Blog

Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro joins Ethan to talk about “New Approaches to Platform Data Research,” the report they just published together with the NetGain Partnership. Elizabeth and Ethan talk about a variety of issues facing journalists and researchers for studying social media companies, and what sort of solutions — both small-scale and radical — could help ensure a better-studied, more accountable social media ecosystem. Elizabeth is the co-founder of the National Trust for Local News.

Moderation processes online should reduce harm, offer victims justice they find meaningful, and fix inequity in these social spaces. On all of these counts, the moderation systems implemented by big social media companies fail conclusively. Sarita Schoenebeck from the Living Online Lab at the University of Michigan joins us to talk about what moderation and harm reduction driven by the real-world experiences of victims might look like.

How could social media systems be designed as safe places that really work for the people who use them? What can art help us understand about machine learning data sets? Caroline Sinders of Convocation Design joins us this week to talk about her research-based art practice that’s trying to change perspectives about what exactly is going wrong on the Internet, and just how exciting it may be to fix it.

In this bonus episode, Omar Wasow talks about his paper published last year documenting the political impact and public opinion resulting from the 1960s civil rights movement in America.

Jillian C. York, the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, joins us to talk about censorship on social media platforms and her new book Silicon Values, out now on Verso.

Well before Facebook achieved social media dominance, Black Planet was the online home to millions of Black Americans. The site’s founder Omar Wasow joins us to talk about why it was so important to create an online space for Black people, and what a next generation of the Internet might look like for such communities.

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade. evelyn douek is a lecturer on law at Harvard Law school, a research scholar at the Knight First Amendment Institute, and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center For Internet & Society.

This episode shares a recorded talk from the 2021 Reimagine the Internet conference, a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade. Jonathan Ong is an associate professor of global digital media in the department of communications at UMass Amhsert.