Pablo Boczkowski on the crisis in the “mental health capital of the world”
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
1w ago
I’m in Paris this week – spring break for UMass – visiting my second-favorite university, SciencesPo. I’ve taken on a new responsibility with SciencesPo, with a new initiative – l’institut libre des transformations numériques de Sciences Po – where I am leading a board of stakeholders advising the project. To spend some time with my colleagues – and to enjoy somewhere slightly warmer than western Massachusetts – I’m spending the week at SciencesPo, enjoying both planned and chance encounters. One of those encounters is with Pablo Boczkowski, a brilliant media scholar normally based at Northwes ..read more
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How Big is YouTube?
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
3M ago
How big is YouTube? I got interested in this question a few years ago, when I started writing about the “denominator problem”. A great deal of social media research focuses on finding unwanted behavior – mis/disinformation, hate speech – on platforms. This isn’t that hard to do: search for “white genocide” or “ivermectin” and count the results. Indeed, a lot of eye-catching research does just this – consider Avaaz’s August 2020 report about COVID misinformation. It reports 3.8 billion views of COVID misinfo in a year, which is a very big number. But it’s a numerator without a denominator – Fac ..read more
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Disinfo and Elections in the Global Majority
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
4M ago
I’m just back from a very quick trip to Rio de Janiero to take part in a conference put together by dear friend and colleague Jonathan Ong, called Disinformation and Elections in the Global Majority. Hosted at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio (wonderfully enough, shortened to PUC, pronounced “Pookie”) and co-organized by Jonathan and JM Lanuza at UMass Amherst and Marcelo Alvez at PUC, the event began as a conversation between Filipino and Brazilian scholars about the 2022 elections. It expanded to a much broader dialog about what the world could learn from the experiences of democrac ..read more
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Heather Ford: Is the Web Eating Itself? LLMs versus verifiability
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
6M ago
One of my favorite things in academia is that you can go a decade without seeing a friend and remain at least somewhat in touch with what they’re doing and thinking by reading their work. Dr. Heather Ford, Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, where she leads the cluster on Data and AI Ethics, is in the US for two weeks, and we were lucky enough to bring her to UMass Amherst for a talk today. I haven’t seen Heather in person for over a decade, but I’ve had the chance to follow her writing, particularly her new book, Writing the Revolution: Wikipedia and t ..read more
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What I Did On My Summer Vacation: 2023
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
6M ago
It’s chilly here in western MA and there’s a hint of red starting to show in the leaves. This was the second full week of classes and I’m remembering the joy of teaching at UMass, a place where our classes bring together a remarkable cross-section of smart people from across our state and the world. Summer is well and truly over, even though there are likely at least a few hot days still to come. I had an odd summer. I often work on a new course, a book or another major project in those months “off”. (Because I run a research lab, there is no “off” – our work continues through the summer, but ..read more
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Lightning Talks at CU Boulder Local Tech Economies
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
8M ago
Much of the Local Tech Ecology conference is a series of lightning talks at the Local Tech Ecologies conference at CU Boulder. Some short notes on each talk: Josh Ritzer from Nigh: “Talking about local is one of the most important things we’re not doing in society.” Josh grew up in Minnesota in a small town, and remembers watching big box stores displacing local businesses. He notes that rising inequality is destroying America’s middle class. We need to transform local commerce, building systems that pushes economic value to the local level. Coupons and “deals” are signs of an inefficient mark ..read more
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Local Tech Ecologies: Fernanda Rosa on decolonizing technology
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
8M ago
I’m at UC Boulder this morning at a conference organized by friend and colleague Nathan Schneider. He’s a professor of media studies who has done tremendous work thinking about communities and the systems that support them. Today’s conversation is focused on local tech ecologies, specific to Boulder, CO and more broadly. Nathan’s inspiration for the conference is, at least in part, disaster response. The Marshall Fire of December 2021 destroyed more than a thousand homes and left Boulder residents turning to social media to protect themselves and understand what was happening. The platforms Bo ..read more
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Competition for Twitter is good. Threads, thus far, is not.
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
9M ago
On July 6th, Facebook (note 1) launched Threads, their new messaging microblogging system built on top of Instagram… in other words, their Twitter killer. Within 24 hours, more than 70 million people – myself included – had signed up for the service, making it the fastest growing social network in history. But let’s be clear: Facebook had a serious head start. More than 3 billion users around the globe use one of Facebook’s core products – Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp – and the company can advertise the new service to any of those users. If you had an Instagram account – as more than 1.5 b ..read more
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Elon Musk’s Compelling Case for Worst Human of 2023
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
1y ago
There’s a saying that you never want to be the main character of Twitter. If you are, it usually means you’ve humiliated yourself in a particularly embarrassing way. The exception to this rule is Elon Musk, who seems to thrive on attention, positive or negative. As has been widely reported, Musk threw an epic temper tantrum when the President of the United States was receiving more attention than he was in making a tweet about the Superbowl, and responded by ordering Twitter engineers to massively amplify the reach of his tweets. pic.twitter.com/iZUukCVrl5 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14 ..read more
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New writing!
Ethan Zuckerman Blog
by Ethan
1y ago
It’s been a good winter for writing… or in some cases, a good winter for writing I did months ago to see the light of day. Here’s a few pieces I’m especially proud of and which may be of interest to you, depending on whether you follow me for insights on social media or just for the wedding photos. A Social Network Taxonomy: Is Mastodon a replacement for Twitter or something entirely different? That’s a surprisingly complicated question. Looking for an answer, and talking with friend Tom Tyler, Tracey Meares, Eli Pariser and Deepti Doshi, I found myself playing with some new ways to characteri ..read more
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