Ethan Zuckerman (UMass Amherst): Data Ecology Invited Speaker
Online Publics and Unpermissioned Research
Social media platforms from TikTok to X have emerged as key parts of our digital public sphere. Understanding the influence these platforms have on discourse is essential, but studying them is difficult: platforms have few incentives to open themselves to scrutiny, and platform companies are increasingly uncooperative with scholars and activists who seek to understand online discourse. A subset of scholars and activists are choosing to study platforms in unpermissioned and adversarial ways, collecting data from platforms through methods that violate terms of service and raise technical, legal and ethical challenges. This talk offers an overview of prominent experiments in unpermissioned research, frameworks for conducting unpermissioned research in ethical ways, and examines the idea of a “safe harbor” for public service research that violates corporate usage agreements and, possibly, US laws.
Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2021) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. It showcases news and opinions from citizen media in more than 150 nations and 30 languages, publishing editions in 20 languages. Previously, Zuckerman directed the Center for Civic Media at MIT and taught at the MIT Media Lab. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. Previously, he helped found Tripod.com, one of the web’s first “personal publishing” sites. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.