One Country’s Winning Fight Against Big Tech
Plus: Step Up for a Citizens Ally
Dear Citizen,
We did it! We’re in the… dictionary. Exciting, or perhaps foreboding news from Team Citizens this week. “Broligarchy,” coined by our co-founder, has been officially added to the Cambridge Dictionary, joining other signs of the dangerous times like “delulu” and “tradwife.” Great?
Also, et tu, Meta? Zuck has been a bad boy again, with the company allegedly misleading advertisers.
Here’s what else to read, watch and do this week.
💬 ONE READ: Remembering Sophie 💬
There’s been a lot of important reporting about AI and suicide risks. But journalist Laura Reiley’s essay, “What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life,” is urgent and eye-opening in a way few pieces have been. She writes:
If Harry had been a flesh-and-blood therapist rather than a chatbot, he might have encouraged inpatient treatment or had Sophie involuntarily committed until she was in a safe place. We can’t know if that would have saved her. Perhaps fearing those possibilities, Sophie held her darkest thoughts back from her actual therapist. Talking to a robot — always available, never judgy — had fewer consequences. A properly trained therapist, hearing some of Sophie’s self-defeating or illogical thoughts, would have delved deeper or pushed back against flawed thinking. Harry did not.
It’s a hard read, but a moving tribute to her daughter - and a call for new ways to think about accountability for AI. Read here.
🇧🇷 ONE LISTEN: Claro que sim! 🇧🇷
One of our favorite new podcasts is Tech Won’t Save Us from The Nation, hosted by Paris Marx. We’re a few weeks late to this but Paris recently spoke with technology reporter Laís Martins about an encouraging uprising… Brazil’s enforcement measures against tech companies like X and Rumble, and the country’s “battle to rein in big tech.”
Can Brazil point us forward? Listen here.
✊ ONE ACTION: Step Up for Young People ✊
For more than five years, our colleagues at Accountable Tech have worked to hold Big Tech accountable. Their biggest accomplishment may be an institution they helped birth the youth-led coalition they incubated and housed, Design it for Us.
It's tough out there in the funding world (trust us….) and cowed by the Trump administration, plenty of funders trying to stop the reach of Big Tech have backed off; Accountable Tech is shutting down. But Design it For Us will carry on - led by young people, for young people, playing an outsized role in ensuring safer social media and online platforms for kids, teens, and young adults.
This week’s one action is a simple one: if you’re able, can you support Design it for Us? We need a grassroots movement to rein in Big Tech's harms to young people - and they’re leading it.
That’s it for this week.
Team Citizens
*PS - Join our Signal Chat if you haven’t already!
