Everyone Cheering The Social Media Addiction Verdicts Against Meta Should Understand What They’re Actually Cheering For

First things first: Meta is a terrible company that has spent years making terrible decisions and being terrible at explaining the challenges of social media trust & safety, all while prioritiz…

Estimating the effect size of moral contagion in online networks: A pre-registered replication and meta-analysis

Abstract. Over 5 billion people now use social media platforms. As our social lives become increasingly entangled with online social networks, it is import

Social media is a gnarly coordination problem we need to decompose - a warm space

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.

Study: Social media probably can’t be fixed

The [structural] mechanism producing these problematic outcomes is really robust and hard to resolve."

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?

Meta is limiting how much political content users see. Here's how to opt out of that

Meta is now limiting the amount of political content it recommends to Instagram and Threads users. Here's why it made the change — and how to opt out of it.

The spreading of misinformation online

Significance The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web is a fruitful environment for the massive diffusion of unverified rumors. In this work, using a massive quantitative analysis of Facebook, we show that information related to distinct narratives––conspiracy theories and scientific news––generates homogeneous and polarized communities (i.e., echo chambers) having similar information consumption patterns. Then, we derive a data-driven percolation model of rumor spreading that demonstrates that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size. , The wide availability of user-provided content in online social media facilitates the aggregation of people around common interests, worldviews, and narratives. However, the World Wide Web (WWW) also allows for the rapid dissemination of unsubstantiated rumors and conspiracy theories that often elicit rapid, large, but naive social responses such as the recent case of Jade Helm 15––where a simple military exercise turned out to be perceived as the beginning of a new civil war in the United States. In this work, we address the determinants governing misinformation spreading through a thorough quantitative analysis. In particular, we focus on how Facebook users consume information related to two distinct narratives: scientific and conspiracy news. We find that, although consumers of scientific and conspiracy stories present similar consumption patterns with respect to content, cascade dynamics differ. Selective exposure to content is the primary driver of content diffusion and generates the formation of homogeneous clusters, i.e., “echo chambers.” Indeed, homogeneity appears to be the primary driver for the diffusion of contents and each echo chamber has its own cascade dynamics. Finally, we introduce a data-driven percolation model mimicking rumor spreading and we show that homogeneity and polarization are the main determinants for predicting cascades’ size.

Social media algorithms can be redesigned to bridge divides — here’s how

"It falls to both the tech companies that built these systems and an engaged public to create technologies designed for social cohesion."

Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)

Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who wants the internet to feel human again, I think ATProto matters for you too.

Worried About Meta Using Your Instagram to Train Its A.I.? Here’s What to Know.

Social media users voiced worries about a move by Meta to use information from public posts, including on Facebook, to train its chatbot.

Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem | NOEMA

There’s never been a better time to make social media what it always should have been: a tool to strengthen rather than strip-mine the social fabric.

How Online Mobs Act Like Flocks Of Birds

A growing body of research suggests human behavior on social media is strikingly similar to collective behavior in nature.

Shifts in U.S. Social Media Use, 2020–2024: Decline, Fragmentation, and Enduring Polarization

The social media ecosystem appears to be in flux. Twitter’s rebranding to X has come to symbolize a broader reorganization of online publics – political reshuffling, user attrition, and uncertainty over the role of legacy platforms. Simultaneously, the shift from text-based, networked feeds toward algorithmically curated, short-form video has accelerated, with TikTok setting the pace for the wider ecosystem [18, 14, 16]. At the same time, everyday communication increasingly migrates from large, open networks to semi-private spaces such as group chats and messaging apps. Commentators describe a digital public sphere in transition: smaller, more fragmented, less dominated by traditional social networking sites, and rise of more broadcast-oriented forms of media – with some even suggesting that we are seeing the beginning of the end of the social media era.

A New Social

Our mission is to liberate people's networks from their platforms, enabling The Last Network Effect and leveling the playing field across the open social web.