as a first-line route to information? What if we took care to read whole articles (not just headlines or quick videos) and then shared them with friends, accompanied by our own thoughts?

If the journalistic sources for influencers’ facts disappear, thanks to lost traffic and revenue, what are we left with?

It wasn’t long ago that these were standard practices for many of us in left and progressive circles. A mass return to longer, slower, more reflective reading is possible, and we can each consider our capacity to take it on, individually and among our circles of friends and colleagues.

This might also require us to take a critical look at our engagement with, and reliance on, influencers — including on the left. According to the American Press Institute, “More than half of all American teenagers and adults (57 percent) now report getting news and information from influencers at least sometimes, and fully 81 percent of those ages 13-17 report getting news and information from influencers.”

We don’t need to renounce our dependence on the thoughts and analysis of leftist social media icons we trust, but we do need to recognize that their information comes from somewhere: They draw from journalism — which generally comes from independent publications and news organizations that are staffed and resourced — in order to provide their commentaries. If the journalistic sources for influencers’ facts disappear, thanks to lost traffic and revenue, what are we left with?

For individual readers, foundations, and concerned policy makers, the mandate in this department is clear: Supporting independent journalism is key to maintaining both day-to-day knowledge of the world and factual sources for research, both of which are essential to democracy.

There’s no magical shortcut, no silver-bullet strategy that will solve the dire threats to our society’s informational infrastructure. Material support for journalism outlets is necessary now, particularly as online readership tumbles off an AI-shaped cliff.

Of course, individual readers play a crucial role here. For institutional funders and potential major donors, we believe it’s worth assessing how journalism fits into your portfolios, and why liberal and progressive funding for this indispensable democratic puzzle piece has been consistently slashed, even as the right wing unabashedly bankrolls its own media.

If we all recognize that we have a stake in the looming threats to independent journalism’s very existence, it shouldn’t only affect our individual reading choices; it should also drive us toward collective action. Fortunately, the possibilities for mass movements abound, as people around the country rise up against Big Tech companies through diverse and creative channels.

Environmental justice activists, Indigenous rights organizers, rural communities, and even disgruntled former Trump supporters are banding together to oppose data centers, and in many places, they’re winning.

Child advocacy groups and impacted teens and caregivers drove the push that resulted in last month’s massive win against Meta, in which the company is instructed to make sweeping changes to its addiction-driving practices.

Rank-and-file workers are challenging AI from a labor vantage, and pushing their unions to act.

The more we can plug into these resistance efforts, the less inevitable an AI-dominated future becomes.

As a backlash against generative AI has spread across social media, even the most dominant platforms have acquiesced to a few changes. Corporate accountability activists are sounding the alarm on Big Tech’s runaway political spending, and are calling for renewed efforts to overturn Citizens United and implement state-level reforms. The more we can plug into these resistance efforts, the less inevitable an AI-dominated future becomes.

Finally, let’s allow ourselves to access our outrage at the injustice wrought by tech companies’ attacks on our rights, humanity, and any vestiges of remaining democracy. A recent study by Social Change Lab found that when it comes to AI, “the emotion most strongly associated with action was not fear or anxiety, but anger.”

Every week brings a new encroachment of AI into our lives. This is terrifying, but it should also be motivating: We all have a stake in this struggle. Don’t let AI take over our search results or our lives without a fight.

World-renowned political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal is 72 years old, suffering multiple health problems, and may die in prison, say legal advocates in a new request they filed today that asks the United Nations to support his release. Abu-Jamal’s legal team decided to appeal to the UN after having exhausted nearly every legal avenue for relief available in the United States.

Abu-Jamal was a Black Panther and journalist when he was convicted of the 1981 murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner, and he has always maintained his innocence. His death sentence was overturned in 2001, and in 2011, Pennsylvania resentenced him to life without parole. Since then, “each attempt to secure Mr. Abu-Jamal a new and fair trial has been rejected,” argues a submission his lawyer Bret Grote and others made on his behalf to the UN’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. 

Grote told Truthout the filing, which UN rules limit to 20 pages, attempts to summarize nearly a half-century of the “failures of the criminal legal system” in Abu-Jamal’s case, including an “unfair trial, a biased appellate process, decades of surveillance and censorship, and a death by incarceration sentence that has been recognized by the United Nations as violating international human rights standards.” 

The UN determination of whether someone faces “arbitrary detention” is interpreted “more broadly” than simply being “against the law.” It also considers “elements of inappropriateness, injustice, lack of predictability and due process of law.” 

Abu-Jamal’s lawyers say he was in “continuous solitary confinement” from 1983 to 2011 on Pennsylvania’s death row, before being transferred to the general population in a state prison called SCI Mahanoy, where Abu-Jamal’s advocates say officials have denied him proper medical care. His legal team’s submission to the UN notes he was diagnosed in 2012 with hepatitis C, which caused cirrhosis of the liver, and he later “developed a painful, severe rash covering most of his body, potentially caused or exacerbated” by the disease, and then went into diabetic shock “due to untreated hyperglycemia” caused by steroid treatment for his skin condition. It also cites UN human rights experts who raised concern when Abu-Jamal was shackled to his hospital bed in 2021 while awaiting long-delayed heart surgery.

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

Abu-Jamal, a prolific writer who has authored 13 books, now risks losing his eyesight. 

“I have been, for all intents and purposes, unable to read, unable to write, unable to see anything more than the masthead of a newspaper and not even its headlines; blurry television bursts of color,” Abu-Jamal revealed in a 2025 Prison Radio commentary called “Mumia’s Vision: A Message for the Movement.” He explained he had “been reluctant to talk about my eye problems” because “any sign of weakness is to be avoided at all costs” in prison, since it “brings predation.”

His legal team’s submission to the UN refers to medical records showing how in 2025 Abu-Jamal “began experiencing a common and easily treated complication of cataract surgery” that clouded his vision, and notes he continues to “suffer from multiple complex ophthalmological conditions, including proliferative diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma, that pose a significant risk of permanent blindness.” 

“He is old and he is sick,” Samah Sisay, an international human rights lawyer at the Center for Constitutional Rights, told Truthout. “This is someone who should not be incarcerated.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Abolitionist Law Center, where Abu-Jamal’s lawyer Grote is legal director, have a track record of success in filing submissions before the United Nations. In 2023, they also asked the UN Human Rights Committee to review whether the U.S. was complying with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which prompted it to call for “a moratorium on the imposition of sentences to life imprisonment without parole,” which opponents often call “death by incarceration” because of the lack of opportunity for review and release. 

Grote acknowledged that the UN body lacks enforcement powers but said, “We are asking for a ruling because we think the truth of what has been done to Mumia in his case needs to be exposed in the light of day.” 

In 2020, the same UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention was asked by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School to review the case of Indigenous political prisoner Leonard Peltier, saying he — like Abu-Jamal — faced health problems after nearly 50 years of incarceration. It responded in 2022 by calling on the U.S. government to “immediately” release Peltier after concluding the “cumulative effect of the procedural deficiencies” he “suffered in parole proceedings are overwhelming, rendering his continued detention arbitrary.” In January 2025, President Joe Biden commuted the rest of Peltier’s life sentence to home confinement. 

Unlike Peltier, whose conviction was in a federal court, Mumia has a state-level conviction, so Sisay says officials like the governor could ask the state for more information to address accusations made in the legal team’s submission to the UN. She notes how “international pressure, regardless of whether the U.S. claims to recognize international law, has always been crucial to movements for social justice.” For example, the U.S. has been slow to change its policies on extreme sentencing, but Sisay says “a lot of the work” that went into abolishing the juvenile death penalty or juvenile life without parole “happened through international advocacy as well as at the domestic state and federal level.” 

Compassionate release for terminally ill prisoners is another path home, but “thankfully Mumia does not have a terminal diagnosis at this point,” Grote told Truthout. 

In 2021, Pennsylvania granted compassionate release to Russell “Maroon” Shoatz, another former Black Panther Party member who was convicted of killing a police officer and spent decades in solitary confinement. But he lived just 52 days after release before he died from cancer at the age of 78, surrounded by his family. Despite his weakened state, a judge had argued months earlier Shoatz presented “an undue risk of escape or danger to the community.”

The UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms.”

Laura Whitehorn, a former political prisoner who was incarcerated more than 14 years and co-founded the group Release Aging People in Prison (RAPP), told Truthout, “Mumia’s case fits squarely into why I started RAPP with three people who served long sentences and saw the damage, and were outraged at the lack of reasoning behind long sentences for older people.” She contrasted the U.S. approach to a landmark ruling earlier this month by India’s Supreme Court, which gives states three months to create a policy for the early release of more than 5,000 prisoners who are elderly or terminally ill. 

Pennsylvania is not one of the 25 states that have enacted “second look” policies to allow judges to review a person’s sentence, so Abu-Jamal’s paths to release in the state seem limited to a request for an unlikely commutation given the politicized nature of his case, or an appeal “if new evidence justifies it,” Grote told Truthout, noting Abu Jamal’s case is 44 years old and “even more of a challenge would be finding evidence that courts would treat fairly.” Grote says the UN has a chance to recognize how Abu-Jamal’s “continuing incarceration is in violation of international human rights norms” and “offer a catalyst to the campaign to bring him home to his family and community.” 

Correction note: This article was edited to clarify that the petition for Leonard Peltier was filed by the Lowenstein Clinic for International Human Rights at Yale Law School, and that the 2023 moratorium on LWOP recommendation came from the UN Human Rights Committee.