By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Content moderation is at the heart of operating a social media platform—removing, promoting, demoting, and labeling content factors significantly into users’ experiences. It’s inevitably controversial, difficult to do accurately and safely, and a focal point for external pressure. A young man in Manila, Philippines, explains his work as a…

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman The work of running a small social media platform is primarily social, rather than technical. Unlike big platforms, which are largely differentiated by technical affordances and whose work mostly involves building and maintaining technical infrastructure, small platforms are largely differentiated by social factors and most of their work involves…

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media has changed the way memes—cultural building blocks—are produced, transmitted, and selected. In particular, social media has expanded the diversity of memes and accelerated their evolutionary process. Framing social media as an evolutionary environment for memes is a useful analytical tool for understanding the digital public sphere. In…

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media makes it possible for a piece of content to rapidly spread to millions of people in a matter of hours. In fact, “going viral” may be the defining phenomenon of the digital public sphere. Justine Sacco was flying from New York to South Africa to see family…

by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Advertising, the dominant business model for social media, is lucrative for platforms and enables users to access services for free. However, left unregulated, it often places platforms’ interests at odds with users and the public. When the Web first emerged, it wasn’t clear how services would make money. Dozens…

Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media has always supported authenticity—both subjective and objective. At the same time, social media constantly undermines authenticity. How people and platforms resolve that paradox is a key dynamic in the digital public sphere. From the start, social media promised a more authentic public sphere. Content could flow freely and…

Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Popularity is a fundamental force across social media, with implications for society at-large. Is a popularity contest the right model for allocating social capital in the digital public sphere? In 2017, Jimmy Donaldson, a teenage dropout from Eastern Carolina University, uploaded an unusual YouTube video. It was nearly 24 hours…