GETTING-Plurality Research Workshop: Sovereigns and Subjects in the Digital Age
Online Event
Virtual
12:45 pm – 2:00 pm EDT
GETTING-Plurality Research Workshop: Prosocial Media
Join the next GETTING-Plurality Research Workshop with Emillie de Keulenaar, Luke Thorburn, and Glen Weyl, as they discuss their recent paper “Prosocial Media.”
Online Event
Virtual
11:45 am – 1:00 pm EDT
Related Programs
Please join us for the next GETTING-Plurality Research Workshop, convened by the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. In this session, we’ll hear from presenting authors Emillie de Keulenaar, Luke Thorburn, and Glen Weyl on their recent paper, “Prosocial Media.”
About the Speakers
Authors:
Emillie de Keulenaar is a PhD candidate at the University of Groningen, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam’s Open Intelligence Lab, and a research consultant for the UN DPPA Innovation Cell. Her research lies on the formation of speech norms in social media content moderation and their impact in the formation of online counter-spheres. With the UN DPPA Innovation Cell, she develops analytical software and research methods for monitoring public conflict and dialogue across the web.
Luke Thorburn is a Ph.D. student at King’s College London and a research fellow at the AI & Democracy Foundation. He works on topics at the intersection of algorithms and conflict, including systemic risks of social media algorithms, democratic infrastructure for AI governance, and the use of algorithms to support peace processes in conflict regions.
Glen Weyl is the founder and Research Lead of the Microsoft Research Special Projects the Plural Technology Collaboratory, founded and serves as Board Chair of the Plurality Institute, and founded and serves on the board of the RadicalxChange Foundation. He previously led web3 technical strategy at Microsoft’s Office of the Chief Technology Office, served as Co-Chair and Technical Lead of the Harvard Edmond & Lily Safra Center Rapid Response Task Force on Covid-19, and taught economics at University of Chicago, Princeton, and Yale.
Commentator:
Ethan Zuckerman is an associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative 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 (2021) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013).
Pre-Reading
Find the paper for pre-reading here: “Prosocial Media.”
Social media empower distributed content creation by algorithmically harnessing “the social fabric” (explicit and implicit signals of association) to serve this content. While this overcomes the bottlenecks and biases of traditional gatekeepers, many believe it has unsustainably eroded the very social fabric it depends on as it has attempted to maximize engagement and thus advertising revenue. We propose an alternative model that makes the social fabric an explicit output as well as input. Citizens are members of communities defined by explicit affiliation or clusters of shared attitudes. Both have internal divisions, as citizens are members of intersecting communities, which are themselves internally diverse.Each is understood to value content that bridge (viz. achieve consensus across)and balance (viz. represent fairly) this internal diversity, consistent with the principles of the Hutchins Commission (1947). Content is labeled with social provenance, indicating for which community or citizen it is bridging or balancing. Subscription payments allow citizens and communities to increase the algorithmic weight on the content they value in the content serving algorithm. Advertisers may, with consent of citizen or community counterparties, target them in exchange for payment or increase in that party’s algorithmic weight. Underserved and emerging communities and citizens are optimally subsidized/supported to develop into paying participants. Content creators and communities that curate content are rewarded for their contributions with algorithmic weight and/or revenue. We discuss applications to productivity (e.g. LinkedIn), political (e.g.X), and cultural (e.g. TikTok) platforms.
The paper was also recently featured in this TIME article.
Workshop Series Logistics
The GETTING-Plurality Research Workshop is a series convened by the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. In each session of the research workshop, we will discuss one paper focused on emerging technologies’ democratic potential or their governance. Our aim is to build a vibrant, cross-disciplinary scholarly community and support the development of cutting-edge work capable of confronting a new era of technological innovation, and its ethical and governance implications.
This 75-minute workshop is entirely virtual and will be conducted over Zoom — please register to receive the link. Papers will be pre-circulated, and all attendees are expected to read them. A full-group discussion of the work will follow a brief presentation by the author(s) and commentator feedback. Attendees are expected to join with their camera-on, as possible, and engage in the group discussion.