Blog

Are.na might be the most exciting social network for designers, artists, and curious, interdisciplinary self-educators, kind of like Pinterest or Tumblr but offering the functionality to spin a vast web of images and knowledge. The platform is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary, so we invited two of Are.na’s co-founders to talk to us about the close-knit (and often paying) community that makes the site vibrant and how the platform’s systems of Blocks and Channels makes it an ideal tool for connecting ideas and creating trains of thought.

Deen Freelon is one of the foremost scholars on how contemporary protest movements organize on the Internet. This week Deen joins us to talk about his work on the Black Lives Matter movement, how he’s trying to understand mis- and disinformation from both the right and the left, and what fixing social media might look like when the scale of platforms like Facebook and Twitter is what makes them so exciting and so difficult to moderate.

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.