MediaJustice

MediaJustice is a U.S. national grassroots organisation building power to challenge how corporations and governments use media and technology to shape our collective future. It anchors the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) — a coalition of hundreds of social-justice groups nationwide — and runs four interlocking programmes (Narrative & Communications, Political Education, Movement Building, and Take Back Tech) through which it organises communities of colour against discriminatory uses of media and technology. Founded in 2009 in the Bay Area as the Center for Media Justice, the organisation rebranded as MediaJustice in 2019 and is now headquartered in Oakland, California. Its premise is that media and technology infrastructures — from broadband and net neutrality through to electronic monitoring, facial recognition, and the current AI / data-centre build-out — are sites where racial and economic justice in the United States are being contested, and that the response has to be grassroots organising rather than expert advocacy alone.

Founding and lineage

MediaJustice traces its lineage to the Youth Media Council, launched in Oakland in 2002 to counter biased local news coverage of Black and Brown youth, and to the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net), founded in 2004 by Youth Media Council together with Media Alliance, Reclaim the Media, and Media Tank as a multi-organisation coalition pursuing the proposition — articulated then and carried into MediaJustice today — that "media is not a sidebar to the mortal impact on social and economic justice movements, but one of the main issues." The Center for Media Justice was established in April 2009 under EIN 30-0520981 as a 501(c)(3) civil-rights organisation operating out of Oakland by co-founders Malkia Devich-Cyril, Amy Sonnie, and Jen Soriano — initially incubated alongside the Movement Strategy Center and explicitly framed to "boldly advance communication rights, access, and power for communities harmed by persistent dehumanization, discrimination and disadvantage." Devich-Cyril, the founding executive director, brought a background in Black-radical-tradition organising (their mother was a Black Panther Party activist in Bedford-Stuyvesant) and went on to lead the national grassroots arm of the net-neutrality campaign and to coin the "media justice" framing that distinguished the organisation's work from the broader "media democracy" tradition. In 2019 the organisation rebranded as MediaJustice to reflect the expanded scope of its work — explicitly including biometric surveillance, electronic monitoring, and big-tech accountability — and Steven Renderos, the long-running national organising director of the Center for Media Justice, succeeded Devich-Cyril as Executive Director. Devich-Cyril remains active in the organisation as Senior Fellow.

Leadership and structure

The current senior team is led by Steven Renderos as Executive Director, with Jacinta González as Head of Programs, Shubha Balabaer as Head of Operations, and three programmatic directors — Eteng Ettah (Narrative & Communications), Teresa Basilio Gaztambide (Senior Political Education), and Myaisha Hayes (Senior Movement Building) — alongside specialists including Jai Dulani (Senior Research Specialist), Brandon Forester (Senior Campaign Lead), and a dedicated Data Center Fellow (Vivek Bharathan). The organisation reported 49 employees at the most recent count. The eleven-member board — chaired by Joseph Torres, Senior Advisor for Reparative Policy and Programs at Free Press — is itself a constellation of allied movement institutions: members hold day-jobs at the Intercept (Annie Chabel, CEO), the Groundswell Fund (Angella Bellota), the National Domestic Workers Alliance (Venita Griffin), Just Futures Law (Paromita Shah, Founding Executive Director), the NACDL Fourth Amendment Center (Jumana Musa), and Social Finance (Joseph Bateman, Impact Investing), among others. In ProPublica's fiscal-year 2024 record the organisation reports revenue of $4.25 million (94.8% from contributions), expenses of $4.36 million, and net assets of $6.32 million.

Programmes

MAG-Net and the movement-building core

MediaJustice's organisational form is unusual in the U.S. tech-justice space. Rather than operating as a single direct-membership advocacy organisation, it functions as the anchor of the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) — a coalition of hundreds of social-justice groups whose member organisations span communications, criminal-justice, racial-justice, immigrant-rights, and digital-rights organising bases — and as a research, narrative, and political-education infrastructure that resources MAG-Net members' work. This is the structural difference between MediaJustice and most other in-corpus U.S. tech-and-racial-justice organisations: where the Algorithmic Justice League runs a research-and-public-output programme around Joy Buolamwini's findings and Encode Justice runs a youth-chapter network, MediaJustice runs an organising hub whose members are themselves organising bodies.

Take Back Tech

The Take Back Tech programme is MediaJustice's frontline convening on AI, surveillance, and carceral technology. The 2024 Chicago convening, co-hosted with Mijente, brought 450 participants from 136 U.S. cities and 4 countries into 40 workshops and 4 plenary panels across six focus areas: surveillance and state violence against marginalised communities, AI bias and discriminatory applications, reproductive freedom in the age of surveillance, border technology and immigration enforcement automation, carceral tech and police surveillance, and tech-worker organising. Named coalition partners on the 2024 programme included the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, the Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Accountable Tech, the Advancement Project, Just Futures Law, and the Athena Coalition. The May 2026 Atlanta convening drew 500+ organisers, expanding the programme's geographic and sectoral reach. Take Back Tech functions as both the public-facing form of MediaJustice's analytical work — featured speakers in 2024 included Mohammad Khatami of #NoTechForApartheid and Bridget Todd — and as the organising-side counterpart to legislative and litigation work that adjacent in-corpus entities (the Algorithmic Justice League, Foxglove, the Concept Art Association) carry on the federal-policy and judicial sides of the same questions.

Electronic Monitoring Map and carceral-tech work

MediaJustice runs an Electronic Monitoring Map tracking the deployment of GPS ankle-shackle and house-arrest electronic-monitoring (EM) technologies across the U.S. carceral system, building on a multi-year effort to document the rapid expansion of EM as a "non-custodial" alternative to incarceration that nonetheless extends carceral surveillance into the home. The work sits alongside the organisation's continued Carceral Tech Resistance Network co-organising, treating predictive-policing, facial-recognition, and automated-decision-making systems inside the criminal-legal system as a coherent surveillance-infrastructure cluster rather than as separable technologies. Myaisha Hayes — formerly the Campaigns Director, now Senior Movement Building Director — has been the public-facing lead on the EM and carceral-tech work, including the December 2025 launch of MediaJustice's Digital Colonialism series framing carceral-tech and AI infrastructure as an extension of long-standing extractive technology systems.

Data-centre organising

From roughly 2024 onward, MediaJustice's tech-justice frame has been extended into the AI / data-centre infrastructure layer. The work runs through several pieces. On 18 August 2025 MediaJustice co-published with Kairos Fellowship the organiser guide The Cost of Data Centers to Our Communities — And How to Fight Back, framed as a toolkit for community-led opposition to hyperscale data-centre projects. The September 2025 CounterSpin appearance on data-centre opposition, the December 2025 NPQ piece "The People Say No", the December 2025 grassroots victory against a proposed West Texas data centre, and the March 2026 Steven Renderos WaterHub appearance on data centres in the West track the programme's public arc through 2025–2026. In April 2026 Senior Research Specialist Jai Dulani's Peace & Riot podcast appearance ("Dissects the AI Hype with Amirio Freeman") locates MediaJustice's data-centre work inside a broader analytical position critical of generative-AI hype. The organisation's Data Center Fellow position (Vivek Bharathan) makes the AI-infrastructure work a durable staffed programme rather than a campaign of opportunity.

Funding

MediaJustice's funder profile is grounded in the major U.S. liberal foundations that anchor most of the corpus's U.S. tech-justice organisations: the Ford Foundation (a single $3.7 million grant recorded in 2022), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation ($750,000 in 2024), Democracy Fund ($500,000 in 2024), and the California Endowment ($675,000 in 2025). The Ford / MacArthur / Democracy Fund cluster is the same anchoring set that supports Kairos Fellowship and the Algorithmic Justice League, reflecting the durable U.S. philanthropic infrastructure around tech-and-racial-justice grassroots organising.

Position in the corpus

MediaJustice sits inside the corpus as the U.S. movement-organising counterpart to several other in-corpus entities that work on different layers of the same questions. With Kairos Fellowship, the organisational relationship is direct and load-bearing: the August 2025 Cost of Data Centers organiser guide is the corpus's clearest current artefact of two long-running U.S. Black-led / Brown-led tech-justice organisations jointly producing the U.S. counterpart to Global Action Plan's UK data-centre action-days infrastructure — and the connective tissue through which the U.S. organising base on hyperscale data-centre opposition is being scaffolded. With the Algorithmic Justice League and Encode Justice, MediaJustice shares the U.S. tech-and-racial-justice movement field but occupies a structurally different position: AJL runs a research-and-public-output programme around algorithmic-bias findings; Encode Justice runs a youth-chapter network; MediaJustice runs a movement-organising hub whose members are themselves organising bodies. With the Distributed AI Research Institute, MediaJustice sits on the organising side of the data-and-AI labour-conditions question whose research side DAIR convenes through the Data Workers' Inquiry — different ends of the supply-chain frame, but on the same theory that AI's labour and infrastructure layers are where movement work matters most. And as the convening anchor of MAG-Net, MediaJustice supplies the corpus's clearest current example of the organisational form the make-AI-good frame takes when carried into long-standing U.S. communications-rights organising: a coalition-of-coalitions building power across hundreds of grassroots groups, with technology and AI as one of several interlocking media-justice fights rather than as a free-standing campaign.