Social media platforms have proven to provide users with a space to connect that is non-existent in the physical world. However, users struggle with mental health concerns, disinformation, and more. Social media’s issues have a wide range of implications for these individuals and society as a whole. Middleware—third-party services that give users more control over […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
A few weeks ago, several hundred academics, students, and professionals gathered at the University of Pennsylvania for the 10th International Conference on Computational Social Science: two-and-a-half days packed with presentations and posters. This post attempts to highlight some of the work I found most exciting and briefly summarizes the presentations Kevin Zheng and I gave […] The post Recap: Interntional Conference on Computational Social Science appeared first on Initiative for Digita...| 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 […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
By Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media makes it possible for a piece of content to rapidly spread to millions of people in a matter of hours. In fact, “going viral” may be the defining phenomenon of the digital public sphere. Justine Sacco was flying from New York to South Africa to see family […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Advertising, the dominant business model for social media, is lucrative for platforms and enables users to access services for free. However, left unregulated, it often places platforms’ interests at odds with users and the public. When the Web first emerged, it wasn’t clear how services would make money. Dozens […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Social media has always supported authenticity—both subjective and objective. At the same time, social media constantly undermines authenticity. How people and platforms resolve that paradox is a key dynamic in the digital public sphere. From the start, social media promised a more authentic public sphere. Content could flow freely and […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Popularity is a fundamental force across social media, with implications for society at-large. Is a popularity contest the right model for allocating social capital in the digital public sphere? In 2017, Jimmy Donaldson, a teenage dropout from Eastern Carolina University, uploaded an unusual YouTube video. It was nearly 24 hours […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman Traditionally, field guides focus on the natural world, offering descriptions of different species or families that help readers identify them. As this field guide is focused on social media, we will need a different locus than species or families for our taxonomy. We’ve settled on “logics.” We use “logic,” […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
with Ethan Zuckerman This is a draft of a chapter from Chand’s and Ethan’s forthcoming “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year on MIT Press. We’d love your feedback on what we have so far, so please share your thoughts in the comments. When we set out to write this book, centered around […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
Posts like these will be appearing in our newsletter regularly. To get those right in your inbox, subscribe today. In 2021, we published An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with the Knight First Amendment Institute. It was the culmination of a months-long exploration of alternative social media “logics” meant to encourage fresh thinking about […] The post Announcing the “Field Guide to Social Media” Newsletter appeared first on Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure a...| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 rewards curiosity while making it easy to locate just what you came here to find. […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 a whole by producing a random sample of YouTube videos, analyzing their metadata, sending the… Continue reading 5 Main Takeaways from Randomly Sampling YouTube| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
In 2021, we published An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with the Knight First Amendment Institute. It was the culmination of a months-long exploration of alternative social media “logics” meant to encourage fresh thinking about the possibilities for social media. In the two years since, we’ve been heartened to see the book used in […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 were published in Science and Nature this summer. We brought on three guests to talk… Continue reading The Facebook Studies series on Reimagining the Internet| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Freq is an experimental platform for social music discovery from the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst.| 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 sentences also enjoy r/NatureIsMetal, which features images of animals being savage or brutal, and r/InstantKarma,… Continue reading We Mapped Reddit: Introducing RedditMap.social| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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 organizations” – find those values undermined by tools they must use to conduct business online.… Continue reading Creating PublicSpaces by Geert-Jan Bogaerts, José Van Dijck, and Ethan Zuckerman| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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 men’s lodges, Putnam believed, helped train citizens in the mechanics of civics. People learn to… Continue reading How social media could teach us to be better citizens by Ethan Zuckerman| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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.”| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Ethan lays out his vision for one of the key ideas we’re working on at iDPI, The Good Web.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Since 2017, we’ve been running Gobo.social as an experiment with you, the social media user, to explore how you could control what you see on platforms. Instead of Facebook’s algorithm or Twitter’s trending topics, you get to choose how the information from all of the people you follow is filtered. We have some new ideas… Continue reading Gobo.social| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci published the ebook An Illustrated Field Guide to Social Media with original artwork by Fiammetta Ghedini. he book is adapted from the Mapping Social Media" series of blog posts written by Ethan and Chand for the Knight Foundation, documenting the wide variety of ways social media is put together on the Internet.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
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 a lot today, often referring to a paradigm shift in Internet technologies that’s just around […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 unique in their feed, with each one covering a different topic through interview segments and… Continue reading Trust: A Reimagining Miniseries| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure
“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 Rajendra-Nicolucci and Michael Sugarman under the editorial direction of Ethan Zuckerman. Access “The Three-Legged Stool” […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 COVID-19 pandemic, people and organizations needed a new virtual space to host all kinds of […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 own feed instead of depending on proprietary algorithms? This is what we are hoping to achieve with the next iteration of iDPI’s Gobo project.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
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 you should stay on Twitter as well. What we need are more and different online […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
At iDPI we’re agitating for a smaller future of the Internet. To illustrate this, it’s helpful to think about rooms. Offline, there are all sorts of rooms that we gather in: there are churches, bars, gyms—what we do in each of those is pretty different. Facebook is like a big conference center, with high ceilings, […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
Interoperability — it’s a gruesome little chunk of jargon that refers to a fairly fundamental tenet of the Internet. Simply, it means that different applications and devices can share the same data with one another. As users, we enjoy interoperability daily.| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
We’re Doing What We Love So Joe Rogan Can Get Paid Seven Figures Say the N-Word, Denigrate Trans People, and Undermine Vaccines| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst
In March, we published iDPI’s first piece of research, New Approaches to Platform Data Research. This was written by Elizabeth Hansen-Shapiro, Michael Sugarman, Fernando Bermejo, and Ethan Zuckerman. Download the full report here. The white paper was originally commissioned by the NetGain partnership as a post-mortem on the Social Science One initiative. Ultimately, the research […]| Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at UMass Amherst