Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Content moderation is at the heart of operating a social media platform—removing, promoting, demoting, and labeling content factors significantly into users’ experiences. It’s inevitably controversial, difficult to do accurately and safely, and a focal point for external pressure. A young man in Manila, Philippines, explains his work as a…

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman The work of running a small social media platform is primarily social, rather than technical. Unlike big platforms, which are largely differentiated by technical affordances and whose work mostly involves building and maintaining technical infrastructure, small platforms are largely differentiated by social factors and most of their work involves…

By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media has changed the way memes—cultural building blocks—are produced, transmitted, and selected. In particular, social media has expanded the diversity of memes and accelerated their evolutionary process. Framing social media as an evolutionary environment for memes is a useful analytical tool for understanding the digital public sphere. In…