Distributed Media: Our Voice, Our Power

Entering 2027 the record of what happens to Muslims is kept on platforms trained to mistrust them. Human Rights Watch counted more than 1,050 removals and suppressions of Palestinian content on Instagram and Facebook in two months of 2023; Meta's own leaked documents showed no hate-speech classifiers for Hindi, Bengali, Urdu or Pashto. Now the answer engines summarize a war without sending anyone to the people who reported it, and the mere existence of deepfakes lets real footage be dismissed as fake. Over-policed in one language, unprotected in the rest, and increasingly not read at all.

This is a panel about ownership. Four people built audiences in the millions inside those constraints, were throttled, shadowbanned, demonetized and mistranslated along the way, and kept reaching people anyway: the founder of a newsroom that covered the Syrian war on a phone, the editor of a Muslim publication, an imam who teaches a generation through short video, and a podcaster who built a following without a platform's blessing. Beside them, the director of MPAC's Hollywood Bureau, who works the other end of the record: not what we post, but what gets made about us. They disagree about what to do next, which is the point.

Who this is for

Creators, communicators, and anyone whose community needs to be heard on its own terms.

On the table

• What do you actually own when your audience lives on someone else's servers?
• When the algorithm turns on you, what survives, and what did each of them do the week it happened?
• Is AI the most powerful instrument a creator has ever held, or the fastest way to lose your own voice?
• What would it take for the ummah to keep its own record, and who pays for it?

You'll leave with

• What each of the four did the week they were suppressed, and what worked
• A plan for owning your audience rather than renting it
• A sense of where the power sits, how it is taken, and how it is kept