#public-sphere — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #public-sphere, aggregated by home.social.
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Habermas, Post-Truth Philosopher, Dies Aged 96
Jürgen Habermas, known for his ideas on democracy and public discussion, died at 96. His work explored how people talk and agree.
#JürgenHabermas, #Philosophy, #Democracy, #PublicSphere, #RIP
https://newsletter.tf/philosopher-jurgen-habermas-dies-at-96/
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Jürgen Habermas, a very important thinker about how societies work and democracy, has passed away at age 96. He wrote many books that explained how open talk helps people make decisions together.
#JürgenHabermas, #Philosophy, #Democracy, #PublicSphere, #RIP
https://newsletter.tf/philosopher-jurgen-habermas-dies-at-96/ -
The Fediverse is our coffee house! (Minus the coffee.)
#CoffeeHouses #PublicSphere #JürgenHabermas #MastodonCulture
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Fuel for discontent is building
"Where there is fuel for discontent, there is increasing risk that global challenges could spark a blaze." The Grattan Institute >>
https://theconversation.com/to-stop-australian-democracy-going-the-way-of-the-us-heres-what-we-need-to-do-280353
#inequality #PublicSphere #CivicEngagement #democracy #AntiDemocraticForces #discontents #PolyCrisis #environment #FossilFuels #climate #governance -
What makes this especially serious is that the campaign has been marked by harsh rhetoric, disinformation, and disputes over outside influence. That is precisely why this vote is also a test of the resilience of democratic public life.
#Disinformation #Democracy #Media #PublicSphere -
15 cases of innovation in civic engagement from the Global South, in #openaccess
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We like to think walls belong to the past.
They don’t.
They evolve.
What once looked like walls made of concrete now show up as narratives, algorithms, and silent lines we don’t question enough.
https://open.substack.com/pub/associationredefine/p/invisible-walls-fear-control-division?r=6l8ed8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web#Democracy #DigitalDemocracy
#MediaLiteracy #Disinformation
#Systemsthinking #PoliticalEducation
#AlgorithmicBias #PublicSphere -
A capacity for rational dialogue?
“Democracy depends on the belief of the people that there is some scope left for collectively shaping a challenging future.” Jürgen Habermas
"His abiding concern was the state of democracy and the fear of backsliding into the exclusionary and violent social order..." >>
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/14/books/jurgen-habermas-dead.html
#PublicSphere #PublicDiscourse #communication #dialogue #nationalism #violence #democracy #CriticalTheory -
Jürgen Habermas has died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
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The #Philosopher Jürgen #Habermas is dead. His work on the #publicsphere is essential to understand why not only #TV and #Radio, but also #socialnetworks and #AI #Chatbots need to be regulated so as to ensure that they serve -and not undermine- #democracy and #fundamentalrights.
Now it's time to read:
The Philosopher: Habermas and Us by Philipp Felsch, 208 p.,
Things Needed to Get Better: Conversations with Stefan Müller-Doohm and Roman Yos by Jürgen Habermas, 196 p.
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The philosophical giant Jürgen Habermas has left us.
Habermas spent decades championing the "theory of communicative action" - the idea that democracy only functions when we actually listen to one another. Without his guiding voice, we face a chilling reality: a world where the loudest lies often drown out the most reasoned truths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%BCrgen_Habermas
#Habermas #Democracy #Philosophy #PublicSphere #Communication #SocialTheory
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A willingness to think publicly
In Australia, one avoids talking about politics, religion and sex. "Jon Kudelka’s political cartoons were made with true conviction. A willingness to think publicly." >>
https://theconversation.com/as-beautiful-as-they-were-powerful-jon-kudelkas-political-cartoons-were-made-with-true-conviction-275538https://www.kudelkashop.com/
Image: Jon Kudelka
#PublicSphere #parrhesia #Australia #wildlife #art #climate #FossilFuels -
"The Chinese internet is shaped by forces not unique to China but present in autocracies and democracies alike: the amplification of illiberal voices, the contraction of the public sphere, the erosion of common sense. Today, both autocrats and oligarchic CEOs have taken over the once-open space of the web, monitoring our private lives, ensnaring us in an endless feed, and extracting our attention for influence and profit. As I write, Silicon Valley’s attention moguls work alongside the ascendant Trump administration, centralizing power in their hands beyond democratic oversight. We find ourselves fettered by the very technologies that once promised to liberate us; they shape our behavior in ways we ourselves cannot even see, dictating what we choose to click and consume, to pay attention to and ignore, to say and not to say. The imperative for us to “live within the truth” — authentically and with greater human agency in the face of manipulative systems — has become more urgent than ever before."
https://restofworld.org/2026/wall-dancers-china-internet-book/
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“You talkin’ to me”
Taxi Driver at 50: Martin Scorsese’s film remains a troubling reflection of our times - a forlorn portrait of a society coming apart at the seams.
“There are a lot of Travis Bickles, especially right now.”
"They’re all talking to each other on the internet. When I first wrote about him, he was talking to nobody. He really was, at that point, the Underground Man. Now he’s the Internet Man."
"It is a sobering thought."
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https://theconversation.com/taxi-driver-at-50-martin-scorseses-film-remains-a-troubling-reflection-of-our-times-261662
#ressentiment #violence #discontent #masculinity #rage #racism #misogyny #EconomicDecline #loss #ranking #valorisation #ImperialistViolence #inequality #progress #regression #WesternModernity #SocialAcceleration #film #internet #PublicSphere #OnEdge -
Frisch erschienen: Eine Special Section des "Global Media Journal - German Edition" (Vol. 15, No. 2) zum Thema #ContentModeration. Christoph Böhm und ich haben vier feine Beiträge kuratiert und dazu eine Einleitung geschrieben.
Die ganze Ausgabe gibt es per Open Access hier: https://www.globalmediajournal.de/index.php/gmj
#ContentModeration #gatekeeping #SocialMedia #digital #PublicSphere #FreedomOfExpression #censorship -
'The Sovereign Individual' - The winner-takes-all
"Across its 400 pages, The Sovereign Individual celebrates the instincts of our impossibly wealthy technofeudal overlords to accumulate, hoard and insulate themselves from the messier demands of mass democracy...This libertarian manifesto, loved by Peter Thiel, urges a ‘cognitive elite’ to see selfishness as a virtue."
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https://theconversation.com/this-libertarian-manifesto-loved-by-peter-thiel-urges-a-cognitive-elite-to-see-selfishness-as-a-virtue-263742
#society #civility #individualism #PublicSphere #surveillance #TechIndustry #fortresses #violence #VibeShift #SocialDarwinism #book -
Emergence of governance in open communities
How the Fediverse is growing to meet its challenges
[German language version of this text will be published in FIfF-Kommunikation, the journal of the Forum InformatikerInnen für Frieden und gesellschaftliche Verantwortung (FIfF e.V.)]
ToC
The dead live longer
Multi-layered self-regulation
Gab: the Nazis are coming
Threads and Bluesky: Federation Washing?
Conclusio: Small is Beautiful
LiteraturThe social media landscape has been undergoing a tectonic shift since Elon Musk took over Twitter and Donald Trump took over the USA. The Fediverse emerged at a time when the previous phase of decentralised social networks – the blogosphere – was being supplanted by globally centralised platforms such as Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006). With them came the problems: surveillance-based advertising, election manipulation by Cambridge Analytica, addictive design, enshittification of previously useful services (Cory Doctorow), techno-feudalism (Yanis Varoufakis).
In contrast, a counter-movement for the recentralisation of the Internet (Kahle 2016, Berners-Lee et al. 2016) is emerging and for sovereignty in Europe, which is becoming painfully aware of its comprehensive technological dependence on the US.
The perception of a crisis is giving rise to a new digital universe, the decentralised and federated Fediverse. For many migrants from toxic environments, it feels like a friendly neighbourhood where reason and civilised conversation prevail. Of course, this is not a genetic trait, hard-coded into Mastodon & Co. But how does an open community oriented towards the common good, a bustling field of players and technologies, organise itself? How does the governance of complex socio-technical systems unfold?
Resilient structures of self-organisation, so the theory goes, are the result of experiences of conflict. Current external or internal conflicts as well as structural problems (onboarding, money, etc.) trigger a collective reflection that challenges open communities to emerge from a lack of structure. The solutions, as I would like to show with examples, can be of technical or social protocols, usually a combination of both.
The dead live longer
Distributed and federated protocols have been around since 1999 with XMPP. According to official historiography, the Fediverse began in 2008 with the decentralised OpenMicroBlogging protocol and the platform Identi.ca, a free version of Twitter based on it, both developed by Evan Prodromou.
In January 2016, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) presented the ActivityPub protocol to improve the interoperability of the various decentralised platforms in the Fediverse. Prodromou is again co-author. Also since 2016, Eugen Rochko has been developing the microblog Mastodon, which is now the star among the decentralised platforms with around ten million users. In addition to Mastodon, the microblog Misskey, the photo platform Pixelfed, the link aggregator Lemmy and the video platform Peertube are also popular in the ActivityPub universe (FediDB: Software, April 2025).
As already mentioned, the development is motivated by criticism of the techno-feudalism of the mega-platforms. The current lead author of ActivityPub, Christine Lemmer-Webber, notes that no companies are involved in the team developing the protocol, which is very unusual for technical committees. In addition, the team identifies predominantly as queer, which leads to functions in the protocol and in the clients that help users and administrators to protect themselves from ‘unwanted interaction’ (Klemens 2023).
Mastodon is run by a non-profit limited company. The community excludes venture capital as well as surveillance advertising, which has made the mega-platforms the richest companies in the world. Mastodon per default does not even include a function for displaying adverts. But how is a global community that is essentially financed by collecting donations supposed to build an alternative to this overwhelming power and lure people out of the lock-in by the mega-companies?
As the Fediverse contradicts all business logic, experts predicted that it would soon come to an end (Woźniak 2025). The opposite is the case. At Berlin Fediday 2024, Prodromou (2024) reported on growth by all criteria: ActivityPub is being implemented by more and more platforms (WordPress, Ghost.org, Flipboard, Threads). The number of users is growing continuously, as are the bridges to other protocols, applications, content, publications and institutions of self-organisation: the SocialCG (Community Group) for ActivityPub at the W3C, the online conference FediForum, the moderator community IFTAS, Mastodon’s non-profit offshoot in the USA. He answers the question of his presentation title ‘Is Bigger Better?’ with a resounding yes.
A week later, Prodromou announced the creation of the Social Web Foundation (SWF), whose mission is a ‘growing, healthy, sustainable and multipolar Fediverse’. Shortly afterwards, the foundation became a member of the W3C as a community front-end for ActivityPub: ‘We collect requirements and design potential extensions to the ActivityPub protocol and guide them through standardisation’ (SWF 2025).
Multi-layered self-regulation
The Fediverse is, of course, also subject to external regulation through laws, etc. The focus here is on the area in which the Fediverse players are free to regulate themselves. The Fediverse project unites them on the basis of a normative conviction: a different, decentralised, federated Internet is possible. Civil society and the public sector can collectively create an online environment in which people treat each other in a civilised and respectful manner. Common values are initially shared tacitly. As the community grows and becomes more diverse, but especially when conflicts challenge these values, they are made explicit in rules of conduct, mission statements, etc. and operationalised with mechanisms for their implementation and enforcement.
Projects usually start with minimal ad hoc organisational structures and move on to more permanent forms as required. Regulation arises in order to solve problems, e.g. a legal form must be established in order to open a bank account and thus collect donations. Internal dynamic lead to the problem of the Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL). A free software project is started by a man (is there really not a single woman in the Wikipedia list of BDFLs?), becomes popular, grows into a community of co-developers and users, in which the founder remains at the top, respected for his valuable contributions. A meritocracy that, if left unchecked, becomes dysfunctional. The term was coined for Linus Torvalds and his Linux kernel. In the Fediverse, this currently affects Matt Mullenweg from WordPress, Daniel Supernault from Pixelfed and Loops and Eugen Rochko from Mastodon, for example. The latter announced in January 2025 that he would retire from management and concentrate on development. A new non-profit company is to be founded to which he will transfer the Mastodon brand and the copyrights to the code. This means that Mastodon’s independence no longer depends on a single person (Mastodon 2025).
Gab: the Nazis are coming
2016 was a breakthrough year for the Fediverse. It was also the year of Brexit and Trump’s first presidential election. And behind both, the Alt-Right movement emerged onto the research radar from image boards like 4Chan. An Internet-native movement that only half-jokingly boasts of having voted Trump into office and promotes “Fashy”, a “fashionable fascism” (Cramer 2017).
Gab was launched in August 2016 as a social network for radical free speech. Co-founder Andrew Torba cited ‘the total left-wing monopoly of Big Social’ as the motive. Especially during the 2016 election, Facebook and Twitter censored conservative voices. Gab started on its own technology as a mixture of Twitter and Reddit.
Gab was soon banned from the app stores for hate and pornography. In October 2018, a white supremacist killed eleven people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh. The perpetrator had posted his anti-Semitism on Gab for almost a year. As a result, payment services, web hosts and cloud providers also blocked Gab. To circumvent this block, the creators decided to migrate Gab to a fork of Mastodon in July 2019, making it accessible with every Mastodon app.
Mastodon founder Rochko spoke out on the same day. He explained that the licence (AGPLv3) does not allow certain uses or users to be excluded as long as it is complied with. At the same time, he expressed his disgust at Gab,
“which uses the pretense of free speech absolutism as an excuse to platform racist and otherwise dehumanizing content. Mastodon has been originally developed by a person of Jewish heritage and first-generation immigrant background, and Mastodon’s userbase includes many people from marginalized communities.
Mastodon’s decentralized approach that allows communities to self-govern according to their needs has enabled those marginalized communities to create safe spaces for themselves where previously they were reliant on big companies like Twitter to stand up for them, which these companies have often failed to do.” (Rochko 2019)
It was precisely decentralisation and federation that brought about a social protocol as a solution. On the one hand, many Mastodon admins had already decided to block Gab, including mastodon.social, which is operated by the Mastodon gGmbH itself. On the other hand, rules have been made explicit for the servers listed on joinmastodon.org, which is also operated by the gGmbH. With the Mastodon Server Covenant, server operators commit to
1. Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia,
2. Daily backups,
3. At least one other person with emergency access to the server infrastructure,
4. And to give users at least 3 months of advance warning in case of shutting down. (Mastodon: Covenant)
There is no technical switch against Nazis. Although there have been discussions about inserting code into the clients to prevent them from logging into Gab servers, such changes can be easily reversed. The copyright licence also does not allow Nazis to be excluded from using one’s own software. There is a long debate about banning use for military purposes, for example (Kreutzer 2006). In practice, restrictions on use by licence violate the definition of free software and have not become established.
Nazis can set up their own Fediverse servers. However, the Federation’s code of conduct, the Covenant, ensures that these instances remain isolated, like Gab and Truth Social, and do no harm in the Federation. For newcomers, this level is less visible than the policies of the individual instances. However, it is crucial for the information space as a whole.
Regulations are only as good as their enforcement. Block lists for accounts and instances are maintained as tools for the daily work of admins and moderators (e.g. Oliphant). The moderators have joined forces in the IFTAS (Independent Federated Trust & Safety) forum.
Looking back at research on “alternative social media” (ASM), Robert W. Gehl (2025) notes that the widespread assumption that ASM are progressive had a blind spot: they can just as easily be used by the political right. The deplatforming of right-wing radicals on the mega-platforms increased the pressure to build their own places for radical freedom of speech. Now the research has turned into the opposite and reduced ASM to ‘alt-right social media’. However, Gehl sees an advantage in the fact that an aspect that was largely missing from the earlier literature has since been addressed: governance. ‘Much of the earliest scholarship focused on how technical elements such as free and open source software and decentralized architectures would shift power away from corporate social media to end users, but had less to say about how those users might govern themselves.’ (ibid.)
Threads and Bluesky: Federation Washing?
The next invasion of the Fediverse threatened to come from one of the mega-platforms that the alternative was up against. Meta wanted to capitalise on the Twitter exodus following Musk’s takeover and planned a text-based companion app to Instagram. Threads launches with fanfare on 5 July 2023. Thanks to Instagram’s more than two billion users, the new service gained 100 million users within five days, except in Europe, where a data protection clarification delayed the launch until December. Threads also began integrating the ActivityPub protocol in December 2023 (The Verge 2023).
The bridge from Instagram to the Fediverse has triggered even more heated debates than Gab, including reciprocal death threats. Above all, there were fears about the well-known strategy of embrace, extend, extinguish. From this camp, the tried and tested instrument used against Gab was brought up: a campaign for the collective exclusion of threads from the federation, which was followed by many instances.
Conversely, Fediverse stakeholders welcomed threads because they see interoperability between platforms as a major step forward. ‘We’ve been advocating for this for years,’ wrote Rochko (2023) on the day of the threads launch. In his blog post, he addresses accusations (data tracking, advertising, being overwhelmed by huge servers, embrace-extend-extinguish, moderation). However, he describes the lock-in of the social graph as the biggest problem, which prevents users from switching platforms if they do not want to lose all their contacts.
“The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.” (ibid.)
Prodromou also welcomed the mega-platform’s access so that the Fediverse can quickly grow and become a powerful alternative. If there are problems, every site and all users are free not to connect to the newcomers. ‘Choice is part of the strength of the Fediverse.’ (Prodromou 2024)
Another invasion came from Twitter, specifically from its co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. In 2019, he launched an initiative that gave rise to the AT Protocol and Bluesky Social. The platform with the look and feel of the original Twitter was launched in 2023. In January 2025, Bluesky claimed to have 30 million users (BNO News 2025).
Technically, the AT protocol allows decentralisation. In fact, the system is currently neither decentralised nor federated, as Lemmer-Webber (2024) discusses in detail. Furthermore, venture capital financing, not least from blockchain circles, raises doubts about sustainable freedom.
Conclusio: Small is Beautiful
The mega-platforms must continue to be rendered less hazardous through legal regulation. Buying oneself free is not an option. Rather, building alternatives is crucial. Decentralisation from above leads to a Fedi-Washing that only looks like it. The inherently decentralised network of protocol-connected nodes that has grown over the years and organises itself from below is sustainable. Last but not least, the Fediverse offers an opportunity for Europe. Many of the developers and more than twice as many Fediverse servers are in the EU (8,818) than in the USA (4,275) (Fediverse Observer, April 2025).
The non-profit nature and small size of the communities are clearly positive features of the Fediverse. Kissane & Kazemi (2024) have investigated how governance is organised on individual servers and between servers. Their conclusion: ‘Fediverse governance as we encountered it in our research conversations is emergent, unevenly distributed, and often reactive.’ The majority of Fediverse servers are operated by individuals or small groups. Medium-sized servers offer uniquely favourable conditions for community self-governance according to local norms and allow for very direct, context-dependent moderation that is superior to that of centralised platforms. ‘The Fediverse’s combined emphasis on the sovereignty of local norms and a federated form of network diplomacy can offer a real and optimistic challenge to the dead end of centralized content moderation at scale’ (ibid.).
To summarise: local, manageable communities form the basis, create diplomatic networks and grow organically into a fediverse that is more than the sum of its parts. Small is Beautiful as a prerequisite for Bigger is Better.
Literatur
Berners-Lee, Tim et al. (2016). Solid: A Platform for Decentralized Social Applications Based on Linked Data, 2016, http://emansour.com/research/meccano/solid_protocols.pdf.
BNO News (2015). Twitter alternative Bluesky hits 30 million users, 28.01.2025, https://bnonews.com/index.php/2025/01/twitter-alternative-bluesky-hits-30-million-users/.
Cramer, Florian (2017). Meme Wars: Internet culture and the ‘alt right’, at FACT Liverpool, 07.03.2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiNYuhLKzi8.
FediDB: Software (o.J.). https://fedidb.org/software.
Fediverse Observer (o.J.). Server nach Land, https://fediverse.observer/stats.
Gehl, Robert W. (2025). A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship, 07.02.2025, https://www.socialmediaalternatives.org/2025/02/07/asm-scholarship-history.html.
Kahle, Brewster (2016). Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Decentralized Web, Juni 2016, https://archive.org/details/LockingTheWebOpen_2016.
Kissane, Erin & Darius Kazemi (2024). Findings Report: Governance on Fediverse Microblogging Servers, https://fediverse-governance.github.io/.
Klemens, Ben (2023). Mastodon – and the pros and cons of moving beyond Big Tech gatekeepers, Ars Technica, 02.01.2023, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/mastodon-highlights-pros-and-cons-of-moving-beyond-big-tech-gatekeepers/.
Kreutzer, Till (2006). Open-Source-Software zwischen Moral und Freiheit, iRights, 15.08.2006, https://irights.info/artikel/open-source-software-zwischen-moral-und-freiheit/6219.
Lemmer-Webber, Christine (2024). How decentralized is Bluesky really?, 22.11.2024, https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/.
Lemmer-Webber, Christine (2025). Toot, 19.01.2025, https://social.coop/@cwebber/113856458328842294.
Mastdon: Covenant (n.d.), https://joinmastodon.org/covenant.
Mastodon (2025). The people should own the town square, 13.01.2025, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/.
Prodromou, Evan (2024). A Bigger Better Fediverse, presentation at Berlin Fediday 2024, 14.10.2024, https://berlinfedi.day/2024/.
Rochko, Eugen (2019). Gab switches to Mastodon’s code. Our statement, 04.07.2019, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/07/statement-on-gabs-fork-of-mastodon/.
Rochko, Eugen (2023). What to know about Threads, 05.07.2023, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/.
SWF (2025). The Social Web Foundation announces its membership in the World Wide Web Consortium, 11.2.2025, https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/02/11/the-social-web-foundation-announces-its-membership-in-the-world-wide-web-consortium/.
The Verge (2023). Threads is officially starting to test ActivityPub integration, 13.12.2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/24000120/threads-meta-activitypub-test-mastodon.
Woźniak, Michał “rysiek” (2025). Eight years on, Mastodon stubbornly survives, personal blog, 05.04.2025, https://rys.io/en/177.html.
#Fediverse #FreeCulture #Internet #mediaScience #publicSphere
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Comparto un breve artículo que he escrito sobre Mastodon y Bluesky como alternativas a X. Es un análisis introductorio en torno a tres elementos que diferencian a ambos servicios y que podrían influir en su desarrollo futuro: el protocolo de comunicación, el sistema de moderación de contenidos y el modelo de propiedad. ¡Gracias a las personas que por aquí me ayudaron a resolver algunas de mis dudas!
#Mastodon #Bluesky #publicsphere #esferapública #alternativestoX
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“On a digital network, public space is not a place (like Facebook), it is the interconnection of sovereign spaces owned and controlled by individuals.”
– What is the Small Web
https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/#fn:4
#SmallWeb #publicSpace #publicSphere #townSquare https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/114049881597268650
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“The lords of the algorithm dictate not just headlines but your sense of time, place, the destiny of your desires.” writes Peter Pomerantsev. “There is a growing transparency divide between Europe and the US – but it is America that has less freedom of speech in this sense. And that gives citizens less choice and agency to understand what they see and how – all is controlled by tech CEOs.”
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Agenda-setting by mass media, social/ media literacy and the climate
"97% of adult Australians have limited skills to verify information online – new report. We also found many people accept content at face value, mostly based on their “gut feeling” or emotional response, rather than questioning the content".
"Accessing reliable and trustworthy information enables citizens to make informed decisions about everything – from voting, to making purchases, to staying safe online, to accessing health advice and services...Unlike many advanced democracies such as the Netherlands or Finland, Australia doesn’t have a national media literacy policy or strategy to ensure citizens are provided with support to help them verify information online."
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https://theconversation.com/97-of-adult-australians-have-limited-skills-to-verify-information-online-new-report-243595The significance of media consumption on climate opinion
"Our study has ... identified that patterns of consumption of ABC and Sky News predict climate opinion, with more consumption of ABC aligning with agreement with pro-climate action opinions and more consumption of Sky News aligning with disagreement with pro-climate action opinions. We further identified a consistent relationship between climate opinion and frequency of consuming ABC and Sky News, with higher consumption of ABC News aligning with stronger pro-climate opinion and higher consumption of Sky News aligning with weaker pro-climate opinion."
>>
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074301672400250XGreens to call Murdoch executives before Senate inquiry into greenwashing>>
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/04/greens-to-call-murdoch-executives-before-senate-inquiry-into-greenwashing-ntwnfb
#MediaLiteracy #information #credibility #accuracy #framing #MassMedia #MSM #online #SocialMedia #SocialNetworking #platforms #AI #AgendaSetting #citizens #PublicSphere #democracy #EngagedCitizenship #ClimateDisruption #climate #FossilFuels -
"The purpose of this report is to analyse the role of digital platforms in contemporary media environments, including public perception of the benefits and problems they bring, especially when it comes to news and information about politics.
Overall, we find evidence for what we call ‘platform ambivalence’. This refers to the fact that many people use platforms for news and information about politics, while also remaining sceptical of the information they see there, and concerned about misinformation, bias, privacy, freedom of expression, and tech power. At the same time, people also appreciate the wider societal and personal benefits, such as easy access to information and staying connected with friends and family.
The report focuses on five platform types: (i) social media, e.g. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok; (ii) search engines, e.g. Google, Bing, and Yahoo!; (iii) video networks, e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion; (iv) messaging apps, e.g. WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger; and (v) generative AI chatbots, e.g. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Perplexity."
#SocialMedia #PublicSphere #SocialNetworks #DigitalPlatforms
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Do we need our own European #publicsphere in these weary times? Can we have our own European Social media that protects our #data?
So this time we went to Brussels to sit down with the people who shape these policies – in the European Parliament’s own studio. Alice Stollmeyer, Christian Ehler, Karen Melchior:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bj0nV0YR_OM -
"The blogosphere
could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But..the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes."
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/05/the-blogosphere-is-in-full-bloom-the-rest-of-the-internet-has-wilted-dave-winer
#blogosphere #SocialMedia #WalledGarden #fiefdom #PublicSphere #Agora #writing #CounterPublics #SocietalDebates #Commons #OpenSource -
From Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism pg 382:
A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. The mixture in itself was remarkable enough, because it spelled the end of the illusion that gullibility was a weakness of unsuspecting primitive souls and cynicism the vice of superior and refined minds. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
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