This is the Substack Live video and audio podcast post of my Sustain What chat with journalist Tina Kelley and lawyer Eric Jepeal, who are seeking partners for Commonloop, a social media platform that would funnel revenue generated from humans’ online habits (which are unlikely to change soon) into enterprises or programs that are a boon for all of us - instead of a boon for billionaires.
Here’s the curtain raiser post with lots of relevant links:
Here are some relevant papers and posts we alluded to:
2021 PNAS paper: Stewardship of global collective behavior https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118
The digital age and the rise of social media have accelerated changes to our social systems, with poorly understood functional consequences. This gap in our knowledge represents a principal challenge to scientific progress, democracy, and actions to address global crises. We argue that the study of collective behavior must rise to a “crisis discipline” just as medicine, conservation, and climate science have, with a focus on providing actionable insight to policymakers and regulators for the stewardship of social systems.
2023 paper (article summarizing): Social media platforms generate billions in annual ad revenue from U.S. youth https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/social-media-platforms-generate-billions-in-annual-ad-revenue-from-u-s-youth/
Social media platforms Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube collectively derived nearly $11 billion in advertising revenue from U.S.-based users younger than 18 in 2022, according to a new study led by Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The study is the first to offer estimates of the number of youth users on these platforms and how much annual ad revenue is attributable to them. The study was published on December 27, 2023, in PLOS ONE.
Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now - Jaron Lanier’s manifesto:
https://www.jaronlanier.com/tenarguments.html
Reversing “enshittification” of everything - my chat with Cory Doctorow
Bluesky’s for-profit model
https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan
The Conversation - a global op-ed page, in essence, largely facilitated and populated by universities.
https://theconversation.com/us/partners
The website for the philanthropy efforts of YouTube’s titan, “Mr. Beast”:
https://www.beastphilanthropy.org/our-work
When Expertise Becomes a Requirement: Lessons from China’s New Influencer Regulation https://www.ssbm.ch/when-expertise-becomes-a-requirement-lessons-from-chinas-new-influencer-regulation/
Center for Humane Technology - social media in society
https://www.humanetech.com/social-media-society
How to Fix the Internet podcast, Electronic Frontier Foundation
https://www.eff.org/how-to-fix-the-internet-podcast
A sobering moment from my conversation with Tristan Harris (a founder of the Center for Humane Technology) after the release of the Netlix documentary Social Dilemma
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Thank you Steve Chapple, Victor I. Covaleski, R Hull, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
