For years, corporate media has maintained that Donald Trump was under the influence of Russian agents and that the Russians helped him win the 2016 presidential election. All of these claims turned out to be unsubstantiated. How exactly did the media err on such a monumental scale?

Today, the podcast turns three years old and I tell the story of how I became a journalist and what I learned in the process.

Some observations on the possible future of society from a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates.

Everyone needs a password manager these days and many people were using LastPass. Unfortunately, LastPass made some pretty horrible mistakes that mean that these people should look for an alternative now. Here's why.

The Twitter Files show us how cynical the US government tried, and often succeed, to shape how we perceive reality. But they also show those of us that weren't buying the propaganda that they aren't slowly going insane.

The start of the new year sees some changes to the podcast. This episode provides an outlook of what is coming down the line.

Looking back at the third year of The Private Citizen and at the topics discussed and issues tackled in 2022.

Responding to listener feedback on episodes about journalism, Drachenlord, The Twitter Files, the Fediverse, free speech, artificial intelligence and beyond.

The Twitter Files show how the factually accurate Hunter Biden laptop story was suppressed. They also reveal the secret FBI operation targeting social media executives and high-level journalists that led to this suppression.

In a first episode about the Twitter Files disclosures, we look at how Twitter, at the behest of intelligence agencies, catalogued people's speech and selectively silenced some of them. And then lied about it.

In response to listener feedback, we're delving a bit deeper into the topic of machine learning and its impact on society and our political structures.

Since Twitter doom and gloom has some people moving to Mastodon, the Fediverse is being discussed even by mainstream media outlets. Is it finally going to take off? Let's discuss some of the problems we are facing here.

What happens at Twitter at the moment is only a story because Silicon Valley is finally waking up to the fact that Elon Musk is a horrible and pretty dumb person. And the only reason that Silicon Valley did not know this is because it spent years stupidly convincing itself of the exact opposite.

In a world were computer algorithms decide what is best for us, two groups of people will exist: those who program the algorithms and those who do what the algorithms tell them to do.

People don't want to save the planet, people are afraid to get inconvenienced and guilt-ridden about their childrens' future. They only care about themselves and it's going to destroy our social welfare societies. George Carlin called it thirty years ago.

Elon Musk, after a long saga of tweets and lawsuits, is about to finalise his deal to buy Twitter. What does that mean for the social network and also the general political landscape?

Science-fiction writer and critic Theodore Sturgeon not only invented the Vulcan salute and the Prime Directive for Star Trek, he also pioneered a very interesting approach to critical thinking centred around always asking the next question.

Responding to listener feedback on episodes about Drachenlord, electrical network frequency analysis, Stephanie Sterling vs. the Domina dev, Nord Stream, fear-based journalism and religion.

Fear is the strongest of all emotions, which means news articles based on fear get the most clicks. Which means out society is going to hell in a handbasket and the idiot journalists are to blame.

Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, bringing natural gas from Russia to Europe, via Germany. Was it the Russians? Did the Americans do it? Why? And what will happen now?

What happens when you're a game developer and you put stupid political statements in your patch notes? Stephanie Sterling makes a video about it and you get banned off Steam. Surely that's a good thing?

Can you tell when an audio recording was made, down to the second, just by the electrical background hum? What sounds like a science fiction fantasy is actually real.

Permabanned on almost all internet platforms, Rainer Winkler has been effectively silenced off the internet. He's also being investigated for disseminating illegal pornography. Will he give up now? And is his situation actually a free speech issue?

Catching up with some stories I've talked about in earlier episodes: Julian Assange, Drachenlord and the War in Ukraine.

The EU thinks that some lines of code, probably shoddily written, should take precedence over how the actual driver wants to control their vehicle on the road. It's an idiotic idea and it says a lot about the people passing these laws.