The paper that started it all. Ethan lays out what digital public infrastructure is and why we need it, pointing to the successful history of public broadcasting to argue for the introduction of public service digital tools that fill gaps in the digital public sphere.

The paper that started it all. Ethan lays out what digital public infrastructure is and why we need it, pointing to the successful history of public broadcasting to argue for the introduction of public service digital tools that fill gaps in the digital public sphere.

This paper fleshes out the definition of digital public infrastructure, and starts to outline a roadmap for building an ecosystem of public service digital tools.

A look at the paradox that many treat their publicly viewable YouTube videos like an effectively private way to share videos with friends and families while AI companies view these as open season for training large language models.

Trade-offs in creating a temporal map of Reddit. A look at the data science models, research methodologies, and design decisions that went into representing a snapshot of Reddit taken in 2021 and 2022 with out Reddit Map project.

A popular press overview of the most significant findings from our ‘Dialing for Videos’ paper.

Understanding the content on YouTube as a whole by random sampling from its 13 billion videos. There’s a lot of gaming, not a lot of people speaking English, and most videos don’t have comments or likes. Does that mean YouTube is full of failed creators? No, it means most people on YouTube are using it in very quotidian ways.

A collective of Dutch public broadcasters and cultural organizations (PublicSpaces) have taken on the work of auditing their software use and identifying tools that conflict with their values. This paper outlines the PublicSpaces origin story, and investigates whether the model of aligning software with the principles of “values-led organizations” might create a new market for open source and socially responsible software.

The paper that started it all. Ethan lays out what digital public infrastructure is and why we need it, pointing to the successful history of public broadcasting to argue for the introduction of public service digital tools that fill gaps in the digital public sphere.

This paper explores early accounts of social media content moderation to consider whether the “free speech” and “public health” approaches to community moderation might have obscured a promising earlier model: community moderation. Community moderation has re-emerged in spaces like Reddit and special purpose social networks and in novel platform initiatives such as the Oversight Board and Birdwatch. The paper argues that community moderation approaches could address persistent challenges of social media moderation.

This essay lays out a new way of thinking about social media platforms, classifying them based on their ownership (one owner/many owners) and network structure (big room/many rooms). For example, what do Twitter and Mastodon have in common? They are both big rooms. How are they different? Twitter has one owner, while Mastodon has many owners.

An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media is a collection of essays exploring the different “logics” that animate the diverse universe of social media. Because Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are so prominent and are so widely amplified by mainstream media, we tend to assume that all social media operate in the same way and suffer from the same problems. This narrow view of social media not only limits our discussions about social media and social media’s effects, it constrains our imagination about what social media could do or be. 

A survey of the existing middleware landscape and analysis of tools’ potential impacts on users and social media as a whole.

To enable the spread so-called “middleware,” or software the users could employ to help them better navigate and filter their social media accounts, new privacy norms will need to prevail. We suggest “contextual privacy,” wherein norms about who has access to what information are dictated by a context created by culture, software, and users’ needs.

In this post, we propose a social media platform designed specifically for social music community. Mike makes the argument that right now, there’s only purpose-built technology for accessing music, but not for build social spaces around it. Freq takes inspiration from Reddit, Letterboxd, and torrent tracks to build intentional infrastructure for music community.

In this post, we introduce our open source tool RedditMap.social, which maps the most popular subreddits by number of comments and shows how closely they are related to one another. Ethan also explains the background of the project.c

This blog post outlines our work on Gobo, a “loyal client” for social media that aggregates, filters, and posts to your different feeds. We think a loyal client is critical to moving past many of the hard problems and sticky debates of the digital public sphere. By moving some power from platforms into the hands of individuals and clients, we can allow many different answers to the difficult questions of the digital public sphere, and inject some much needed agency and innovation into the social media space.

This blog post outlines our work on Smalltown, a fork of Mastodon we’ve developed for use in small-scale civic discussions. We are using Smalltown to test out a number of our hypotheses about social media and to experiment with new approaches to building and running civic spaces online.

As Silicon Valley giants sketch their preferred future for digital advertising, an infrastructure with significant implications for life online and offline, there are startlingly few alternatives to their vision. In response, Chand and Ethan propose “forgetful advertising”, a vision for responsible digital advertising structured around a single design choice: avoiding the storage of behavioral data. Forgetful advertising can still target ads using information like geography, intent, and whatever other context can be gleaned from a single interaction between a user and a website, but it cannot remember any previous interactions to inform its targeting. Chand and Ethan argue forgetful advertising can make digital advertising compatible with the values of human agency and privacy and offer it as a bottom-up solution for organizations that find existing digital advertising systems inconsistent with their values.