The Perilous Power Of Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms have immense power, from shutting down voices to amplifying what we see. But is that singular power perilous to democracy? Guests Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School. Author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.” (@shoshanazuboff) Guillaume Chaslot, founder of AlgoTransparency. Mozilla fellow. Advisor at the Center […]

Is social media an influential technology or an insurrectionist tool?: Status Report

Portion of “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso, 1937.  [Licensed under Creative Commons] On January 7, when Facebook suspended the US president’s account, followed on January 12 by Twitter suspending his account there, the response moved needles. “These actions,” wrote Prof. Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, for CNN.com, […]

The Technology 202: New report calls conservative claims of social media censorship ‘a form of disinformation’

The report found there is no trustworthy large-scale data to support these claims, and even anecdotal examples that tech companies are biased against conservatives “crumble under close examination.” The report’s authors said, for instance, the companies’ suspensions of Trump were “reasonable” given his repeated violation of their terms of service […]