Adela Bancau-Burcea (Montpellier): Social Media and Freedom of Thought. Ruby Siegel (Skidmore): Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Social Media: Understanding the Relationship Between Facebook, Twitter, and Political Understanding. Thread: “I think an overlooked reason that social media is making our politics more contentious is that it undoes the ‘Big Sort”, and kills cultural federalism”. Mark Oppenheimer on the death of civility in the digital age. Social media can’t stop the weaponization of bad faith. Francis Fukuyama on social media and democracy: The Internet and the rise of social media has changed the terms of the free speech debate worldwide — but in the U.S. context, the burden of any move towards control of bad information may have to rest on the platforms themselves. This explains how social media can both weaken — and strengthen — democracy.
Heather M. Whitney (NYU): Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy. Is the Twittersphere more like a virtual town hall, or an informal convention? Tim Wu on how Twitter killed the First Amendment. Political Twitter is no place for moderates. “Just an ass-backward tech company”: How Twitter lost the Internet war. Twitter, it’s time to end your anything-goes paradise. Opinion Zeynep Tufekci on YouTube, the great radicalizer. YouTube is only just realizing that it might be bad for all of us. Death by a thousand cuts: Marta Zarzycka on misogyny online. Scrolls, trolls, and rickrolls: What a brief history of web harassment can tell us about the contrarian crisis in op-ed land.
Jason Hannan (Winnipeg): Trolling Ourselves to Death? Social Media and Post-Truth Politics. Nancy LeTourneau on addressing the human problem with social media. Social networks are broken — Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix them. Any successful attempt to prevent the real social media pathologies — such as extremist, abusive and hateful behavior online — must be multi-faceted, thoughtful, collaborative and evidence based. How do we fix life online without limiting free speech? Andrew Marantz on Reddit and the struggle to detoxify the Internet. Our best hope for civil discourse is on Reddit.
How social media endangers knowledge. Can social networks do better? We don’t know because they haven’t tried. The age of unregulated social media is over. Why it’s time to regulate social media companies like Facebook.
