Before we break for the year we wanted to reflect on what the podcast brought us in 2025, and what we want to see for 2026

This week Alix is joined by two members of The Maybe team: Prathm Juneja and Georgia Iacovou. We discuss our favourite episodes from the year while making it clear we love all episodes equally. And also this is not your standard clip show. We ask ourselves what we learned, why it was important to us, and what we are hungry for in 2026.

Featured episodes:

• Is Digitisation Killing Democracy? w/ Marietje Schaake
• Nodestar: Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser
• Regulating Privacy in an AI Era w/ Carly Kind
• To be Seen and Not Watched w/ Tawana Petty
• The Taiwan Bottleneck w/ Brian Chen
• Gotcha! How MLMs Ate the Economy w/ Bridget Read
• Also mentioned in this episode: AI in Gaza Live from Mexico City

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The Onion CEO Ben Collins has successfully turned political satire into a sustainable business. He explains why humorous messaging is important to understand times like these — and why he’s dead serious about buying Infowars.

Head to our feed for more conversations from MozFest with Abeba Birhane, Audrey Tang, and Luisa Franco Machado.

Further reading & resources:

• Read The Onion, America’s finest news source, if you don’t already…
• The Onion to buy Infowars

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Audrey Tang has some big ideas on how we can use collective needs to shape AI systems — and avoid a future where human life is seen as an obstacle to paper clip production. She also shares what might be the first actual good use-case for AI agents…

Further reading & resources:

• 6-Pack of Care — a research project by Audrey Tang and Caroline Green as part of the Institute for Ethics in AI
• More about Kami — the Japanese local spirits Audrey mentions throughout the conversation
• The Oxford Institute for Ethics in AI

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You can’t build a digital rights movement if you don’t know what you’re fighting for. Luisa says that we’re in a crisis of imagination, and that participation — the non-performative kind — is one big way out of this.

Further reading & resources:

• Learn more about Equilabs
• Follow Luisa on Instagram — sorry, email is too ‘analog’
• Check out her Linktree

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Earlier this year Abeba Birhane was asked to give a keynote at the AI for Good Summit for the UN — and at the eleventh hour they attempted to censor any mention of genocide in Palestine, and their Big Tech sponsors. She was invited to give her full uncensored talk at Mozfest.

Further reading & resources:

• Abeba’s blog post on the UN censoring her talk on AI
• More about Abeba
• More about The AI Accountability Lab

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Mozilla Festival 2025. Barcelona. Three days in a bonanza of interesting people, ideas, and technology politics. These were our highlights!

More like this: FAccT 2025 episodes one and two

This is an extra special episode packed full of conversations and on-site impressions of the biggest Mozfest we’ve had in years. This year Alix moderated three panels, ran an AMA, and even hosted a game show — and somehow also had time to record all of this, for your pleasure.

Included in this episode is:

• A preview of Exposing and Reshaping the Global Footprint of Data Centers, with independent journalist Pablo Jiménez Arandia, Tessa Pang (impact editor for Lighthouse Reports), and Paz Peña (Mozilla Fellow, and founder of the Latin American Institute of Terraforming.)
• A conversation with Hana Memon, developer at Gen Z for Change
• A conversation with creative technologist Malik Afegbua, on his project The Elder Series
• Nabiha Syed and Helen Turvey will also reflect on how this Mozfest went, and what they hope to see for the future of the festival in the coming years

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Everything is happening so fast. And a lot of it’s bad. What can research and science organizations do when issues are complex, fast-moving, and super important?

More like this: Independent Researchers in a Platform Era w/ Brandi Guerkink

Building knowledge is more important than ever in times like these. This week, we have three guests. Megan Price from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) shares how statistics and data science can be used to get justice. Janet Haven and Charlton McIlwan from Data & Society explore the role that research institutions can offer to bridge research knowledge and policy prescription.

Further reading & resources:

• HRDAG’s involvement in the trial of José Efraín Ríon Montt
• A profile of Guatemala and timeline of its conflict — BBC (last updated in 2024)
• To Protect and Serve? — a study on predictive policing by William Isaac and Kristian Lum
• An article about the above study — The Appeal
• HRDAG’s stand against tyranny
• More on Understanding AI — Data & Society’s event series with the New York Public Library
• About Janet Haven, Executive Director of Data & Society
• About Charlton McIlwan, board president of Data & Society
• Bias in Computer Systems by Helen Nissenbaum
• Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies
• If you want to hear more about the history of D&S, the full conversation is up on Youtube (add link when we have).

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Imagine doing tech research… but from outside the tech industry? What an idea…

More like this: Nodestar: Turning Networks into Knowledge w/ Andrew Trask

So much of tech research happens within the tech industry itself, because it requires data access, funding, and compute. But what the tech industry has in resources, it lacks in independence, scruples, and a public interest imperative. Alix is joined by Brandi Guerkink from The Coalition of Independent Tech Research to discuss her work at a time where platforms have never been so opaque, and funding has never been so sparse

Further Reading & Resources:

• More about Brandi and The Coalition
• Understanding Engagement with U.S. (Mis)Information News Sources on Facebook by Laura Edelson & Dan McCoy
• More on Laura Edelson
• More on Dan McCoy
• Jim Jordan bringing in Nigel Farage from the UK to legitimise his attacks on EU tech regulations — Politico
• Ted Cruz on preventing jawboning & government censorship of social media — Bloomberg
• Judge dismisses ‘vapid’ Elon Musk lawsuit against group that cataloged racist content on X — The Guardian
• See the CCDH’s blog post on getting the case thrown out
• Platforms are blocking independent researchers from investigating deepfakes by Ariella Steinhorn

Disclosure: This guest is a PR client of our consultancy team. As always, the conversation reflects our genuine interest in their work and ideas.

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Governments around the world are using predictive systems to manage engagement with even the most vulnerable. Results are mixed.

More like this: Algorithmically Cutting Benefits w/ Kevin De Liban

Luckily people like Soizic Pénicaud are working to prevent the modern welfare state from becoming a web of punishment of the most marginalised. Soizic has worked on algorithmic transparency both in and outside of a government context, and this week will share her journey from working on incrementally improving these systems (boring, ineffective, hard) — to escaping the slow pace of government and looking at the bigger picture of algorithmic governance, and how it can build better public benefit in France (fun, transformative, and a good challenge).

Soizic is working to shift political debates about opaque decision-making algorithms to focus on what they’re really about: the marginalised communities who’s lives are most effected by these systems.

Further reading & resources:

• The Observatory of Public Algorithms and their Inventory
• The ongoing court case against the French welfare agency's risk-scoring algorithm
• More about Soizic
• More on the Transparency of Public Algorithms roadmap from Etalab — the task force Soizic was part of
• La Quadrature du Net
• France’s Digital Inquisition — co-authored by Soizic in collaboration with Lighthouse Reports, 2023
• AI prototypes for UK welfare system dropped as officials lament ‘false starts’ — The Guardian Jan 2025
• Learning from Cancelled Systems by Data Justice Lab
• The Fall of an Algorithm: Characterizing the Dynamics Toward Abandonment — by Nari Johnson et al, featured in FAccT 2024

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Seeing is believing. Right? But what happens when we lose trust in the reproductive media put in front of us?

More like this: The Toxic Relationship Between AI and Journalism w/ Nic Dawes

We talked to a global expert and leading voice on this issue for the past 20 years, Sam Gregory to get his take. We started way back in 1992 when Rodney King was assaulted by 4 police officers in Los Angeles. Police brutality was (and is) commonplace, but something different happened in this case. Someone used a camcorder and caught it on video. It changed our understanding about the role video could play in accountability. And in the past 30 years, we’ve gone from seeking video as evidence and advocacy, to AI slop threatening to seismically reshape our shared realities.

Now apps like Sora provide impersonation-as-entertainment. How did we get here?

Further reading & resources:

• More on the riots following Rodney King’s murder — NPR
• More about Sam and Witness
• ObscuraCam — a privacy-preserving camera app from WITNESS and The Guardian Project
• C2PA: the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity
• Deepfakes Rapid Response Force by WITNESS

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