2021 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Interoperability and Alternative Social Media

Abdo, Alex; Doctorow, Cory; Keller, Daphne

This panel will focus on the interoperability of social networks, a popular prescription for weakening the power of politically influential sites like Facebook and Twitter. Author and internet activist Cory Doctorow will speak about “adversarial interoperability,” an “elegant tool” that allows technical innovators to build new tools that interoperate with existing systems whether the owners of those systems like it or not. Legal scholar and former associate general counsel for Google, Daphne Keller, will approach questions of interoperability and regulation from the perspective of user rights and benefits.

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Reimagine the Internet is a virtual conference co-hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the soon-to-be-launched Initiative on Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In six sessions over five days, there will be more than a dozen speakers whose work hints at what the internet could become over the next decade.

As the internet has become an inescapable part of our commercial, social, and civic lives, the flaws and harms of the contemporary internet have become increasingly apparent. Despite rhetoric of decentralization, monopolies and points of control have arisen online, and powerful corporations have largely unregulated power over vast swaths of speech and commerce. The spaces these corporations have built may be having significant negative effects on our democracies, leading towards political polarization, the spread of mis/disinformation, and the growth of politically influential conspiracy theories.

While there is robust debate about what social ills can be traced to decisions made by commercial actors, the discussion over what’s to be done is often circumscribed. We debate how platforms like Facebook and YouTube should be regulated to be less harmful, but the conversation rarely extends to questions about how we could design new internet spaces that could lead towards healthier discussions, communities, and societies. “Reimagine the Internet” is an event designed to spark some of these conversations and to feature some of the most promising efforts in this direction.