Hate has a significant advantage on social networks: its ability to go viral. The case of Luigi Mangione, the alleged murderer, urgently calls for a rethink of digital commons.
The Case for a Public Social Media Platform - JSTOR Daily
Artist and writer Joshua Citarella explores why corporate platforms corrode democracy—and what a postal-service-style digital commons could do differently.
AI-powered hate content is on the rise, experts say | CBC News
Experts say that artificial intelligence technology is allowing for a rapid increase in the amount of hateful content and misinformation online.
Bluesky COO Rose Wang On Building a Better Social Network
De-google-ify Internet - Main Page
The web giants centralize our digital lives in exchange for their services The Free Software community offers alternative ethical services The Framasoft network intends to prove itby hosting them
Free Our Feeds
Social media is broken: controlled by a handful of billionaires who shape what people see, say, and believe. These platforms profit from division, exploit user data, and lock people into closed systems.
RIP social media. What comes next is messy.
As social media splinters, how can we keep the new online spaces from devolving into toxic pits of despair?
Pirate Social — A Distributed Social Network
Pirate Social is a distributed social network connecting Bluesky, RSS, and YouTube, hosted on your own free website with integrated CMS.
Medsky
Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media
Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media
Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.
Dan Shipper 📧 on Twitter / X
The smallest technical decisions become humanity's biggest pivots:The same-origin policy—a well-intentioned browser security rule from the 1990s—accidentally created Facebook, Google, and every data monopoly since. It locks your data in silos—and you stayed where your stuff… pic.twitter.com/G87qsuPHxN— Dan Shipper 📧 (@danshipper) July 9, 2025
14 Theses on Online Political Violence
The old world of content safety practices is dead, and the new one is struggling to be born.
Ian Preston (@ianopolous.bsky.social)
Mathematician/particle physicist turned privacy researcher. Java Rockstar #Oxford Building a better web - private, self-sovereign identity, p2p, social - with @peergos.org. Public social media undermines democracy. #covidisairborne #maskswork #cleantheair
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
mai ishikawa sutton
My work lies at the intersection of technology and the solidarity economy. I’m passionate about strengthening the digital commons, in which people control and steward communication technologies as collective goods.