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Blog
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Social media platforms have proven to provide users with a space to connect that is non-existent in the physical world. However, users struggle with mental health concerns, disinformation, and more. Social media’s issues have a wide range of implications for…
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A few weeks ago, several hundred academics, students, and professionals gathered at the University of Pennsylvania for the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science: two-and-a-half days packed with presentations and posters. This post attempts to highlight some of the…
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with Ethan Zuckerman This is a draft of a chapter from Chand’s and Ethan’s forthcoming “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year on MIT Press. We’d love your feedback on what we have so far, so please share…
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Posts like these will be appearing in our newsletter regularly. To get those right in your inbox, subscribe today. In 2021, we published An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with the Knight First Amendment Institute. It was the culmination…
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Hello, welcome to the new publicinfrastructure.org! I hope you find it colorful and inviting. There’s a lot of information on this site because there’s a lot of different things we do, but my intention is to create a space that…
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We’re excited to announce the publication of our paper, Dialing for Videos: A Random Sample of YouTube, in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. The article is the culmination of a long research project to better understand YouTube as…
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In 2021, we published An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with the Knight First Amendment Institute. It was the culmination of a months-long exploration of alternative social media “logics” meant to encourage fresh thinking about the possibilities for social…
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Facebook, after a very protracted saga that began with the Social Science One initiative, partnered with academics to allow them to research political data about the 2020 American presidential election on the platform. The first four studies from that research…
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Ethan and Chand cover the history of “trust and safety” and talk about what it will take to build a safe Internet, from the standpoints of both technology and content moderation. Published by Social Media and Society, September 2023.
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Freq is an experimental platform for social music discovery from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst.
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By Ethan Zuckerman “Accents are just mouth fonts.” That brilliant observation is just one of the gems I found today on r/BrandNewSentence, an online community dedicated to collecting “sentences never before written, found in the wild”. Fans of these strange…
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This is an entry in our Keyword series, where we try to define the terms you’ll often hear when people talk about building a better Internet and put those keywords in their current context. The term decentralization gets thrown around…
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In March 2023, we ran a four-part miniseries called “trust,” where we talked about how trust works online from a bunch of different angles: free speech and platforms, gamer guilds, crypto and DAOs, justice, and more. These episodes are pretty…
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“The Three-Legged Stool” is the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure’s banner white paper: the culmination of our work here at the lab so far and our roadmap for our efforts in the coming years. It was written primarily by Chand…
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In Digital Government: Research and Practice. Abstract: Institutions like public broadcasters and universities face conflicts of values when using surveillant digital tools: organizations bound to protect the privacy and respect their autonomy of their constituents – which we term “values-led…
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This is an entry in our Keyword series, where we try to define the terms you’ll often hear when people talk about building a better Internet and put those keywords in their current context. In the early days of the…
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In Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society – Special Issue on “Digital Citizenship.” Abstract: In 1995, social scientist Robert Putnam suggested that American civic life was weakening because people were retreating from public spaces. Local organizations from bowling leagues to…
