Eli Pariser was a Public Interest Technology Fellow at New America.
Pariser has dedicated his career to figuring out how technology can elevate important topics in the world—as an author, an online organizer, and most recently, as a co-founder of Upworthy.
Pariser joined MoveOn.org in 2001, serving as Executive Director from 2004-2009. During that time, MoveOn revolutionized grassroots political organizing by introducing a small-donor-funded and email-driven model that has since been widely used across the political spectrum. MoveOn.org quickly grew to more than 5 million members, who gave over $120 million to campaigns on topics like climate change and campaign finance reform. During this time he also co-founded Avaaz.org, which is now the largest online advocacy organization in the world totaling over 30 million members.
In 2011, as a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, Pariser published the New York Times bestseller The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Thebook highlights the ways that important content can get lost in the newsfeed era. The TED talk that Pariser gave based on The Filter Bubble has generated over 3.5 million views.
Insights from The Filter Bubble helped to inspire Upworthy, which Pariser founded with longtime collaborator Peter Koechley in March of 2012. The pair set out to prove once and for all that what’s important can be incredibly popular, even if what’s popular isn’t usually important. To date, the Upworthy community has logged more than 1.5 billion minutes of attention on topics ranging from the criminal justice system to advertising’s adverse effects on body image to clean energy.
Pariser is based in Brooklyn. You should follow him on Twitter here.