New Year, New Us
Plus: Stand Up for Anti-Disinformation Heroes
Dear Citizens,
Happy 2026 to all The Citizens! As we start a new year, five years into our great experiment, we wanted to say a quick thank you, to you - without your support this wouldn’t be possible.
And thank you to the dozens of experts, journalists, technologists and advocates who make up our extended Citizens “brains trust”. They keep us sharp, grounded and occasionally entertained. This week, they’ve helped shape some of what you’ll find below - alongside a few things from our own work in 2025 that we think are worth your time.
Before that, in case you missed it: We rounded up what five years of standing up to power looked like in practice, and what we’ve learned along the way.
Team Citizens
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Here’s what to read, watch and know.
📚 A Few Things Worth Reading
🗣️ What’s it like to be a whistleblower? 🗣️
In this piece from The Washington Post, Naomi Nix speaks to several big tech whistleblowers, including a longtime friend of the Citizens Yaël Eisenstat, about what life has been like after they came forward to expose big tech’s bad acts. She writes:
Eisenstat is part of a growing group of former tech workers who have alleged that their Silicon Valley employers harmed the public and compromised users’ safety. This cohort of whistleblowers has triggered a public reckoning over the technology industry, including a slew of negative media stories, heated congressional hearings with top tech CEOs, and a steady stream of laws around the world that ban or restrict social media use for young people.
While many profiled in the piece have faced poorer job prospects, possible “blacklisting” and more, one thing is clear: these truth tellers don’t regret it. “I genuinely don’t think I would have been able to live with myself if I didn’t do what I did,” said one person. “And I now get to figure out how to live with myself doing what I did.”
From the Citizens archive
🇷🇺 Russia, Britain and the Cold War on Trust 🇷🇺
What’s new isn’t the ambition – Russia has meddled for decades. What’s changed is the method: espionage has moved into the gig economy, relying on ordinary people to carry out small, deniable acts.
It doesn’t feel like a war. It looks like ordinary life with headlines telling the story in fragments. A fire in a East London warehouse storing aid for Ukraine, a bribe to a politician, a hack on a journalist, a smear campaign on social media. But taken together, they reveal a pattern - a long, patient offensive in which Russian state interests are pursued through outsourcing, influence and corrosion. The aim isn’t so much to achieve a decisive victory. It’s to wear us down.
Team Citizens
🧠 Inside Palantir: Profits, Power & the Kill Machine 🧠
Earlier this year we spoke to a former Palantir employee - now a critic and educator - about the company’s role in surveillance, border enforcement and war.
In case you didn’t know, Palantir has:
- Supplied intelligence tools used by Israel in Gaza
- Helped ICE separate migrant children from their families
- Secured new contracts for real-time migrant tracking
Subscribe to the Citizens for clear uncompromising news on how Big Tech is reshaping democracy.
🎥 What We’re Watching
🌳 Chaotically Human 🌳
A recommendation from our advisor and all-around mensch Roger McNamee is this (short!) TED Talk from Professor Carissa Véliz, who urges us to cherish the analogue (aka offline) aspects of our lives - and “protect the spaces where we are unobserved, unpredictable, and chaotically human.” Can we rethink our relationship with technology? Carissa will make you want to try:
PS. We hosted a live discussion with Roger and Carissa on Substack earlier this year. As two of the sharpest minds taking on Silicon Valley’s surveillance machine, they dug into how power really works in the digital age — and how we can take it back.
From the Citizens archive
🤖 How Algorithms Make Everything the Same 🤖
A wide-ranging conversation with Carole Cadwalladr, Kyle Chayka and Yancey Strickler on culture flattening, platform incentives and why everything feels increasingly same-y. Thoughtful, sharp with lots of lols.
🏛️ Democracy, Big Tech & the US 🏛️
We were joined by Jennifer Rubin of The Contrarian and Yaël Eisenstat to unpack democratic backsliding in the United States - and the role Big Tech has played in shaping recent political currents.
The Citizens
🎧 Worth a Listen
👀 Mission Implausible 👀
Friend of the Citizens Tamsin Shaw is an expert on psychological manipulation and politics.
In this guest spin on the Mission Implausible podcast, Tamsin shares how we are all targets for influence operations.
💥 One Way to Take Action 💥
🔐 Stand Up for Democracy Defenders 🔐
On December 23rd, the US State Department barred several leading disinformation researchers - including longtime Citizens partner Imran Ahmed of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate - from entering the US.
Why? Because Elon, Zuck and their tech bros are mad that there’s still democracy defenders out there fighting social media disinformation. Civil society organizations, including ours, have joined a sign on letter here denouncing the action.
How can you help? Spare a donation (or a like or share) for the Center for Countering Digital Hate and/or The Global Disinformation Index.
Let’s show them we’ve got their backs and we stand against the “sociopathic greed” of the tech giants.
That’s all for this week.
Keep an eye out for what’s coming in 2026. New investigations? New formats?! Maybe even the return of live events… 👀 More on all of that very soon.
Happy New Year,
Team Citizens
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already! There’s 330 people there now.
