Tracking how young people are expressing voice and exerting agency in public spheres through participatory politics.

Here's a snip from a blog post by Ethan Zuckerman about lessons learned from many hours on the phone with reporters doing "social media in Iran" stories:

It's been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there's been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world.

Today on Boing Boing tv, a conversation with Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, about videoblogging culture in the North African nation of Tunisia.

Despite intense restrictions on freedom of speech there, and extreme risks for critics of the political status quo, bloggers there are finding innovative uses for video online, as a method of cultural commentary and activism. — Read the rest

Ethan Zuckerman, founder of Tripod and Geekcorps, wrote a hilarious account of making a hot tub from scratch in the dead of winter. He says it was a horrible idea, but the photos and humor in the entry tell me that he and his friend had a great time making it. — Read the rest

Ethan Zuckerman is the head of the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure at the UMass–Amherst and the author of such books as Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn't, and How to Rewire It and the brand-new Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them. — Read the rest

Even if social media platforms were 100% effective at removing fake news and conspiracy theories, the problem won't go away, says Ethan Zuckerman, associate professor of public policy, communication, and information at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The problem can only be fixed by changing the political system so that corrupt powerful people can't benefit from large percentages of the population believing conspiracy theories. — Read the rest

Civic Signals is a new organization co-lead by The Filter Bubble author and former Upworthy founder Eli Pariser, which aims to explore new ways to leverage the democratic power of the Internet for positive change (previoupublic spsly). From January 12-14, they'll be hosting their first ever (online) New Public Festival, "in an emergent conversation over 3 days in our online park with an extraordinary group of designers, urbanists, technologists, builders, artists, and civic futurists." — Read the rest

Mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook say they are trying to delete posts about QAnon, a far-right conspiracy theory that grew out of another conspiracy theory, Pizzagate. Of course, attempts to scrub QAnon from social media only add fuel to the fire. — Read the rest

For more than a decade, consumer rights groups (including EFF) worked with technologists and companies to try to standardize Do Not Track, a flag that browsers could send to online companies signaling that their users did not want their browsing activity tracked. — Read the rest

The End of Trust will be McSweeney's issue 54, the first-ever all-nonfiction issue of McSweeney's, with more than 30 contributions on "surveillance in the digital age."

Despite the widespread belief that meme-warriors won the election through tactical shitposting of photoshopped Pepe the Frogs in Nazi arm-bands, the reality is a lot more complicated.

A team of esteemed scholars including Yochai "Wealth of Networks" Benkler and Ethan Zuckerman (co-founder of Global Voices) analyzed 1.25 million media stories published between April 1, 2015 and election day, finding "a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world."

Ethan Zuckerman — formerly of Global Voices, now at the MIT Center for Civic Media — has spent his career trying to find thoughtful, effective ways to use technology as a lever to make positive social change (previously), but that means that he also spends a lot of time in the company of people making dumb, high-profile, destructive suggestions for using technology to "solve" problems in ways that make them much worse.

Brett "Remix Manifesto" Gaylor tells the story of his new project: a revolutionary "mashup documentary" about privacy and the Web.

Using organized teams of locals, Motor City Mapping has created an amazing map of blight in Detroit — letting neighbors and city officials see the precise condition of 400,000 houses. — Read the rest

The Dislike Club is an ambitious program that will feature luminaries talking about where we are in 2014 when it comes to internet culture and internet and society.
Guests include Ethan Zuckerman, Gabriella Coleman, Paul Ford, and Astra Taylor, as well as a group of people who never joined Facebook, coming together to debate what they should do about what they feel is an invasion of their privacy by the big social media sites.

Ethan Zuckerman — founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices — is an activist who puts his money where his mouth is. For decades, he's undertaken heroic efforts to foster a global dialog using the Internet, taking practical steps to network netheads from all over the world, giving them the power to work together. — Read the rest

Artist Jay Shells combines his love of hip hop music and his formidable sign-making skills in "Rap Quotes."

Something weird happened on Twitter yesterday. It was annoying and upsetting at the time, but now it's meaty fodder for behavioral analysis discussions. Ethan Zuckerman wrote a blog post about it that extracts some of the more interesting questions raised about social media and activism. — Read the rest

(Updated with additions, March 10, 2012. Here's a Twitter list, so you can follow all of the African writers mentioned in this post who are on Twitter.)

The internets are all a-flutter with reactions to Kony 2012, a high-velocity viral fundraising campaign created by the "rebel soul dream evangelists" at Invisible Children to "raise awareness" about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony and child soldiers. — Read the rest