Ethan Zuckerman

UMass Amherst, Global Voices, Berkman Klein Center. Formerly MIT Media Lab, Geekcorps, Tripod.com

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Last Notes

2026-10-07 19:48:59 UTC

If any friends are at 4S in Toronto, I'm giving a talk on AI and cosmopolitanism in about 45 minutes in City Hall (second floor) - not on the program, but please come say hi.

2026-08-25 17:19:36 UTC

Happy to share the latest issue of Daedalus, edited by the leaders of the Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which I was part of. My essay is on shifts in the media ecosystem in the past six years: https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/civic-information-architecture
I'm particularly excited about the essays reacting to my overview. Sandra González-Bailón sees turning points for the information environment in the 2010s that I neglected, writing mostly about this decade: https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/hardest-part-always-people
Steven Waldman emphasizes the danger to democracy presented by the loss of local news: https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/community-news-is-the-key And Darryl Holiday invokes the Gilded Age in examining concentration of wealth and power held by the owners of media platforms, seeking a return to community ownership: https://www.amacad.org/daedalus/civic-media-second-gilded-age

2026-08-10 16:10:33 UTC

Sometimes the body tells the mind to sit down and shut up. That's been the story of my summer, recounted here: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/08/10/the-eyes-have-had-it-a-mental-health-update-from-the-summer-of-sue/

2026-07-24 13:00:08 UTC

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@nprofile…fwps I would agree that the incentives are mostly advertising. The real reasons to migrate to less popular areas are affordable housing and quality of life, which can become more obvious once you've taken a look at house prices. But it's complicated, as you note - moving can sever you from community, and it's often only realistic if you have a job that can be done virtually.

2026-07-09 14:31:52 UTC

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@nprofile…fwps Thanks for a great visit!

2026-07-09 14:31:05 UTC

The case for AI sovereignty is easier to make the more the Trump administration screws with Anthropic - my latest for Prospect: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/74050/trump-anthropic-ban-ai-sovereignty

2026-06-16 15:03:23 UTC

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I'm very grateful to DiGRA for showcasing three brilliant young scholars in this keynote session and for giving Ifat time to tell the story of her work, her Uighur collaborators and the ways in which game spaces can be a venue for connection between friends and family members who've been forced apart.
(For my friends in academic spaces - Ifat will finish revisions on her PhD this year and is on the job market. She's absolutely amazing and someone you should look to hire.)

2026-06-16 15:03:11 UTC

So proud of Dr. Ifat Gazia, my student and dear friend, who received a standing ovation for her keynote this morning at DiGRA 2026 (the Digital Games Research Association annual conference) in Ireland. Ifat's dissertation (defended late last year) is about digital erasure - how vulnerable groups are kept from online spaces and how narratives are constructed about them, not by them. Ifat's work documents the ways in which communities - like Uighurs who have been expelled from or fled East Turkestan (Xinjiang) - can find each other through unexpected communities like the battle royale game PUBG.
Ifat's own struggles not to be erased were on display in her talk. It's difficult for international students in the US to travel right now, and Ifat wasn't able to be in Ireland due to issues with travel documents.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/116/760/387/825/852/325/original/4a7ab6face52c1b6.png

2026-05-13 20:38:36 UTC

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@nprofile…3gx9 Absolutely. Duck.ai sounds like it meets the characteristics of a loyal client as well - I don't know the others as well.

2026-05-11 18:28:13 UTC

"The loyal client" is a concept that's been important to our lab over the past five years as we've tried to make social media better: it's the idea that the tools you use to access social media should meet your needs, not those of the platform owner. Spencer Lane wrote a great paper on this as part of his dissertation, which the journal Internet Histories has just published. Very proud of him and happy to be a coauthor on this:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24701475.2026.2662718

2026-05-06 15:56:17 UTC

I have the cover story this month in Prospect, titled "Social Media in the Dock". It's an examination of recent court decisions in California and New Mexico and their implications. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/information-technology/73382/meta-google-social-network-in-the-dock
The TL;DR: it's good news that we've found ways to hold social networks responsible for bad product design and bad behavior without overturning Section 230. Big thanks to Nate Matias and Evelyn Douek for their help getting up to speed on the complex issues involved.

2026-04-17 16:54:08 UTC

Enjoyed this interview with InnovEU about the possibility of taxpayer-supported social media platforms and digital public infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_M7cU_8ofk&list=PLhPsYe80-Wq1bOuVZmZGso_Kr3W8biIpx&index=5

2026-03-26 20:52:18 UTC

Had such a good time with Dexter and The Kill Switch podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=wbCtoLvgc4Q So appreciate getting to talk about internet economics in detail with a smart, thoughtful journalist.

2026-03-26 15:19:54 UTC

Had a great time talking with Zachey Kliger about Meta's failed Metaverse bet, why Gen Z is suspicious of social media, and why XR is more interesting than VR: https://kligerscorner.com/blog/ethan-zuckerman-metaverse-ai/

2026-03-24 22:47:56 UTC

Howard French on his new book, "The Second Emancipation", speaking at UMass Amherst: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/03/24/howard-french-the-second-emancipation/

2026-02-02 22:17:09 UTC

"If, however, Trump is a fascist president, that does not mean that America is a fascist country." Excellent Jonathan Rausch essay, "Yes, It's Fascism" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-trump-maga-ice/685751/

2026-01-21 17:14:23 UTC

New course, new blog post: "Where Should We Live?" - Will Climate Change Alter Where Americans Choose to Live? https://ethanzuckerman.com/2026/01/21/where-should-we-live-a-new-class-on-cities-migration-and-climate-change/

2026-01-20 15:50:23 UTC

Why do tech billionaires want server farms in orbit? So that they don't have to deal with communities trying to defend their energy grids, water supplies and well being: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/72162/why-tech-billionaires-dream-of-servers-in-the-sky

2025-06-11 14:40:02 UTC

And while we are talking podcasts, I am delighted that Elizabeth Joh and Roman Mars are back with "What Trump Can Teach Us About Con Law" - they have been sorely missed, and the new episode - which goes from zoot suits to deportation - is terrific: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-return-of-con-law/id1242537529?i=1000712335937

2025-05-14 16:38:11 UTC

You can learn a lot from how a nation handles Wikipedia... and it's not good news that the US is starting to attack the problem. Great new essay from my friend Ryan McGrady: https://www.techpolicy.press/what-attacks-on-wikipedia-reveal-about-free-expression/

2025-05-05 16:11:48 UTC

I've been writing a great deal this spring about "authenticity" and American politics. This piece in Prospect is likely the most articulate - https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/technology/ai/69809/learning-to-speak-with-honesty-without-ai - and a few folks have said kind things about the piece. But if you're interested in the whole train of thought
You might want to check out:
Post-post-truth and the forking of reality: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/03/27/post-post-truth-or-how-the-signalgate-story-is-forking-reality/
Don't Look Up: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/04/04/science-on-screen-dont-look-up/

2025-04-24 22:00:43 UTC

A recent talk from UMass's excellent AI x Democracy conference - my thoughts on how media has shaped the democratic public sphere and what the politics of a public sphere mediated by AI might be: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/04/24/aixdemocracy-what-are-the-politics-of-ai/

2025-04-16 15:41:43 UTC

Honored to be moderating this conversation, "Democracy is a Disability Issue" at the Boston Museum of Science tomorrow night: https://www.mos.org/events/democracy-disability-issue .
If you're in Boston, please sign up and come. If not, please watch the live stream: https://www.mos.org/events/livestream-democracy-disability-issue

2025-04-09 18:55:19 UTC

Two punk goddesses not only made amazing music, but taught the DIY world how to press and distribute their own records. Mike Sugarman on Simple Machines, Tsunami and The Mechanic's Guide to producing your own recordings.
https://low-frequency.beehiiv.com/p/the-mechanic-s-guide-how-two-dc-punks-taught-the-american-underground-to-start-labels

2025-04-05 02:33:57 UTC

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I have students who are afraid to come to class because of ICE. I have students deleting their social media presence for fear they're being surveilled, looking for excuses to deport them. Five UMass students have had visas revoked: https://www.umass.edu/news/article/immigration-actions-affecting-students-umass-sponsored-visas

2025-04-05 02:33:57 UTC

The attacks by the Trump administration on universities by cutting funding are painful, and are going to damage our ability to conduct research. The attacks that are revoking student visas are utterly terrifying to students and are destroying our ability to teach.

2025-04-04 20:26:22 UTC

Earlier this week, I got to introduce "Don't Look Up" as part of Science on Screen at Amherst Cinema. It was a chance to talk about Neil Postman, participatory social media, the dangers of being smug, and authenticity in social media:
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/04/04/science-on-screen-dont-look-up/

2025-04-03 12:52:12 UTC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuOHbyuanbY
"Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work and the US sank deeper into the great depression."
(The average tariff under Smoot Hawley was 20%. As of "Liberation Day", the average tariff will be 22.5%)

2025-03-28 19:35:44 UTC

It's Friday. The world is a terrifying place right now. Take a break and try a new online community, where the only goal is shouting out the music you're in love with right now: freq.social, from your friends at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. (And once you're on, add me as a friend: https://www.freq.social/user/ethanz)

2025-03-27 15:10:35 UTC

Writing this morning about "post-truth" and forking realities. Reading some great stuff in support of my arguments, including this killer piece by Henry Farrell
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/were-getting-the-social-media-crisis
"...X/Twitter is a Pornhub where everything is twisted around the particular kinks of a specific, and visibly disturbed individual"

2025-03-26 14:46:09 UTC

Freq: out!
The new music recommendation/blogging app from iDPI, created by Mike Sugarman, is now in beta release, with invitations available via Mike's wonderful blog post about creating this new platform: https://low-frequency.beehiiv.com/p/freq-out
Come see the strange and wonderful tunes we spin as we try to figure out how to make the internet less awful. Create an account and offer your own playlist. Embrace small, community-driven, special purpose social media. Freq out!

2025-03-21 14:10:09 UTC

I'm giving a talk on mis/disinformation and the idea of the "post-truth society", in conjunction with a screening of "Don't Look Up" at Amherst Cinema, April 1st, as part of "Science on the Screen". Come join us! https://amherstcinema.org/series/science-screen

2025-03-20 21:51:17 UTC

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@nprofile…w8ng Correct - that's right. There are careful caveats in the Atlantic piece, though not in my much briefer post.

2025-03-20 21:23:48 UTC

Here's a fun back to back: The Atlantic offers a tool to let you find which of your writings have been included in Llama (and likely other AI chatbots) without your permission. My score? Both my books, intros to two other books and about 20 papers. (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/)
Glad to be of help? No, really I'm not. It's one thing to have these in Libgen for students in developing nations to access. Having Meta torrent these to train their stochastic parrot is something entirely different.

2025-03-13 16:10:05 UTC

Live-blogging today from “Attention: Freedom, Interrupted” at McGill University in Montreal. Two posts so far, in addition to my post from Joe Stiglitz last night:
International election interference:
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/03/13/freedom-interrupted-electoral-interference/
The Canadian media ecosystem and the American disinfo threat: https://ethanzuckerman.com/2025/03/13/taylor-owen-canadians-now-see-the-us-as-the-most-serious-disinfo-threat/

2025-03-07 17:37:36 UTC

Chat-based search apps are often "confidently wrong" in attributing and citing news stories... particularly Grok, which performs abysmally. Terrific study from CJR:
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/we-compared-eight-ai-search-engines-theyre-all-bad-at-citing-news.php

2025-02-21 16:07:09 UTC

Meta cancelling professional factchecking in favor of community notes is causing worry in West Africa, where online disinfo has led to community violence and death: https://globalvoices.org/2025/02/21/the-impact-on-the-african-continent-of-meta-scrapping-its-fact-checking-program/ - Great Global Voices coverage. (Also I love that we can toggle between original quotes and translation - great for me as a French language learner.)

2025-01-20 14:26:42 UTC

With Trump's inaugural podium filled with social media barons, it seems like a good time to review the Spanish American War and how new media - the penny press - led us into conflict: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/69071/zuckerberg-its-time-to-face-the-facts

2025-01-18 18:00:52 UTC

To be slightly blunter than The Atlantic allowed me to be: the tiktok ban is a protectionist subsidy to Meta and Google worth hundreds of billions of dollars: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/

2025-01-18 17:53:23 UTC

Grateful that The Atlantic will still read unsolicited manuscripts from me, given that I tend to send them my angriest pieces: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/internet-censorship-tiktok-ban/681361/
I have a hard time believing how far the US has fallen as a defender of speech online in the past two decades.

2025-01-14 19:24:37 UTC

"The future is sustainability. The future is density. The future is managed retreat away ...
For Americans, the hardest part of what is coming is going to be giving up on the grand American myth of infinite material abundance."
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/uninsurable-futures

2025-01-14 18:41:27 UTC

Social Web Foundation (I am an advisor) warns that having an unfactchecked Threads on the fediverse is a recipe for misery and mischief: https://socialwebfoundation.org/2025/01/12/content-policy-on-the-social-web/

2025-01-09 20:13:04 UTC

There's lots of hot takes on Zuckerberg's content moderation decision, and then there's Julia Angwin's, who uses it to explain that Meta is no longer growing through innovation and is reduced to political groveling. https://buttondown.com/JuliaAngwin/archive/heavy-lies-mark-zuckerbergs-crown/

2025-01-08 16:54:12 UTC

Meta embraces the "fuck it" phase of content moderation, in which investigative journalism is censored but sexually explicit ads are just fine: https://www.404media.co/facebook-is-censoring-404-media-stories-about-facebooks-censorship/

2024-12-31 20:01:23 UTC

I remember when using cellphone contacts to evaluate creditworthiness was all the rage at the MIT Media Lab. Who could possibly have guessed that lenders would use that info to shame borrowers to their friends to pressure them to pay? https://globalvoices.org/2024/12/20/kenyan-money-lending-apps-invade-borrowers-privacy-to-recover-debts/

2024-12-23 14:41:17 UTC

This interview with Senator Chris Murphy is the first Democrat, post-Trump victory, who I've heard offer a promising path forward: admitting that the current system is broken and advocating for fixing it. But it comes with a grave warning about normalizing autocracy: https://newrepublic.com/article/189552/transcript-chris-murphys-ominous-new-warning-trump-nails

2024-12-19 14:20:07 UTC

Genuinely thought this was Yes Men style parody when I got this press release in my inbox today from futurecoal.org - the second term of Trump is already making it hard to differentiate reality and satire.
https://social-coop-media.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/media_attachments/files/113/679/925/578/105/790/original/487c0cfc9da73aa6.png

2024-12-07 09:51:18 UTC

Genner notes that as someone who’s both an indigenous person and an anthropologist, it’s easy to see a colonialist logic in the ways data is being extracted by AI companies. Colonialism extracted written data and found ways to appropriate cultural material. If we’re not conscious, we are allowing the global “hyperscalar” companies to engage in similar acts of colonialism. #gvsummit2024

2024-12-07 09:33:44 UTC

Osama Manzar points us to recent Indian headlines about AI: “An algorithm pronounced them dead, and they had to prove they were alive”. Unlike past tech, AI is highly extractive, and potentially highly harmful. We need to understand when taking data is justifiable and consensual. Right now, there is hardly any data justice around AI. And data is being taken from those who are connected and those who are unconnected… and those who are unconnected suffer the most from these systems. #GVsummit2024

2024-12-07 06:44:03 UTC

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@nprofile…4y4j Send a link? I’d love to explore this particular rabbit hole…

2024-12-07 04:46:19 UTC

Translation is activism. Writing is activism.” Featuring indigenous voices is a form of activism. We need to show all of these forms of activism are possible - Juke Bransiecq #GVSummit2024

2024-12-07 04:14:06 UTC

Asteris Masouras says that what attracted him to blogs was not journalism but the
"fairytale" of open source. He was amazed at how much "crazy stuff" could run on software we had written. That creativity is still somewhere - in our community (GV), it's about content, not infrastructure. But perhaps we can bring that spirit of open source and resilience back. #GVSummit2024

2024-12-07 04:06:42 UTC

Juke Carolina suggests that saving the internet requires moving from bystander to learner and activist. As we learn, we realize that authoritarianism didn't come up overnight - it was a process. If we don't understand the playbook, we don't understand how to dismantle it. #GVSummit2024

2024-12-07 03:59:27 UTC

Brian Hioe is one of the founders of New Bloom Magazine in Taiwan. He notes that the internet, seen as a hopeful space, has been taken over by the same multinational actors we have hoped to resist. He notes that there has always been resistance online - tweets are blogposts, he argues, just governed by algorithms and shaped by platform decisions. Perhaps resistance is taking back these tools and taking back control. #gvsummit2024

2024-12-06 09:44:48 UTC

Pakistan has installed a China-style firewall. Twitter has been banned, After users moved to BlueSky, that platform has been banned too. Annie Zaman reminds us that Pakistan has blocked the internet in regions like Baluchistan - now this sort of control is coming to the major cities. #GVSummit2024

2024-11-26 18:51:28 UTC

Is digital public infrastructure like roads, an essential infrastructure that others can build businesses on? Or like radio, which makes an informed citizenry possible and is a backbone of democracy? Smart, thoughtful essay engages with some of my work: https://www.techpolicy.press/what-is-digital-public-infrastructure-towards-more-specificity/