What do Pepe the Frog, WallStreetBets and the state of democracy have in common? Meme culture. You heard a whole lot about the “meme stock mania” last week (but did you hear that Jaime Rogozinski, the WallStreetBets subreddit’s founder, just sold his life story to RatPac Entertainment?). You may not have heard of Pepe the Frog until “he” became a meme tweeted by Donald Trumps Sr. and Jr. in 2015. Now Pepe’s the subject of the important documentary about Internet culture and meme politics Feels Good Man.

Whatever we think about meme stocks and meme politics, they’re part of the…

Remember that headline in The Atlantic three years ago asking whether smartphones were “destroying a generation”? I hope not. But if you do, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary — even in 2020, believe it or not. Young people are using smartphones and other technology to heal themselves and the planet. I’m going to share some beautiful anecdotal evidence with you in a moment, but let’s zoom in on the research evidence for one paragraph:

2020, youth & mental health

First, many researchers pushed back almost immediately. I cited nine scholars’ comments here, and a year later, Erin McAweeney and Mary Madden, researchers at…

Watch this non-documentary, now on Netflix, at your own risk. At the very least go into it with more than a grain of salt. Because—calculatingly, it really seems—the film triggers all the old fears and anxieties about the Internet and social media, pre- and post-Cambridge Analytica, without leaving much hope that solutions are possible.

Not that there aren’t some good and brilliant people in there asking all the questions many have been asking for a long time and saying all the same things that they’ve said elsewhere (you will probably recognize Jaron Lanier, Tristan Harris, Shoshana Zuboff, Roger McNamee and…

I’m certainly not the first to quote her, but yesterday Evelyn Douek at Harvard Law School tweeted, “Americans want platforms to be places of open expression, but also misinfo removed, but also tech companies have too much power & can’t be trusted to make content decisions, but also the gvt would be worse.”

Exactly. Making social media a safe place for everybody while protecting the freedom of expression of everybody, including those whose “free speech” spells harm to others is a little like “A Note from Your University about Its Plans for Next Semester”…

“After careful deliberation, we are pleased…

We’re feeling the urgency, right? Maybe it’s just that we’re facing more than we ever have, amid a pandemic, nationwide protests against social injustice and a fraught election year. But all of a sudden, small, incremental, single-platform fixes seem like “band-aids,” symptom treatments.

An example is the Oversight Board that Facebook started. Now its own organization and with its first 20 members, it’s only Facebook’s brainchild, not its baby. It’s about appealing content decisions on just one (admittedly planet-spanning) social media platform. When I first heard and wrote about it, I saw it as an important social experiment. I still…

For 20 years now, all around the world, governments, child advocacy groups, corporations, schools and parents have actually been trying to uphold children’s rights of protection by ignoring their participation rights online (those of expression, conscience, participation, association, access to information and being consulted on matters that concern them). I’m referring to two of the three categories of rights enshrined in the 30-year-old UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the third category being their rights of provision.

Until now. There is growing awareness of how facile, fear-driven and unethical that old approach is. We’re seeing more and more…

Olivia Van Ledtje, age 12, is a social media influencer but in a good way. A powerful way, actually. Spark Change: Making Your Mark in a Digital World — a new book she co-authored with her mom, teacher, speaker and education consultant Cynthia Merrill — explains what “powerful” means to a child and a whole lot of her peers.

Olivia tells the story of giving a talk two years ago in a western Massachusetts elementary school auditorium that was packed with students and teachers from 3 school communities. …

It wasn’t because of the headline — “Zuckerberg and Warren want to fix Big Tech in different ways — and neither of them will work” — that I was excited to read this article by researchers in Science, Technology & Society at Harvard. The headline itself sounded too much like more of the same reflexive punditry we’ve been hearing since the US’s Big Data wakeup call of 2018.

I was excited to see its authors saying that the solution to today’s privacy, safety and ethics concerns around “Big Tech” is not either-or. It’s neither the tech fix of the Mark…