On Wednesday morning, the amazing and brilliant lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University (K1A) – primarily Ramya Krishnan and Alex Abdo – filed a lawsuit on my behalf: Zuckerman vs. Meta Platforms. This is a federal lawsuit, filed in the northern district of California, and it seeks “declaratory judgement” – basically, a ruling from the court that a research study I propose to conduct won’t break laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The research is pretty simple: In 2021, UK-based programmer Louis Barclay built a browser extension called “Unfollow Everythi ..read more

I’m at an event today at UMass Amherst put together by colleagues to launch the new initiative, GloTech, which focuses on perspectives on technology and media from the Global Majority. I’m thrilled to be a senior fellow with GloTech and to lend a hand today with moderating a panel on elections around the world, and the role of mis/disinfo and foreign influence in global elections. So my mind is on questions of election interference. And that’s a helpful frame with which to explore X, Elon Musk’s transformed Twitter, which has moved from being a space that carefully labeled misinformation and f ..read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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