In my new book Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear [MIT Press | Amazon] I critically examine what press freedom means today. I argue that, as news production, circulation, and interpretation are increasingly distributed across a new and unstable set of humans and nonhumans—from journalists and algorithms to platform designers […]
What do we expect of content moderation? And what do we expect of platforms? There is an undeniable need, now more than ever, to reconsider the public responsibilities of social media platforms. For too long, platforms have enjoyed generous legal protections and an equally generous cultural allowance, to be “mere conduits” not liable for what […]
The following is an excerpt from my new book, Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today. In most workshops on how to use LinkedIn, some new adopter would ask: how public must my profile be? This question is about participant structure–who is the audience of a given profile? […]
Fashion bloggers and Instagrammers seem to enjoy a coveted lifestyle–one replete with international jet-setting, designer-comped fetes, and countless other caption-worthy moments. Yet the attention lavished on these so-called “influencers” draws attention away from a much larger class of social media content creators: those aspiring to “make it” amid a precarious, hyper-competitive creative economy. I tell […]
I’ve been trying to write a comment about the leaked Facebook documents published by The Guardian this week. The documents, part of the training materials that Facebook provides to independently contracted moderators, instruct them on what they should remove and what should stay, across a wide variety of categories. But it’s hard not to feel disheartened […]