01 · The publisher · UK, US
Julian Assange
Founded WikiLeaks in 2006. Between 2010 and 2011 published, in partnership with The Guardian, The New York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and El País, the Iraq War Logs, the Afghan War Diary, and Cablegate — roughly 750,000 U.S. military and diplomatic documents. Indicted May 2019 under 17 counts of the Espionage Act. Confined seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, then five years in HM Prison Belsmarsh. On June 26, 2024, pleaded guilty in Saipan to a single Espionage Act count, sentenced to time served, released. On Constitution Day, September 17, 2026, posted his first message on X in twelve years: “I’m back.”
Why he is on this list: the Espionage Act prosecution of a publisher established, and then failed to establish, that publishing classified material given by a source is a crime. The failure is provisional. The next publisher tried under that theory will inherit the case Assange settled by plea rather than by verdict. Every Fifth Estate writer working from a leaked document, from a whistleblower’s intake form, or from a screenshot of an internal deck, is standing on the ground Assange lost seven years of his life to defend.
Where to find him. @JulianAssange on X · wikileaks.org. Sources: DOJ, June 26, 2024 · the timeline sits on our history page.
02 · The reporter · Racket News
Matt Taibbi
Twenty years at Rolling Stone before leaving for Substack in 2020, where he now publishes Racket News. In late 2022, working with a small team of independent journalists, he received access to internal Twitter documents under Elon Musk’s new ownership and produced The Twitter Files — a series of long-form threads and articles documenting the moderation architecture that Twitter had built in coordination with federal agencies. In March 2023 he testified before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.
Why he is on this list: the Taibbi testimony is the single most cited primary source for the claim, now central to Finn v. Global Engagement Center and Missouri v. Biden, that federal agencies operated a standing moderation-request pipeline into major platforms. His exact House Judiciary language: “We learned Twitter, Facebook, Google, and other companies developed a formal system for taking in moderation ‘requests’ from every corner of government: the FBI, DHS, HHS, DOD, the Global Engagement Center at State, even the CIA.”
Where to find him. racket.news · @mtaibbi on X. Start with the original Twitter Files threads and the House Judiciary testimony (both linked from his Racket archive).
03 · The plaintiff · Unreported Truths
Alex Berenson
Ex-New York Times reporter covering pharmaceuticals for a decade. Suspended from Twitter in August 2021 for a post about vaccine efficacy; sued Twitter in federal court in December 2021 on First Amendment and breach-of-contract grounds. In July 2022, reached a settlement under which Twitter reinstated his account and effectively conceded that his ban had violated the platform’s own written rules — one of the first successful jawboning suits by a working journalist. Publishes Unreported Truths on Substack. In October 2025, received the same Nature letter as Sayer Ji, from the same editor, in the same week, using the same “profiteering from misinformation” frame.
Why he is on this list: the Berenson settlement is the earliest legal precedent for the proposition that federal jawboning of a private platform gives the deplatformed user a live First Amendment claim against the government agents doing the jawboning. Every subsequent case, including Finn, runs through this doctrinal ground.
Where to find him. alexberenson.substack.com · @AlexBerenson on X.
04 · The investigator · Ruby Files
Kris Ruby
Media strategist and independent investigator. Produced the Ruby Files, a running documentation of how content-moderation word-lists supplied by outside organizations — including CCDH — were incorporated into Twitter 1.0’s AI-driven moderation systems. Where the Twitter Files documented the request pipeline, the Ruby Files documented the algorithmic implementation: how a word from an external list became an automatic flag on millions of posts at once.
Why she is on this list: the Ruby Files are the fingerprint work on how a small policy input becomes a large-scale suppression output. Without that link, the moderation-request pipeline could be dismissed as episodic; with it, the pipeline is a machine.
Where to find her. @sparklermag on X · the Ruby Files are indexed at rubymedia.com.
05 · The Substacker · The DisInformation Chronicle
Paul Thacker
Former investigative reporter for Science and a decade of pharmaceutical-industry disclosure reporting at the Environmental Working Group. Publishes The DisInformation Chronicle on Substack. In October 2024, with Matt Taibbi, first published the “Kill Musk’s Twitter” directive — a leaked internal CCDH document that read as a coordinated plan to demonetize and delegitimize X.
Why he is on this list: Thacker is the model for a Fifth Estate writer who took a mainstream investigative track record with him when he left, and used it to break a story the mainstream press did not touch for weeks. His pharma-disclosure archive on Substack is one of the largest single-writer accountability corpora in the health-freedom space.
Where to find him. disinformationchronicle.substack.com · @thackerpd on X.
06 · The archivist · Foundation for Freedom Online
Mike Benz
Former State Department official. Founded the Foundation for Freedom Online in 2021. Has documented, in extraordinary depth, the transatlantic censorship infrastructure — the NATO Hybrid CoE (Center of Excellence, Helsinki), the 2019 NATO “tanks to tweets” declaration, the DHS/CISA misinformation architecture, and the network of NGO cut-outs that funnel foreign speech policy into American platforms.
Why he is on this list: Benz is the reason the pipeline is not a metaphor. If you have wondered where the specific claim “foreign-based policy is being routed into American platform moderation” comes from — the answer, in almost every serious version, traces to primary-document work on Benz’s site.
Where to find him. foundationforfreedomonline.com · @MikeBenzCyber on X.
07 · The named target · MAHA
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Author of numerous books on environmental and health-policy litigation. Founded Children’s Health Defense in 2016. Named in the CCDH “BlackOps” memo published in October 2024 and included in the “Disinformation Dozen” report that CCDH used to pressure platforms into deplatforming a dozen named individuals. Now leads the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative and, as of 2025, serves as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Why he is on this list: RFK Jr. is the case study in what happens when a Fifth Estate figure is the specific and named target of a coordinated deplatforming campaign, and later occupies the office the campaign was trying to prevent him from occupying. The doctrine of the Fifth Estate is not, and should not be, partisan; but the mechanics of what he was subjected to are documentary.
Where to find him. @RobertKennedyJr on X · hhs.gov · childrenshealthdefense.org.
08 · The witness · Public
Michael Shellenberger
Founder of Environmental Progress and, later, of Public on Substack. One of the Twitter Files authors, alongside Taibbi. Testified before the House Weaponization subcommittee in March 2023. His formulation, “the Censorship Industrial Complex,” is now the standard shorthand for the field the coalition is litigating and legislating against.
Why he is on this list: Shellenberger’s methodology — naming the actors, following the money, and refusing to concede rhetorical ground to the “countering hate” framing — is the most publicly imitated model for how the Fifth Estate does adversarial policy reporting.
Where to find him. public.substack.com · @shellenberger on X.
09 · The editor · The Free Press
Bari Weiss
Opinion editor at The Wall Street Journal, then The New York Times. Resigned from the Times in July 2020 with a public resignation letter that documented, from the inside, how newsroom self-censorship had become a working editorial system. Founded The Free Press in 2021, now one of the largest reader-supported publications in the U.S., with a paid subscription base measured in the six figures. Worked on the Twitter Files with Taibbi and Shellenberger.
Why she is on this list: The Free Press is the proof of concept for a Fifth Estate publication built at the scale of a small legacy paper — with a masthead, editors, standards, and reader-funded revenue — and no advertiser or foundation constraints on the story it can run.
Where to find her. thefp.com · @bariweiss on X.
10 · The lawyer · System Update
Glenn Greenwald
Constitutional lawyer turned journalist. In 2013, with Laura Poitras, broke the Edward Snowden documents in The Guardian. Co-founded The Intercept in 2014. Resigned from The Intercept in October 2020 when its editors refused to run his pre-election reporting on the Biden family without cuts he described as ideological censorship. Publishes System Update on Rumble and Substack.
Why he is on this list: the Snowden reporting is the modern precedent for a working journalist who publishes classified material from a whistleblower and is legally protected while doing so — the pole opposite of the Assange outcome. Both are the Fifth Estate at work; both are precedent the next journalist will need.
Where to find him. ggreenwald.substack.com · System Update on Rumble · @ggreenwald on X.
11 · The engineer · Steve Kirsch’s newsletter
Steve Kirsch
MIT-trained engineer, founder of Frame Technology, Infoseek, and Abaca. Since 2021, publishes one of the largest independent vaccine-safety-data newsletters on Substack. Deplatformed from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Medium during the pandemic era; the Substack scaled anyway. Sponsors independent data audits and open surveys.
Why he is on this list: Kirsch is the case study in what happens when a technically credentialed insider is subjected to the full deplatforming apparatus and refuses to be silenced by it. His methodology — open data, open surveys, published data pipelines — is one of the strongest working examples of Fifth Estate epistemology in the science space.
Where to find him. kirschsubstack.com · @stkirsch on X.
12 · The broadcaster · The HighWire
Del Bigtree
Emmy Award-winning television producer (The Doctors). Executive producer of the 2016 documentary Vaxxed. Founded The HighWire in 2016, an independent broadcast operation now reaching millions weekly outside the cable-news pipeline. Named across the same dossiers as GreenMedInfo. In 2024, launched Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Action, a political-advocacy vehicle.
Why he is on this list: The HighWire is the proof of concept for a Fifth Estate broadcast — not a podcast, a full weekly show with a studio, correspondents, and a live audience — built entirely outside the cable-news infrastructure and funded directly by viewers.
Where to find him. thehighwire.com · @HighWireTalk on X.
13 · The archivist · GreenMedInfo, Substack
Sayer Ji
Founded GreenMedInfo in 2008 as a curated open-access index of peer-reviewed research on natural substances; the database now contains nearly 100,000 study abstracts reaching more than 200 countries with 250 million cumulative views. Systematically deplatformed 2018–2024: NewsGuard downgrade (November 2018), Pinterest ban (December 2018), Facebook restrictions (April 2019), Google Medic Update (June 2019, 81% search-traffic drop), ISD “disinformation” label (2020), Disinformation Dozen designation (March 2021), Facebook page permanently deleted with 500,000 followers (July 2021), PayPal and Venmo account terminations (March 2022). In 2025, plaintiff in a federal civil-rights case in the Middle District of Florida against CCDH, Imran Ahmed, senior government officials, and technology firms — described in the complaint as the largest coordinated censorship enterprise in U.S. history. Founder of Restore the First.
Why he is on this list: because a Fifth Estate section written by our coalition’s founder is honest only if it names him at the same level of scrutiny as the twelve above. The record is the record. See also his Glass House essay.
Where to find him. greenmedinfo.com · sayerji.substack.com · @sayerjigmi on X.