#KeepGVStrong: Global Voices advocates for a connected world at a dark time

TL:DR; For two decades, Global Voices has done something uncommon and vitally important: it’s amplified voices of people from all around the world, making it possible to hear perspectives usually left out of the news. We’ve done this work for over twenty years, powered by volunteer writers and translators, with a small team of professional editors and coordinators. Due to cuts to international aid, we’re up against the wall financially – we need anyone who’s been helped by or inspired by Global Voices to lend a hand. Many more details below, but if you can, please chip in: https://globalvoices.org/donate/

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In 2004, I was a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, watching a new chapter in the history of media unfold. Thousands of people were starting to share their thinking and opinions online via weblogs, personal journals that mixed links to interesting sites discovered online, personal details, political opinions and observations about the world. Facebook was in its infancy, in a dorm room across the Harvard campus, so blogs were the online space in which many people first experienced individuals sharing unfiltered opinions. At the time – before the rise of influencers monetizing their online presence or algorithms filtering our posts for maximum engagement – it was a space for excitement and hope.

For some, the hope was that writing online would loosen the grip of the mainstream media. Bloggers could write about what they chose, when they chose and might be able to report news directly, as eyewitnesses. For others, the promise of blogging was that their individual voice could be heard – a group of liberal bloggers reveled in the idea that Vermont governor Howard Dean was listening to their blogged suggestions for a his platform as a candidate for President.

Rebecca MacKinnon and I were both interested in blogging for a different reason. We’d both found our way to Berkman after experiences in other parts of the world. Rebecca had been CNN’s Asia bureau chief, where her fluency in Chinese and deep experience in the region meant she saw stories invisible to most US reporters. I had just spent five years commuting between western MA and west Africa, building a technology training nonprofit and learning that Africa as covered in US news bore almost no resemblance to the continent I was regularly visiting.

For both Rebecca and me, the exciting thing about the internet in 2004 was the possibility that we could hear from the entire world. That meant not just Dean supporters and American “future of news” types, but Pakistani poets, Ghanaian entrepreneurs, Egyptian hackers and Bolivian linguists. We both began sharing links to blogs from a much broader world than was usually surfaced in US-centric tech spaces, and our growing list of international bloggers we admired turned into an invitation list for Bloggercon, a gathering of the digerati at Harvard that got significantly more global due to our intervention.

Global Voices was born out of that gathering, into a world that was largely optimistic and excited about the potentials of the internet.

We don’t live in that world anymore.

Blogging gave way to social media, becoming vastly more inclusive, but rewarding image, video, frequency and emotion more than the long-form personal writing that characterized the “golden age” of blogs. Some bloggers became journalists or op-ed writers, while others went quiet. Social media spawned a new economy of influencers, generated a wave of panic about mis/disinformation (some legitimate, some overblown) and another about child safety online. Now social media is feeding AI systems, which anticipate a future in which individual voices are subsumed into a generic voice of authority who knows everything, but fails to credit any of the individuals who’ve actually done the knowing.

Throughout it all, Global Voices has been here, presenting a wider world for anyone who’s wanted to learn about it. There have been moments – the Arab Spring, for instance – where American and European audiences have leaned on our work to understand a transformative historical moment. (This 2011 piece in the New York Times by Jennifer Preston, about our work in the Middle East led by regional editor Amira al-Hussaini was one of those moments where broad audiences got a sense for what we were doing.)

But even when the stories we covered haven’t garnered international attention, we’ve served audiences that few others reach. A grassroots translation project – Lingua – blossomed into a massively multilingual community in which stories originate in dozens of language and are translated into dozens of others. In some of the languages we cover, like Malagasy, our site is one of the few resources for international news in a local language. Eddie Avila, now our co-managing director, has led the Rising Voices program, which has helped build local language preservation communities in Mexico, Colombia and Guatemala.

The stories we cover are ones you often won’t see, unless you’re reading extremely widely. Our China team is helping explain “Sister Hong”, a scandal involving sex work, clandestine video recording, LGBTQ issues and China’s particular brand of sexual repression and male loneliness. There’s an amazing series of reflections from Ukrainians fleeing war and bringing home with them, through piles of books and new Ukrainian libraries in cities like Innsbruck, Austria. Meanwhile, as Russia cracks down on “extremist activity”, searching the internet has become a dangerous activity.

Reading Global Voices is a reminder of how big and complex the world really is. Visiting a gathering of Global Voices authors and translators is a reminder of how small and connected we all are. I made it to our 20th anniversary summit in Kathmandu, Nepal this past December almost a week after the gathering had begun – I had to fit my trip between my final two classes of the semester. By the time I had arrived, the hundred or so participants from six continents had built lasting bonds, and it felt a little like joining a high school halfway through the year… until I took a brief pause to decide where to sit for lunch and got lovingly dragged to a table full of writers I’d never met, none of whom knew who I was. Through two decades of working really hard to listen and learn from one another, we’ve created a culture that’s remarkably welcoming, both to a jet-lagged co-founder, to our new executive director, Malka Older, and to the many Nepali authors, journalists and students who joined with us.

This work has never been easy to do. Global Voices is only possible because the vast majority of the work is done by volunteers. A small staff is supported by donations, but mostly from grant funding. Ivan Sigal and Georgia Popplewell, who took the reins from Rebecca and me, and ably marshaled the organization for fifteen years, were very good at helping foundations like MacArthur, Open Society Foundation, Omidyar, Ford, Knight, Kellog and others understand the importance of our work, directly and indirectly. Those funders value the stories and podcasts we produce, but they also saw a literal generation of writers, translators and editors trained within our community. (Many have gone on to be leading journalists in their home countries, or for international news organizations.)

We’ve faced financial hard times before, but we’ve never seen anything like the environment we’re in now. The Trump administration’s cuts to international aid have hit us both directly and indirectly. Directly, some of the organizations we work with, like the Open Technology Fund, have seen their funding held up by the White House, and have had to go to court to continue operating. When they don’t get funded, neither do we. But the secondary effects have been profound as well. Cuts to international aid, public broadcasting and public health have left thousands of worthy organizations seeking the support of a small number of foundations who now see massively increased demand for their limited funds.

We have the blessing of being a genuinely international organization – we were founded by US citizens as a Netherlands nonprofit, and our board represents Egypt, Nigeria, the UK, Indonesia, India, Peru, the Netherlands and Hong Kong. Like a lot of international organizations, we’re turning to European funders… but we’re hearing from our European members that nationalism is making work like ours harder in their countries as well.

It’s a dark and difficult time in the world right now. The work we’ve done at Global Voices has long represented a vision of how the world could be different. We could listen carefully to one another, to understand our world from multiple points of view. We could work together on projects too big for one person – or one group of people from the same nation – to take on. We can fight for an internet that connects us and builds understanding, rather than separating us into easily marketed consumer categories.

We’re in real trouble here, and we could use your help. If you’re in a position to make a gift to Global Voices, it really would make a difference right now. I have enormous confidence in Malka Older, Eddie Avila and Krittika Vishwanath, our directors, who have taken the wheel of our ship in the stormiest seas I’ve ever seen. We need help getting through the next few months so we can figure out who’s able to support the hard work of international connection at a moment where the world is in danger of getting more fragmented and isolated.

If Global Voices is or has ever been an inspiration, please help us out. And check out the Everest Roam Nate Matias (dear friend and US Global Voices board member) is taking on this weekend, a bike ride that includes a vertical climb the height of Everest, raising money for GV.

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Source: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/07/30/keep-global-voices-strong/