Decentralized Social Media and the Great Twitter Exodus
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2022
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
It’s Election Day in the United States—so while you wait for the results to come in, why not listen to a podcast about the other biggest story obsessing the political commentariat right now? We’re talking, of course, about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the billionaire’s dramatic and erratic changes to the platform. In response to Musk’s takeover, a great number of Twitter users have made the leap to Mastodon, a decentralized platform that offers a very different vision of what social media could look like.
What exactly is decentralized social media, and how does it work? Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein has a paper on just that, and he sat down with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic on the podcast to discuss for an episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. They were also joined by Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John’s University, to hash out the many, many questions about content moderation and the future of the internet sparked by Musk’s reign and the new popularity of Mastodon.
Among the works mentioned in this episode:
- “Welcome to hell, Elon. You break it, you buy it,” by Nilay Patel on The Verge
- “Hey Elon: Let Me Help You Speed Run The Content Moderation Learning Curve,” by Mike Masnick on Techdirt
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | It is 100% capable of dealing with stuff that its users don't want to deal with. |
| 0:39.0 | And I think that what I like about it is that the proof is always in the pudding, |
| 0:43.0 | because ultimately, if the network over time does allow a controversial instance |
| 0:49.0 | to be part of most of it, then that's a sign that that controversial instance |
| 0:54.0 | isn't nearly that controversial. |
| 0:56.0 | And so it prevents unrepresentative sensoriasness, let's put it that way, |
| 1:01.0 | from dominating the rest of the conversation. |
| 1:04.0 | I'm Quinted Eurusic, senior editor at LawFair, |
| 1:08.0 | and this is the LawFair podcast, November 8th, 2022. |
| 1:14.0 | It's election day in the United States. |
| 1:17.0 | So while you wait for the polls to close and results to come in, |
| 1:21.0 | why not listen to a podcast about the other biggest story |
| 1:24.0 | obsessing the political commentary at right now? |
| 1:27.0 | I'm talking, of course, about Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter |
| 1:30.0 | and the billionaire's dramatic and erratic changes to the platform. |
| 1:34.0 | In response to Musk's takeover, a great number of Twitter users have made the leap to mastodon, |
... |
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