Publications

Defederation on decentralized social media offers new possibilities for online governance. Experts consider how it can be used responsibly, in a way that balances speech and safety.

As the social media landscape undergoes broad transformation for the first time in over a decade, with alternative platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads emerging where X has receded, many users and observers have celebrated the promise of these new services and their visions of alternative governance structures that empower consumers. Drawing on a large-scale textual analysis of platform moderation policies, capabilities, and transparency mechanisms, as well as semistructured group interviews with developers, administrators, and moderators of federated platforms, we found that federated platforms face considerable obstacles to robust and scalable governance, particularly with regard to persistent threats such as coordinated behavior and spam. Key barriers identified include underdeveloped moderation technologies and a lack of sustainable financial models for trust and safety work. We offer four solutions to the collective safety and security risks identified: (1) institutionalize shared responses to critical harms, (2) build transparent governance into the system, (3) invest in open-source tooling, and (4) enable data sharing across instances.

When I worked at Twitter, I led the team that placed a fact-checking label on one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. Following the violence of Jan. 6, 2021, I helped make the call to ban his account from Twitter altogether. Nothing prepared me for what would happen next.

Backed by fans on social media, Mr. Trump publicly attacked me. Two years later, following his acquisition of Twitter and after I resigned my role as the company’s head of trust and safety, Elon Musk added fuel to the fire. I’ve lived with armed guards outside my home and have had to upend my family, go into hiding for months and repeatedly move.

This isn’t a story I relish revisiting. But I’ve learned that what happened to me wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t just personal vindictiveness or “cancel culture.” It was a strategy — one that affects not just targeted individuals like me but all of us, as it is rapidly changing what we see online.

Private individuals — from academic researchers to employees of tech companies — are increasingly the targets of lawsuits, congressional hearings and vicious online attacks. These efforts, staged largely by the right, are having their desired effect: Universities are cutting back on efforts to quantify abusive and misleading information spreading online. Social media companies are shying away from making the kind of difficult decisions my team did when we intervened against Mr. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. Platforms had finally begun taking these risks seriously only after the 2016 election. Now, faced with the prospect of disproportionate attacks on their employees, companies seem increasingly reluctant to make controversial decisions, letting misinformation and abuse fester in order to avoid provoking public retaliation.

Could a public editor solve social media’s crisis of trust?