Civil Society

Opening — Why this matters now AI governance isn’t just a technical issue—it’s an institutional one. As governments scramble to regulate, corporations experiment with ethics boards, and civil society tries to catch up, the question becomes: who actually holds the power to shape how AI unfolds in the real world? The latest ethnographic study by The Aula Fellowship, Levers of Power in the Field of AI, answers that question not through theory or models, but through people—the policymakers, executives, researchers, and advocates navigating this turbulent terrain. ...

When Meta and other tech giants scale back content moderation, the gap isn’t just technical—it’s societal. Civil society organizations (CSOs), not corporations, are increasingly on the frontlines of monitoring online extremism. But they’re often armed with clunky tools, academic prototypes, or opaque black-box models. A new initiative—highlighted in Civil Society in the Loop—challenges this status quo by co-designing a Telegram monitoring tool that embeds human feedback directly into its LLM-assisted classification system. The twist? It invites civil society into the machine learning loop, not just the results screen. ...