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…
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…
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…
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.
Freq is an experimental platform for social music discovery from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst.
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…
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…
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…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
Rather than opening one app for Twitter, another for Mastodon, and yet another for Reddit, what if you could view all three together? Furthermore, what if you could filter and prioritize your content from each platform, taking control of your…
What follows is the text of a tweet thread Ethan Zuckerman issued last week. Below it are some additional tweets embedded focusing on the case for leaving Twitter Long thread – buckle up. TL:DR; yes, you should join Mastodon. But…
Chand and Ethan just published a long-in-the-making paper proposing a new system for targetted advertising that doesn’t rely on a surveillance model. Check it out in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology’s special issue “A Healthy Digital Public Sphere.”
Chand and Ethan dig into the problem that while local networks offer ways to connect with local community members, they also host much more severe mis- and disinformation.