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Fixing Social Media

This event is part two of the two-part series presented by Ethan Zuckerman, How to Fix Social Media ... and Civic Life, and Everything Else, co-sponsored by the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the College of Information and Computer Sciences.

Fixing Social Media
Social networks like Facebook are an institution that have lost public trust over the past decade as their importance and influence has become increasingly clear. This loss of confidence presents an opportunity: instead of aspiring to fix social networks, we can imagine and build new tools that support our ability to be good neighbors and good citizens. What could social networks look like if their goal was not maximizing shareholder profit, but seek to strengthen our democracies. This talk explores the idea of software designed around civic values and seeks to make social change through creating publicly-funded social media.

Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2020) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages.

Mar 4, 2021 04:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)