News discussion site Reddit offers a model for a fairer internet - if it can overcome its flaws.
How to Fix Facebook—Before It Fixes Us
An early investor explains why the social media platform’s business model is such a threat—and what to do about it.
Publishers fearing Facebook dependency: fight for your future, reinvent RSS.
Right now Facebook accounts for over 40% of all traffic for U.S. news organizations, making many dependent on the social network for…
The Internet Isn’t Facebook: How Openness Changes Everything
Openness makes the Internet harder to govern — but also makes it resilient, innovative, and difficult to capture. Let's look at how the openness of the Internet both defines it and ensures its success.
Our Social Media is Broken. Is Decentralization the Fix? | Internet Archive Blogs
When Jack Dorsey, founder of the very centralized social media platform, Twitter, posted this message about decentralized social media, our DWeb community took note:
Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’: It’s the Zombie Internet
Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore interact to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.
Facebook's Big Move Toward the AfterWeb
Blow up your browser! The Next Big Thing is the AfterWeb. Facebook made a monumental announcement Monday that seemed as though it was designed to...
Can Facebook Fix Its Own Worst Bug? (Published 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg now acknowledges the dangerous side of the social revolution he helped start. But is the most powerful tool for connection in human history capable of adapting to the world it created?
New study shows just how Facebook's algorithm shapes conservative and liberal bubbles
Research conducted at the height of the 2020 election reveals new details about how Facebook's algorithms handle political content. But it suggests there are no easy fixes to political polarization.
Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media - Aaron Ross Powell
Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.
The Facebook Files
Facebook knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws but hasn’t fixed them. That’s a key finding of a Journal series that launched this week, based on an array of internal company documents. Read all the stories here.
How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation
The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can't fix the problem.
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
Facebook content management controversies
Facebook and Meta Platforms have been criticized for their management of various content on posts, photos and entire groups and profiles. This includes but is not limited to allowing violent content, including content related to war crimes, and not limiting the spread of fake news and COVID-19 misinformation on their platform, as well as allowing incitement of violence against multiple groups.
FediForum | Growing the Open Social Web:<br>An Online Un-Workshop
Since the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk over three years ago, the Open Social Web has been adopted by an enthusiastic community. People world-wide are building and using open social platforms and open social protocols to better interact with others online.
Facebook Shouldn't Give Politicians More Power Than Ordinary Users
Amidst escalating rhetoric about alleged "anti-conservative bias" on social media, Facebook has doubled down on its policies exempting (some) politicians from its ordinary fact-checking and from its
It's important to understand: social networks are not meant to be one-size-fits all! When Meta (which makes Threads, as well as Facebook and Instagram) creates platforms that have hundreds of millions of users, they do things like enable genocides, where tens of thousands of innocent people die.
Christopher Mims
So I guess either Bluesky becomes a nonprofit or we all start sharing our Threads handles on here…?
