Filip Noubel is a multilingual journalist, editor, translator, and researcher whose work spans traditional media, political risk analysis, and literary translation. In this interview, he reflects on how Global Voices elevates lived experience and local conversations to global audiences, how the tension between journalism and activism functions as an interface, and what ethical lines he draws around AI in citizen media.

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From Languages to Media

Nica: Filip, do I have your permission to record this interview? Can you state your full name for that?

Filip: Sure. My name is Filip Noubel.

Nica: Okay, thank you. Hi, I’m Nica Davidov. I’m an anthropologist and the ethnographer for Edgeryders. Thank you so much for making the time.

I know a little bit about your project, and I sent you, from my perspective yesterday, since I’m in New York, a general overview of the topics I wanted to go through with you. This absolutely will not take more than an hour, and probably less, though that also depends on how chatty you are.

All right, can you tell me a little bit about yourself, your background, and also how you first got involved with Global Voices?

Filip: Sure. As I said, my name is Filip Noubel, and I have a slightly complicated family and childhood history.

My mother comes from the former Czechoslovakia, a country that no longer exists. My father is French. I grew up in another country that no longer exists, the former Soviet Union, mostly in two places: one that is now Uzbekistan, Tashkent, and the other in what is now Ukraine.

Nica: It’s alright, I grew up in Moscow.

Filip: Oh, okay.

Nica: Is that why you have Russian in your signature, among other things?

Filip: Exactly. I mention all this because then my parents moved to Greece. A lot of people assume, when I start telling this story, that they must have been communists, or diplomats, or perhaps spies. They were none of those things, at least as far as I know.

They were teachers. There was a special program between the Soviet Union and the French government to send native French speakers to teach French across the Soviet Union, from Birobidzhan to Vladivostok. That is how my parents got involved. My mother was teaching Czech, my father was teaching French, in Tashkent and elsewhere, in different universities. So I went mostly to Russian-speaking schools, at least in Tashkent, and of course Odessa at that time was also mostly Russian-speaking.

I explain all this because, by the time I was twelve or thirteen, I already spoke about seven languages. That is also how I got into media, because my first media-related job was translating Russian television content.

After growing up, I studied in East Asia, in Japan, then in Prague, where I studied translation, and then in France, where I majored in what was then called Soviet Studies and East Asian Studies, so Russian, Czech, Chinese, and Japanese. I also studied a little in Beijing.

Later I moved back to Prague, and this was the beginning of the internet bubble. It was still very new in Central Europe, around 1996 or 1997. I joined an internet media company founded by Americans in Prague, because Prague was very fashionable in the mid-to-late 1990s, along with Budapest.

I was hired to listen to Russian TV content, review it, translate it, and write it up. I had never studied media. My background was in Chinese and Japanese studies, so not media at all. I had never imagined myself working in media, so I slipped into it by accident.

Then, when they realised I also spoke Chinese, they wanted to launch a website covering the global Chinese-speaking world: China, Hong Kong, which at the time was still much more independent, and Taiwan. So I began doing the same for Chinese-language media.

When you translate and summarise, you also have to provide a lot of background, because our audience was mostly American or anglophone readers in Europe. So there was a gradual shift from translating, to providing background, to actually writing original pieces because I had come to know enough.

That is how I slipped into media. And I would say my whole career has three parts. One is traditional media, whether as a reporter in the field, at a desk, or as an editor. Another part is more political science and risk research, so I worked for the UN, for the International Crisis Group, and now for several think tanks. The latest one is based in Kazakhstan, where I am going at the end of the month, and I’m very happy to go back to Almaty and especially Bishkek, because I lived there for five years afterward.

Then I have a third part, which is still around translation, but mostly literary translation. This is also where I do some literary journalism, such as book reviews and interviews with writers for different publications, anywhere from New York to Mongolia, in different languages.

I think that trajectory is reflected in the world of Global Voices, because you find there a lot of people who do not necessarily have a media background, even though some do. Many are multicultural, from one place, living in another, and covering a third place because of language skills, personal histories, partners, parents, travel, and so on.

It is also very rooted in language and translation, because Global Voices operates, to varying degrees depending on the community, in between thirty and forty languages. Some are very active and produce a lot of translation, some less so, and there are ups and downs.

That is why I was naturally attracted to Global Voices. My first interaction with it was when I was still living in China, in 2015. I was working in China not as a journalist, but as a media trainer with an international organisation called Internews, which also no longer exists in the same way. I was training Chinese journalists on issues around ethics, rule of law, media law, and so on.

China is a very specific environment. It is not exactly a free country, and getting journalistic accreditation is quite difficult, so you have to be very careful. Long story short, I started by translating some content from English into French, and then I got more interested. I thought: let me be careful, but maybe I can report on certain things that would not endanger me, since I did not have media accreditation and had a different status, as a representative of a non-profit organisation.

So my first story, which I think is very emblematic of the culture of Global Voices, was a tragic one, but journalistically very important. There had been a terrorist attack in Nigeria involving the kidnapping of female students, something that unfortunately still happens.

Lived Experience and Global Context

Nica: I think there was one on a bus, maybe? I remember that.

Filip: Yes. The important part for me was that, at the time, there were literally thousands of African students in China. They had very different experiences: some had grants to study, some experienced anti-Black racism, some developed businesses. It was a very rich and complicated subject.

After that attack, African students in China organised, over WeChat, what they officially called a picnic in a park, so that it would look innocent. But the real reason was that it was a memorial for the girls who had died. They wanted to hold a commemoration with candles. Of course, there was no way they could have obtained formal permission to do that anywhere in Beijing, even at that time, during Xi Jinping’s early years, when there were still some pockets of relative freedom.

Because I knew some African students, I got the message and went to the park in order to report on what was officially just a picnic, but in fact an illegal memorial. I wanted to write about what it meant to be an African student, especially a Black African student, in China, and about the different views and experiences around that.

For me it was a very powerful experience. Emotionally it was very heavy, because people were crying. There were photos of those who had died. You could sign a book. It was also strategically well organised. People came officially for a picnic, so they brought food. There were instructions on how to enter the park through different gates so as not to attract too much attention, because suddenly having around two hundred African students in one place would look suspicious. So officially, it was a picnic.

The whole story began online, and then I wrote the story, which was translated, including into Igbo, one of the languages of Nigeria, as well as into French. I received a lot of feedback, including from students who were interested in how I had been able to report on the event without endangering anyone. For example, I made sure not to show people’s faces directly, but rather from behind or at angles. It was mostly about the story and the interviews.

That was when I thought this was a very interesting form of journalism. Back then, in 2015, we still used the term citizen journalism a lot. Some people like it, some hate it. I am fine with it, though I understand why some do not like it.

The key phrase that became central to my understanding of Global Voices’ mission was lived experience. It is about giving space and a platform to people who are usually not present in the media, even in their own countries, so that they can tell stories from their own perspective, while still maintaining strong journalistic standards in terms of fact-checking, not endangering sources, and not imposing the journalist’s own opinion as if the journalist were wiser or knew better.

Another key point, which always irritates me, is the idea that journalists are supposed to be neutral. I think that is complete nonsense, because we are human, we have emotions, and we have biases. But I do think the goal is to be fair whenever you can. That means giving space to all parties involved, when they are able or willing to speak, and giving them the chance to explain their own side.

That, to me, is absolutely possible and should be one of the key editorial standards. There is no need to be neutral, because that would deny your humanity. I cried, for example, while participating in that memorial. I had emotions. We were talking about young people who had died. But that does not mean you cannot be fair.

In that particular case, of course, I could not interview the Chinese government about why it would not allow the event, because that simply would not have been a good idea for anyone involved.

That story, for me, contains all the different goals that a community like Global Voices is trying to achieve. It is about elevating underrepresented voices and explaining, without judgment, people’s actions, silences, ways of speaking, and the language they use to describe what they think from their own perspective.

The other expression we used was that we elevate local conversations to global audiences. That is where translation becomes so important, because most mainstream global reporting is usually done by Western media and in dominant Western languages.

For example, if you are Brazilian and you want to learn about Bangladesh, and you do not speak English, it is probably very difficult to find information in Brazilian Portuguese about Bangladesh. But through Global Voices, this is possible, because a person writing from Bangladesh in Bangla can be translated, usually through English, into Brazilian Portuguese. So you get access to a local person and a local story in your own language.

It is wonderful to speak many languages, but that is not possible for everyone, and it is a privilege. So by bridging languages, you make information from one local context accessible to someone somewhere else in the world who otherwise would never encounter it.

Global Voices as an Interface

Nica: That makes sense. In a way, much of what you just said, especially about translation and counteracting the hegemony of English, already starts answering my next question, but I still want to ask it.

Our project is called INTERFACED, and among the project partners we have had a lot of lively and quite robust debate about what exactly an interface is. The broadest idea is that an interface is something, a method, a space, a moment in time, a locus, where citizens, in the broad sense, not in the passport sense but in the Greek sense, can express agency and interact with institutions and power, but also horizontally with one another, and participate civically in ways that are not just voting.

From that perspective, would you say that the Global Voices platform or project is an interface? And if so, what about it makes it so?

Filip: I love that question. We do not use the term interface ourselves, but I think many of the discussions we have internally are actually about that.

The first thing is the identity of the people producing information. Because we are an extremely diverse community, spanning around 150 nationalities and a similar number of languages, and as I said, a lot of people have very mixed identities, one of the big debates is, for example, the relationship between journalism and activism.

Just yesterday, I was talking to a Russian friend in exile who had heard about Global Voices, and he said, “What you guys do is not journalism. It is more activism.” That is an interesting debate.

I think the point is not to reach one fixed conclusion, but to ask: why do you think that? What assumptions are behind that position?

Nica: I know that debate well. When I was younger, I was involved in things like Indymedia, at the intersection of media activism and journalism, so I know that whole line of argument: journalism is neutral, no it isn’t, and so on.

Filip: Exactly. So, thinking with your term interface, I would say that the tension between journalism and activism is itself an interface.

And I would say this because people come to Global Voices for many reasons. Most people are volunteers, and we are often asked why people would spend, or as some say waste, their time writing for us without getting paid. Of course, there are ethical, social, and economic justice questions tied to that, and we can have that conversation too.

Some people come from economically privileged positions. They live in safer or wealthier countries, have free time, and want to write. That is fine. Other people come because they cannot be published in their own country. No media outlet would accept their piece, whether because the topic is taboo, because of censorship, because it concerns an invisible or discriminated-against community, or for other reasons.

Some contributors are already in more mainstream media but have highly specific knowledge on a particular issue, so they come to Global Voices because they want to write about it. As long as what they do aligns with our values and overall direction, which are human rights, digital rights, and freedom of expression in a broad sense, then we welcome it.

A lot of people come to Global Voices having never written a piece before. They do not have media education. I do not have formal media education either, and for me that has never been a problem. If you want to be a good journalist, I think you need curiosity and good listening skills, and then you learn. Having a journalism diploma is fine too; I am not against it.

What Global Voices does, although we do not always name it that way, is also a form of media training. We welcome people who come from activist backgrounds, whose first, second, or third language is not English, but who have unique access to particular communities and lived experiences. We create a space for them, as long as they understand and agree that there is an editorial process.

A lot of activists resent editing and can see it as censorship, as putting words in their mouths. We have had many such experiences. Sometimes they begin badly, but people also learn, if you take the time to explain that we are not against activism. I think almost everyone at Global Voices is an activist in some sense, even if they may not describe themselves that way. But we are still primarily a media organisation, so we need fact-checking and editing.

Whenever I explain Global Voices, I usually say I want people to remember two key concepts: lived experience and context.

We almost never do breaking news, and there is a reason for that. We do not have the capacity, and others do it better. That is not our mission. We only do it when there is something major, like a revolution, the death of a very important person, or perhaps a large natural disaster.

Our main focus is going deep into context. Returning to the earlier example, if you are a Brazilian person who has never left Brazil and you read a piece by a Bangladeshi person about Bangladesh, we want that story to be accessible to you even if you know nothing about the place. We want you to be able to understand it and form your own opinion.

So we spend a lot of time contextualising and explaining. When contributors refer to a major event in their own culture, something that obviously needs no explanation locally, we have to remember that our reader may be on the other side of the world and may not even know where the country is, let alone what revolution or historical figure is being referred to.

That, too, is a kind of interface. It is across cultures and languages, and also between more traditional journalism and activism. We try to find common ground across all those dimensions.

Some contributors get impatient and ask whether they have to explain everything in their culture so that everyone can understand it. There is no fixed rule for that. It is a kind of middle ground, a common-sense editorial judgment. But common sense is itself culturally specific, and some cultures are more dominant than others. In some cases you do not need to explain references to Western popular culture because of the dominance of US media or the English language, for example.

So it is a delicate dialogue. A large part of the work is simply taking the time to explain to people who do not have a media background that we love their story, that it is wonderful they came to us, that they are taking the courage to write in a third or fourth language, and that we are here to support them through editing and copy editing. But we also hope that, as we learn from them, they can learn from the editorial process, because that can also help them later in their lives and careers as activists, since activists do need media.

Making Things Visible

Nica: So which parts of this process would you say constitute political participation or civic participation? Is it storytelling? Reading about other places and making connections? Facilitating connections across cultures and languages? All of the above, or more than all of the above?

Filip: That is exactly the kind of yearly review we do within the community. We ask people about their motivations. Why are you participating in this community? And participation can mean many things. Some people want to write one story a week, some once a year, and everything in between.

We ask whether their motivation is to read about other places, or to express their opinion. We do publish opinion pieces as well as reporting. Is it about telling the story of your community beyond your community through translation? Is it about being connected to the world?

We usually offer multiple options in those questions, and most people choose several. So I would say it is a mix of all of them.

Nica: But do you see all those motivations as ways of being political, of expressing political agency? Some people might say that learning and sharing are emotional or cultural, and others would say that all of it is political. I am curious where you place yourself in that spectrum.

Filip: This is just my own position among many others in the community, but I subscribe to the view that everything is political. Culture is political. Literature is political. We saw some debates recently at the Berlin Festival that were quite shocking in that respect.

I would describe all this as political participation, because the most common feature of our stories is that they make something visible, and to me that is a political act. Often these are things that are not even known within people’s own communities.

We work a great deal with human rights situations, often the bad ones. Most of the time it is bad news: discrimination, censorship, threats, imprisonment, torture, death, denial, erasure, rewriting of history. So writing about these things is political.

Most of our stories are written under the contributor’s real name. Of course, we are responsible, not reckless, so when people are in difficult situations, and the list of such countries is growing, we offer them the option of anonymity, both for themselves and sometimes for their sources. Safety comes first. If people want to testify, or write a story, they can do so under another name if necessary.

Nica: What do you mean by testify? I know the verb, but how do you mean it here? Is that a particular genre of story you publish?

Filip: We have had, for example, letters from people who were imprisoned, or whose relatives were imprisoned, or from people who had been in concentration camps in western China. I use the word testimony not in a narrowly legal sense, but more in a moral and cultural sense.

These are people saying: we never get access to tell our stories in our own words, from our own perspectives, with enough context for others to understand them. That, to me, is testimony.

We are very flexible in format. We have standard stories of around a thousand words with original or second-hand quotes. But we also publish essays, what we might explicitly call testimonies. It can be a letter. It can be quite activistic, even a call to action, saying: I witnessed this, I saw this, and I think the world or my government should do something. Very personal, very subjective. We think that is essential.

Sometimes you need to hear powerful voices speaking in their own terms. That is why I use the word testimony.

Nica: That makes sense. Let’s zoom in a little on more precarious contexts: dictatorships, authoritarian regimes. You spoke to someone else in our project about Tunisia, one of the countries we are interested in, and how hard it is there to get information, interviews, or people to talk.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this kind of citizen journalism or lived-experience writing. Is it inherently more political in contexts with more censorship, repression, and authoritarianism? Or is the politics of sharing experience and elevating voices just more visible there?

Filip: One thing I am very sensitive to is how we give something back to the country or society where the story is happening. That has to do with two issues.

One is language. If you are writing about human rights atrocities in Myanmar, for example, and Myanmar is one of our languages, are we able to have that story, which is often first written in English because we do not have the editorial capacity in Burmese, translated into the local language?

And then, even if we can translate it, how do we distribute it? There are Burmese exile media. Ideally, from a journalistic point of view, you extract a story and a voice, give it proper context, translate it into as many languages as possible, especially languages of the Global South, so that people in Indonesia, Kenya, Chile, and elsewhere can read about what is happening in Myanmar in their own languages.

But the best-case scenario is if you can also produce a local-language version and have it circulated by relevant local or exile media. Because Global Voices uses Creative Commons, our stories can be republished. We do not hold conventional copyright over them. The one thing we ask is that republishers provide proper attribution, saying that the story first appeared on Global Voices in whatever language.

That is how the full cycle of political participation can sometimes be achieved, though certainly not in all cases.

We also do not write only about human rights abuses, because people sometimes want to confine us to that niche. What sometimes surprises people is that we also have stories about food, for example. And then we get asked: why are you writing about food if you are supposed to write about human rights?

The answer is that food is also about conflict, because many nations claim dishes as their national dish. It is about identity, tradition, gender, oral tradition, and threatened languages. You can write about food through the prism of gender, or of endangered languages. That is how I would define the variety of topics we cover.

Another unique aspect, which I think is not always obvious from the outside, is that even when you are an editor, you are not actually the person with the most power, unlike in many traditional media environments. At Global Voices it is almost the opposite.

The editor is not the person commissioning stories. The editor’s role, when I was managing editor, was to speak to regional editors and ask: what do you want to write about this week? What is happening in your country, your region, your community, your language community? Then we would discuss not so much the topic itself, but the angle. Is this going to be a long or short story? Will it be easy to find sources? Is there danger? Is there room for collaboration? Could it become a cross-border story?

But the original idea, and the sense that this is an important story, do not come from the editor. The editor is there to listen and guide the process.

That is very different from more traditional media, where the editor can be the one who shouts and tells you what to write and from what angle. I hate that model. At Global Voices it is the opposite. Someone says: I am still living in Myanmar, or I am in exile, and this is what is happening in my province, or in the exile community. I want to tell the story of these girls, or these activists, or this community. I have access, I can explain.

And the editor says: great, fantastic, but remember that you need to explain the political context and recent history, because your story may be read in Russian, or by readers who know nothing about Myanmar.

That work of contextualising and guiding is one of the most unique aspects of Global Voices. People who come from more traditional media are often pleasantly shocked by it. They ask: really, I get to decide?

AI: The Mammoth in the Room

Nica: I have one more question, and we are asking everybody some version of it because it emerged organically in another series of interviews we were doing with people involved in decentralised media activism, moving away from Twitter/X and toward more open-source internet tools.

In your context, in this world of elevating voices, citizen journalism, the politics around it, and the interfaces it opens up, what do you see as the role of AI? I know nobody can escape that question now.

Filip: It is more than the elephant in the room, it is the mammoth in the room.

Nica: I really like that. I am going to steal it from you, with credit.

Filip: No problem.

We have had countless discussions, trainings, and disagreements about AI. Let me go through a few points. I do not necessarily agree with all of them personally, but I think it is important to map the discussion inside the community.

The first thing is that most of us would agree that we already use AI in some form. Even Google Translate is a form of AI. So rather than pretending we can avoid it entirely, we need to think about where we can use it ethically and which parts of writing, editing, and translating remain ethical under current conditions.

Because we are such a diverse community in terms of age, culture, gender, media background, writing frequency, and so on, we have to include that diversity in our thinking. So we are constantly discussing it, and we also invite people from outside to share their perspectives.

One example is from our work with Indigenous languages, especially from Central America. As you know, “Mayan language” is really a plural category. These are not dialects that all speakers understand; they are a family of different languages.

We have had discussions with native speakers who are also activists and who want to write about their identity and about being underrepresented and discriminated against, often with histories of cultural or other forms of genocide.

Some of them love AI, and they make a very valid point. They say: our languages are just beginning to be recognised. Some are only now gaining a written form. Some variants are privileged over others, even within the Mayan language family. We want to promote our language, which other people dismiss as useless economically or socially. We want to create engaging content. We have zero money and zero support from government or NGOs. If we do not use AI to produce content, we will not be relevant. We need AI because we have no economic means, and we want to show that this language is alive.

That is a very interesting perspective, and I fully respect it.

On the other hand, there is the darker side. I think this happened in Canada. There were anglophone publishers producing books in Indigenous languages using AI translation, and when the books were published, native speakers said the translations made no sense at all. So you have two extreme poles of the same discussion: it can go very well, or it can be a complete disaster.

As editors, we have more or less agreed on one thing: there will never be a final answer, and we need to revisit this conversation every month or at least every quarter, because the technology changes so fast. We need to keep up not only with the tools themselves, but with the discussions, the new problems, and the new solutions.

Personally, I am very suspicious of AI on two levels. First, on the level of writing articles. I absolutely reject the idea of AI writing a piece that someone then signs and submits as their own. I would denounce that in any professional environment I am part of.

The other issue is more controversial within the community. Some people argue that English is not their native language, and since they have decided to write in English, they will use AI as a kind of conversation partner to improve their thinking on the topic and even their writing. For me, that is not even a grey area. It is a no.

We have human editors. That is a privilege. We have the budget for that. So I would refuse that use of AI. Of course, how can you prove it? You really cannot. At some point you have to trust people. And sometimes it is obvious from the writing when something suddenly no longer sounds like the person.

Where I draw the line is this: the structure of the story, the main ideas, and especially the first draft should come from the human writer. You should not worry about language quality. That is why we have editors, including native speakers of English if the story is first published in English. The acceptable uses are things like spell check, which already uses AI, and maybe playing with AI for possible title suggestions. Even there I am not fully enthusiastic, but I can tolerate it as a game.

What I do not accept is when someone says they are having a conversation with ChatGPT to help develop the story. To me, that is already dangerous, because AI is deeply biased on language, gender, representation, and so on. It introduces ideological discourse right at the core of writing the story, and I am very opposed to that.

Nica: That is very interesting. As I said, we have been asking everybody about AI, and there does seem to be a certain pattern. People tend to be cautiously open to it for technical or assistive tasks, translation, quick information, help with forms, maybe lower-barrier tasks, but with a lot of suspicion around it.

Well, I had more questions in my flexible script, but in the course of just talking you answered many of them, including the process of decision-making and who has ultimate authority. So I think we are almost at the top of the hour, and I want to thank you for your time. If I have follow-up questions after I go back through the material, I will follow up with you.

I think someone else from our project will also follow up with you about the Tunisia component.

It was such a pleasure to meet you.

Filip: Absolutely, no problem.

Thank you so much for your time.