Social Platform Trust & Safety

Instead of asking whether or not a platform optimizes for engagement, it can be more helpful to ask how explicit or implicit these engagement signals are, and provide users with more controls to allow them to tweak their online experience.

These are the sorts of ways in which speech moderation online must embrace the political. The main question we must be asking about a speech platform is not what are the standards for moderation but who moderates and what is the moderator’s relationship to the community .

Zuckerberg’s social-media-shaped public does not turn around Zuckerberg in the same way. But even so, Zuckerberg is reshaping the algorithms so that some aspects of the public - in particular hostility to immigration, to women and to sexual minorities - will likely come to the fore, while others will recede. The extent to which this reflects his... See more

it's a mistake to think there's some perfect institutional design out there that's going to create the just world that we want. Whatever institutional design you have, humans are humans, and humans are going to strategically manipulate those institutions to try to achieve their ends. And there are going to be inequalities, power disparities, and... See more

If this is all downstream of a small and relatively well-off group of high frequency posters (some of our elected officials among them), that would suggest what we might call an ‘elite radicalization’ theory of online politics. The idea is that social media has empowered a (relatively) small group of political influencers who, in response to the... See more