Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks

  1. Ramón Salaverría 1
  2. María-Pilar Martínez-Costa 1
  3. Clara González Tosat 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Navarra
    info

    Universidad de Navarra

    Pamplona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02rxc7m23

Libro:
Journalism, Digital Media and the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN: 978-3-031-63152-8,  978-3-031-63153-5

Año de publicación: 2024

Páginas: 15-25

Tipo: Capítulo de Libro

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-63153-5_2 GOOGLE SCHOLAR lock_openAcceso abierto editor

Resumen

The presence of disinformation and hate speech has multiplied on several centralised social networks. Since its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter (renamed X) has taken controversial measures to increase profits, at the cost of degrading the content offered to users. Other networks, such as TikTok, are suspected of serving as a resource for international espionage, or of stimulating addictive behaviour among minors. Faced with the threats derived from the strategy of these social networks, decentralised network alternatives are emerging, including the so-called fediverse of networks such as Mastodon, with models based on open collaboration and dynamics far removed from the trending topics. This chapter analyses the recent evolution of centralised social networks, showing the problems derived from their transformation. It then analyses the opportunities and limitations of decentralised networks as a resource for overcoming these problems. In particular, it explores the resilience of these networks as a tool for combatting disinformation and censorship.

Referencias bibliográficas

  • Abbing, R. R., Diehm, C., & Warreth, S. (2023). Decentralised social media. Internet Policy Review, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.14763/2023.1.1681
  • Anaobi, I. H., Raman, A., Castro, I., Zia, H. B., Ibosiola, D., & Tyson, G. (2023, April). Will admins cope? Decentralized moderation in the fediverse. In Y. Ding, J. Tang, J. Sequeda, L. Aroyo, C. Castillo, & G.-J. Houben (Eds.), WWW ‘23: Proceedings of the ACM web conference 2023 (pp. 3109–3120). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2302.05915
  • Bakker, P. (2012). Aggregation, content farms and Huffinization: The rise of low-pay and no-pay journalism. Journalism Practice, 6(5–6), 627–637. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2012.667266
  • Bin Zia, H., Raman, A., Castro, I., Hassan Anaobi, I., De Cristofaro, E., Sastry, N., & Tyson, G. (2022). Toxicity in the decentralized web and the potential for model sharing. Proceedings of the ACM on measurement and analysis of computing systems, 6(2), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2204.12709
  • Bogost, I. (2022, November 10). The age of social media is ending. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/.
  • Bradley, S., & Perelli, A. (2023, August 30). Social media is dead. Business Insider. https://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-dead-instagram-tiktok-bereal-replaced-group-chats-messaging-2023-8.
  • Brandtzæg, P. B., & Heim, J. (2010, May). User loyalty and online communities: Why members of online communities are not faithful. In INTETAIN ’08: Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on INtelligent TEchnologies for interactive enterTAINment. ICST. https://doi.org/10.4108/ICST.INTETAIN2008.2481
  • Braun, J. (2023, May 10). Journalism, media research, and Mastodon: Notes on the future. Digital Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2023.2208619
  • Chen, B. (2023, April 19). The future of social media is a lot less social. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/technology/personaltech/tiktok-twitter-facebook-social.html
  • Domingo, D., Quandt, T., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Singer, J. B., & Vujnovic, M. (2008). Participatory journalism practices in the media and beyond: An international comparative study of initiatives in online newspapers. Journalism Practice, 2(3), 326–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512780802281065
  • Fishman, Z., Brewster, J., Wang, M., & Pavilonis, V. (2023, May 5). Verified misinformation: “Blue check” Twitter accounts are flooding the platform with false claims; under new owner Elon Musk, Twitter is granting legitimacy to some of the platform’s influential misinformers. Newsweek, 180(13). https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A746844400/AONE
  • Giachanou, A., Zhang, X., Barrón-Cedeño, A., Koltsova, O., & Rosso, P. (2022). Online information disorder: Fake news, bots and trolls. International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, 13, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41060-022-00325-0
  • Guerra, P., Meira, W., Cardie, C., & Kleinberg, R. (2021). A measure of polarization on social media networks based on community boundaries. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 7(1), 215–224. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14421
  • Laakaniemi, R. (1981). The computer connection: America’s first computer-delivered newspaper. Newspaper Research Journal, 2(4), 61–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/073953298100200409
  • La Cava, L., Greco, S., & Tagarelli, A. (2022). Discovering the landscape of decentralized online social networks through Mastodon. SEBD 2022: The 30th Italian symposium on advanced database systems, June 19–22, 2022, Tirrenia (PI), Italy. https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3194/paper25.pdf.
  • Marwick, A. E. (2021). Morally motivated networked harassment as normative reinforcement. Social Media + Society, 7(2), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051211021378
  • McIntyre, K. E. (2014). The evolution of social media from 1969 to 2013: A change in competition and a trend toward complementary, niche sites. The Journal of Social Media in Society, 3(2), 5–25. https://www.thejsms.org/index.php/JSMS/article/view/89
  • Nieman Reports. (2023, October 11). Six months ago NPR left Twitter. The effects have been negligible. https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/.
  • Orihuela, J. L. (2023). Manual breve de Mastodon. EUNSA.
  • Pariser, E. (2011). The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin.
  • Petre, C. (2021). All the news that’s fit to click: How metrics are transforming the work of journalists. Princeton University Press.
  • Quian, A. (2021). Wikipedia como campo de batalla ideológico e intelectual. In D. Teira & C. Elías (Eds.), Manual de periodismo y verificación de noticias en la era de las Fake News (pp. 173–206). Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia–UNED. https://doi.org/10.5944/m.periodismo.verificacion.2021.07
  • Quian, A., & Elías, C. (2017). Wikipedia y sus relatos colaborativos como indicador de interés ciudadano. Revista Prisma Social, 18, 85–123. https://revistaprismasocial.es/article/view/1426
  • Raman, A., Joglekar, S., Cristofaro, E. D., Sastry, N., & Tyson, G. (2019, October). Challenges in the decentralised web: The Mastodon case. In Proceedings of the Internet measurement conference (pp. 217–229). https://doi.org/10.1145/3355369.3355572
  • Salaverría, R. (2021). Journalists’ use of UGC and automated content: Ethical issues. In L. T. Price, W. Wyatt, & K. Sanders (Eds.), Routledge companion to journalism ethics (pp. 317–325). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429262708-42
  • Sawhney, H. (1996). Information superhighway: Metaphors as midwives. Media, Culture & Society, 18(2), 291–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344396018002007
  • Schneble, C. O., Elger, B. S., & Shaw, D. (2018). The Cambridge Analytica affair and Internet-mediated research. EMBO Reports, 19(8), e46579. https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201846579
  • Scolari, C. (2022). La guerra de las plataformas. Anagrama.
  • Zulli, D., Liu, M., & Gehl, R. (2020). Rethinking the “social” in “social media”: Insights into topology, abstraction, and scale on the Mastodon social network. New Media & Society, 22(7), 1188–1205. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820912533