Soon after September 11, 2001, Eli Pariser built a website calling for a multilateral approach to fighting terrorism. As a 20-year-old, he quickly found himself in contact with more than 500,000 people from around the world. He joined with MoveOn.org to spearhead its campaign against the war in Iraq and in 2004 he became MoveOn's executive director.

In 2011, suspecting that the internet might harbor hidden threats to democracy, Pariser wrote The Filter Bubble and introduced the term to the lexicon, exposing how algorithms amplify select ideas while making others invisible. In 2012, he cofounded Upworthy as a platform to direct millions of users to storytelling about issues that matter.

Now he is the codirector of the Civic Signals project at the National Conference on Citizenship, where he is working to create democracy-friendly spaces in the digital landscape.