A jury reached a verdict in the LA trial focused on Meta and YouTube, a case that experts have characterized as social media's "Big Tobacco" moment.
Transforming Social Media Governance With Applied Theories of Justice – lindsay blackwell
This dissertation explores ways in which social media governance can be improved through the practical application of theories and principles of justice. Three empirical research studies demonstrate that current platform governance practices exacerbate the very harms they seek to mitigate, due in large part to the influence of punitive criminal justice models that are structurally incapable of producing equitable governance outcomes. Informed by transformative justice, social media governance can be reframed from a method for control to a practice of collective care, requiring a fundamental restructuring of the systems and logics that currently govern online spaces.
Mark Zuckerberg Just Got Rather Badly Humiliated
Google informed Meta in March that it couldn't provide all the Gemini AI capacity that Meta was asking for, humiliating CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
New report on alternative social media
Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World
After the feed with Eli Pariser, Ben Smith, and Jasmine Sun
Spark - Take back your timeline
Social media is addictive and manipulative. It's time for social that puts the user in control.
The future of social media is human
We cannot continue participating in social media platforms which do nothing to stop us being tricked by GenAI and the powerful people/governments that control them.
Media Ownership Monitor
Mass media influences how facts are viewed and debated in a society, contributing to crafting its public opinion. Independence and pluralism...
AI Bros Have Gone Too Far...
Web Browsers, AI, and the Politics of Media Power
The left keeps building media strategies on top of platforms built to undermine them. As browsers are rebuilt for mass surveillance and manipulation, the systems that decide what people see and who gets heard are being rewritten without us. Control over the browser is control over political reality.
Dispute over fate of Kenyan workers who saw Meta AI glasses films
Meta and its subcontractor disagree over why over 1000 Kenya-based workers were made redundant.
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects1. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk’s platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users’ feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X’s algorithm has persistent effects on users’ current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.
People, Not Posts - Real Housewives of San Francisco
Why do we still call it "social media"?
The promise of ATproto is social media without corporate overlords
Media Media
The authoritarians are winning, we can all see that. It wouldn't be the worst thing if the pro-democracy camp stopped being naive about social media.
1/ quick notes from a great meeting yesterday with a Boston area researcher, interested in cutting edge research tools like Discourse Graphs, @cosmik.network and science social media. The research questions they are looking at are too complex and interdisciplinary to be tackled by any single lab >
