Social media takes a lot of heat for spreading disinformation, but Francesca Tripodi thinks we should look more closely at another fixture of our browsers: search engines. On this episode of "Civic Genius" we learn more about how the same forces that shape our social media diets also drive the information we find when we search online, and how we can boost our own media literacy.
U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters from the Resolute Desk after signing an executive order to appoint the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in the Oval Office at the White House on January 30, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Nvidia, now the largest corporation in the world, just received the green light from the Trump administration to resume sales of its H20 AI chips to China—marking a dramatic reversal from April’s export restrictions.
The H20 Chip and Its Limits
The H20 is a scaled-down version of Nvidia’s top-tier AI chips, specifically engineered to comply with U.S. export controls. It’s powerful enough to handle AI “inference” tasks but falls short of the benchmarks used to train cutting-edge models—making it legally exportable.
Policy Flip
In April, the administration clamped down, requiring special licenses for H20 exports over fears that even these reduced-performance chips might be leveraged for strategic military or surveillance purposes. Nvidia warned that the move could cost billions. Then came intensive lobbying efforts—including a high-profile dinner between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and President Trump at Mar-a-Lago. By July, the administration reversed course. Nvidia began filing applications to resume shipments with confidence that licenses would be granted.
Strategic Importance
China represents a substantial share of global demand for AI chips. This policy reversal carries enormous implications not only for Nvidia but for the broader question of technological rivalry and national security. As Huang put it, “Half the world’s AI researchers are in China”—making it clear that U.S. companies cannot afford to be absent from such a vital and dynamic market. The move could reshape the global AI supply chain and ease tensions in an intensifying semiconductor trade war.
The Reversal Rationale
At its core, this shift illustrates a tension between national security imperatives and economic priorities—and for now, economics appears to have won.
By July, the landscape shifted. Nvidia’s pledge to invest $500 billion in domestic AI infrastructure may have helped reframe the company as a strategic asset rather than a liability in the administration’s eyes.
A Delicate Balancing Act
This pivot reflects deeper fault lines in U.S. tech policy. On one side, national security hawks push for rigid restrictions to blunt China's AI momentum. On the other side, industry leaders warn that overregulation risks isolating American firms and ceding global influence. The chips didn’t change—but the political calculus did. The administration is betting that economic leverage and domestic investment can coexist with strategic caution. Skeptics, though, see only a temporary détente.
Rare Earths: The Hidden Chess Piece
Behind the scenes, China’s rare earth diplomacy may have helped tip the scales.
It’s difficult to prove direct causality, but the timing suggests a mutual de-escalation. Washington likely viewed China’s flexibility as an opening to stabilize supply chains and avoid driving Beijing toward self-sufficiency or alternative suppliers like Russia. Even Huang emphasized the importance of preserving U.S. influence in China’s AI ecosystem—an objective threatened by rising trade barriers.
Looking Ahead
While nothing is conclusive, it’s clear that rare earth policy is part of the larger chessboard—a subtle but significant backdrop to Nvidia’s reentry. What comes next—whether related to tariffs, TikTok, or the broader balance of power between the world’s two largest economies—is almost certain to reshape the global tech landscape.
Stay tuned.
David Nevins is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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As we look back on 1776 after this July 4th holiday, it's a good opportunity to skip forward and predict what our forebears will think of us. When our descendants assess our policies, ideas, and culture, what will they see? What errors, born of myopia, inertia, or misplaced priorities, will they lay at our feet regarding today's revolutionary technology—artificial intelligence? From their vantage point, with AI's potential and perils laid bare, their evaluation will likely determine that we got at least ten things wrong.
One glaring failure will be our delay in embracing obviously superior AI-driven technologies like autonomous vehicles (AVs). Despite the clear safety benefits—tens of thousands of lives saved annually, reduced congestion, enhanced accessibility—we allowed a patchwork of outdated regulations, public apprehension, and corporate squabbling to keep these life-saving machines largely off our roads. The future will see our hesitation as a moral and economic misstep, favoring human error over demonstrated algorithmic superiority.
They will also criticize our stubborn refusal to integrate AI-based policy forecasting into our legislative processes. While AI models could have analyzed the long-term societal and economic impacts of proposed laws, helping us anticipate unintended consequences and optimize for human flourishing, we largely relied on antiquated, human-limited methods. This neglect meant our policies often lagged behind technological change, undermining the very notion of effective, responsive governance.
Crucially, they will likely question our failure to establish new intellectual property frameworks even after it became evident that current copyright and patent laws disproportionately favored incumbents and no longer served their intended purpose in the age of AI. Contemporary delay reinforced monopolies, rather than fostering a vibrant, decentralized ecosystem of innovation that truly benefited independent creators and inventors.
The future will equally lament our oversight in adjusting our schools and workforce development programs. They will see our delay in instituting widespread AI literacy for the general public as a critical blunder. We did not take the requisite steps to equip citizens with the fundamental understanding to navigate an AI-saturated world—to ensure they had access to the latest tools, discern AI-generated misinformation, and grok the foundational technical aspects of AI so that they could contribute to AI policy conversations. This lapse compromised our collective pursuit of an informed, participatory democracy. Compounding this, our sluggishness in adjusting reskilling and upskilling programs meant we left vast segments of the workforce vulnerable to displacement, rather than proactively empowering them with the skills to thrive alongside AI.
Perhaps more fundamentally, they will indict our failure to see data sharing as a social good. In an era where data is the new oil (or even the new water!), we allowed its collection and control to remain highly fragmented and proprietary. We did not establish robust, ethical frameworks for data cooperatives or public data trusts that could have fueled innovation for the common good—in healthcare, urban planning, and scientific research.
From an innovation perspective, the future will see our lack of sufficient investment in basic AI research as a monumental strategic error. Our focus skewed heavily towards optimizing existing models, rather than dedicating resources to more elementary inquiries that could uncover the next generation of transformative AI systems. This shortsightedness potentially limited humanity's long-term scientific and technological trajectory. This misallocation of resources will be underscored by our prioritization of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) over the development and deployment of robust, beneficial generic AI applications. The speculative pursuit of an arbitrary, unspecified goal often overshadowed the immense, tangible benefits that could have been realized through focused development of practical, specialized AI solutions for pressing societal problems.
Finally, our descendants will not forgive our inadequate investment in public digital infrastructure and universal access. As AI became a foundational layer for economic opportunity and civic life, we allowed a significant digital divide—now an algorithmic abyss—to persist, denying equitable access to the very tools needed to participate in the new economy. From places like New Braunfels, Texas, to rural Virginia, the future will look at our massive, energy-hungry data centers and transmission lines and ask why we also showed a lack of adequate support for the communities disrupted by the immense physical requirements of AI development. These energy-intensive facilities placed environmental and social burdens on local populations without integrating them into the AI ecosystem's benefits.
As things stand, the ledger of future complaints against us concerning AI will be long. But this prophecy need not be our destiny. By confronting these potential failures now, by prioritizing sustained innovation and adaptive governance, we can still pivot towards a future where AI serves humanity's highest aspirations. The time for foresight and courageous action is now, before the future passes its final judgment.
Kevin Frazier is an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at Texas Law and Author of the Appleseed AI substack.
A Voice of America sign is displayed outside of their headquarters at the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building on June 17, 2025 in Washington, DC.
The Trump administration has accomplished something that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and other dictators desired. It destroyed the Voice of America.
Until mid-March, VOA had been on the air continuously for 83 years. Starting in 1942 with shortwave broadcasts in German to counter Nazi propaganda, America’s external voice had expanded to nearly 50 languages, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people worldwide, watching on TV, listening on radio, with a weekly combined audience of more than 350 million people around the world watching on TV, listening on radio or viewing its content online or through social media apps.
VOA was unique from the beginning. It vowed not to be a propaganda service. It would deliver news and information, whether it was good or bad. Over the decades, Congress passed and presidents signed legislation ensuring that VOA would not be the voice of the party, and presidents signed, legislation ensuring VOA would not be the voice of which political party was in power, nor would the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department be able to censor its content. VOA had a mandate to be fair and balanced.
In my 20+ years reporting for the Voice of America, mainly from Asia, we always stressed accuracy over speed. As many as three editors would pour over our scripts and texts to ensure they were free from bias. No one ever asked me to spin a story a certain way.
Near the end of the first Trump administration, as one of VOA’s high-profile correspondents (I was White House bureau chief), political appointees targeted me for retaliation when I led colleagues in fighting attempts to breach our sacrosanct journalism firewall. Subsequent court rulings and investigations by the Office of Special Counsel and the State Department’s inspector general backed us up and concluded that the political appointees at our parent agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, conducted an illegal witch hunt. (This is detailed in my book: Behind the White House Curtain: A Senior Journalists Story of Covering the President – and Why It Matters.).
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, written during the interregnum between the two Trump presidencies, unveiled a blueprint to bring VOA’s perceived liberals to heel. It suggested an end to VOA’s autonomy and having it placed under the State Department or the National Security Council.
Even before any of the Trump appointees returned to USAGM, incumbent management at VOA sought to appease the White House. Stories were spiked and headlines massaged. Those were subtle changes unnoticed externally. More overt pre-emptive obedience: suspending me from reporting as VOA’s chief national correspondent and removing Patsy Widakuswara from her position (she was my successor as White House bureau chief). Media critics noted that Patsy and I had been vociferous in opposing attempted partisan interference in VOA’s reporting in 2020 when the Trump appointees belatedly sought to tear up the broadcaster’s charter and tear down its firewall.
Just as Neville Chamberlain found out after 1938, appeasement is interpreted by enemies as weakness.
Firing the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, the president appointed as a USAGM “special advisor” a former TV broadcaster from Arizona who had twice failed to win statewide office, Kari Lake. She initially promised “reform” at VOA to eliminate the supposed radical left bias and remove imaginary internal security risks.
Lake herself, however, was big-footed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Two weeks after Patsy and I were sidelined, DOGE wiped out VOA. All 1,350 staffers were placed on leave with pay. Radio and TV broadcasts went silent. Our news websites were no longer updated. Leases for content distribution worldwide were canceled.
Patsy became the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Lake and USAGM figureheads to reverse what we contend were illegal actions, executive branch overreach, and viewpoint discrimination. It is possible we will ultimately prevail in federal court, but our audiences are already gone, with Chinese and Russian media outlets filling the void.
If the U.S. government is not mandated to restore international broadcasting or if Congress votes to eliminate such funding, what is the path forward?
At an annual cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, establishing a replacement VOA would drain the bank accounts of most potential philanthropists. Would benefactors even step forward to fund programming for a few geo-strategic languages in which the BBC does not broadcast, such as Khmer, Shona, or Tibetan?
It is also challenging to develop a commercial-driven structure for languages and others, such as Rohingya, for which VOA was the exclusive external source.
The likeliest replacement sponsors: other leading democracies. If not the British, perhaps Australia, Canada, or Japan – or the European Union? The EU has mulled funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Australia, Canada, and the UK, however, face domestic political pressure to reduce what remains of their foreign language services.
Lake, meanwhile, quickly changed her tune to support the DOGE's destructive acts. VOA could no longer be reformed. It was unsalvageable and a “rotten fish” spewing anti-American propaganda, an assertion that could be refuted by bothering to actually view, listen to and read VOA’s staid content, very similar in approach and tone to that of the Associated Press (which also became a Trump administration target for punishment for not accepting the White House’s unilateral move to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”)
Clearly, any entity not parroting administration talking points was now unacceptable. And it was unthinkable to have a government-funded independent media outlet, even if it had been an effective instrument of American soft power and public diplomacy over the decades and helped contribute to the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Public broadcasters NPR and PBS would also come into the crosshairs with cuts to federal funding, while the Federal Communications Commission would be weaponized to bring domestic broadcasters into line by threatening to revoke their FCC licenses.
The actions resemble developments in other fragile democracies, including India, Hungary, the Philippines, Serbia, and Turkey, where press freedoms eroded under the guise of national security or so-called media reform, with aspiring authoritarians intimidating and discrediting journalists. To consolidate power, these leaders are compelled to control the narrative and minimize dissent. The casualties are accountability and democratic institutions.
Steve Herman retired as VOA’s chief national correspondent on June 30, 2025, to accept a position as the executive director of the Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation at the University of Mississippi.
President Donald Trump said on Friday that he has ended trade talks with Canada and will soon announce a new tariff rate for that country, as stated in a Truth Social post.
The decision to end the months-long negotiations came after Canada announced a digital service tax (DST) that Trump called “a direct and blatant attack on our Country.”
“Based on this egregious Tax, we are hereby terminating ALL discussions on Trade with Canada, effective immediately. We will let Canada know the Tariff that they will be paying to do business with the United States of America within the next seven day period,” he wrote.
"We'll continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interest of Canadians," Prime Minister Mark Carney said. He did not respond to questions about whether his government is prepared to drop the DST — an action the Business Council of Canada is calling for in exchange for U.S. tariff relief.
Beginning on June 30, the DST would require U.S. companies, such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber, and Airbnb, to pay a 3% levy on revenue from Canadian users. The policy will apply retroactively, leaving U.S. companies with a $ 2 billion bill.
The DST tug-of-war between Canada and the U.S. has been ongoing for years, with former President Joe Biden's ambassador to Canada, David L. Cohen, warning during his tenure that if a DST were enacted, the U.S. would retaliate.
While Canada and other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries had been discussing some global DST, the Justin Trudeau administration decided to move ahead with its own tax rather than wait for coordinated action.
What is the digital services tax (DST)?
Here are just the facts:
A digital services tax (DST) is a tax levied on the gross revenues generated from certain digital activities within a jurisdiction. It is not an income tax, online sales tax, or VAT.
Hugo Balta is the executive editor of the Fulcrum. He is also the publisher of the Latino News Network.
