Gobo adds notifications

One of the main feature requests we’ve gotten during our Gobo beta: notifications. You can now use it to keep track of your mentions, reposts, and other metrics on any Bluesky, Mastodon, or Reddit account you have linked.

Want to take part in our Gobo beta? Just shoot an email to [email protected] and we’ll get you set up.

Brian Levine joins Reimagining

We’re incredibly lucky to have one of the absolute most important researchers in cybersecurity here at UMass Amherst, and so grateful he joined us for an episode.

Brian Levine is one of the foremost computer scientists working to fight CSAM online, and he sat with Ethan (in person!) for an hour-long deep dive into what it takes to keep children safe on the Internet. It’s a heavy episode, but really worth it if you want to understand the child safety-minded perspectives on end-to-end encryption, start-up culture, and free speech absolutism.

Listen on our site or wherever you get your podcasts.

Authenticity (chapter from Field Guide to Social Media)

by Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci and Ethan Zuckerman

Do you have thoughts about this chapter? We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments.

Social media has always supported authenticity—both subjective and objective. At the same time, social media constantly undermines authenticity. How people and platforms resolve that paradox is a key dynamic in the digital public sphere.

From the start, social media promised a more authentic public sphere. Content could flow freely and directly from its source, without mediation by the gatekeepers of the past. This is exhilarating—you can get an unfiltered view of the lives and ideas of anyone, from regular people to celebrities to politicians to billionaires, from around the world. However, the same things that support authenticity on social media, undermine it. It’s hard to know what’s real, when anyone can say anything. It’s hard to be yourself, when the whole world is your audience. It’s hard to be original, when the same thing has been said or done, by a million other people. Resolving this paradox is a constant struggle for people and platforms.

It makes sense to think about two types of authenticity on social media—subjective and objective. Subjective authenticity is the idea that someone is true to themselves. Objective authenticity is the idea that something is true, empirically. 

Social media encourages subjective authenticity by creating spaces where people can express themselves more freely. Features like anonymity and private groups, along with the diverse array of identities found on social media make it easier for people to be true to themselves. 

However, social media also undermines subjective authenticity. There are two ways social media undermines subjective authenticity that we will highlight: context collapse and mimetic desire. 

Context collapse is when multiple audiences are flattened into one, making it difficult for people to navigate how they present themselves. Co-workers, acquaintances, friends, and family often occupy the same space on platforms, making it easy for information meant for one audience to be misunderstood by others. As a result, many people take a “lowest common denominator” approach to social media, only sharing content that they know will be appropriate for their entire audience, limiting their ability to express themselves truly.

Mimetic desire, a theory first advanced by French philosopher René Girard, argues that human desire arises from our tendency to imitate other people. We want what we want because other people want it. Social media is a powerful engine of mimetic desire, exposing us to all kinds of potential models for our desire—most influentially, people who are close enough to us socially for us to compare ourselves to them realistically. This cycle makes it difficult to know whether who we are and what we want is the product of our true selves, or just an imitation. Sure, this process played out before social media, but there was a much smaller set of models, and much more room for people to develop independently.

Social media encourages objective authenticity by increasing the diversity and quantity of information available. For example, we know what really happened in a number of cases of police brutality—such as George Floyd’s death—because ordinary people videotaped the encounters and uploaded them to social media. However, increasing the diversity and quantity of information also undermines objective authenticity by increasing the noise people encounter. For example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccines spread widely on social media. A good example is the case of Tiffany Dover, a nurse who received one of the first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine on live television in December 2020. Dover fainted after receiving the vaccine and videos of her fainting spread across social media with claims that she had died as a result of her vaccination. In reality, as of 2023 she is alive and well—she just has an underlying health condition that causes her to faint when she experiences pain.

To counteract the ways social media undermines authenticity, some platforms build features to support it. 

To support subjective authenticity, Instagram has a “close friends” feature that allows users to share posts and stories with a private list of followers. The feature was partly inspired by the common practice of people creating “finstas”—fake Instagram accounts only available to someone’s inner circle—to achieve the same thing organically. More radically, BeReal is an entire platform devoted to subjective authenticity. It prompts users at a different time each day to take a simultaneous photo with their front and rear camera. The content is purposefully mundane—people in class, at work, in the gym—and the app consciously markets itself as an alternative to the artifice of platforms like TikTok and Instagram: “BeReal is your chance to show your friends who you really are, for once. BeReal won’t make you famous. If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.” More broadly, one way to think about the widespread migration to chat platforms like Discord and WhatsApp, is that people are seeking out spaces that support subjective authenticity by mitigating context collapse. Peoples’ array of group chats represent different contexts which they can use to segregate audiences effectively.

To support objective authenticity, a coalition of platforms is creating a technical standard called C2PA that would support tracing the origin of different types of media (also called content provenance). It’s hard for people to know if the media they encounter online, like images, videos, and documents, are authentic. And it’s getting harder as advanced AI tools make generating realistic images, videos, and text easier than ever before. With C2PA, content creators can attach cryptographically secured metadata to the media they create with information about its origins (e.g., that an image was captured on an iPhone and edited with Photoshop). Beyond technical standards, many platforms use fact-checking to support objective authenticity. Some rely on professional fact-checkers, like Reuters, to verify content. Others rely on their community, such as Twitter, whose Community Notes initiative enables users to add notes to misleading posts. The notes are shown to everyone if they are rated as helpful by people from diverse perspectives. Further, some platforms try to support objective authenticity by enforcing rules against inauthentic identities. Facebook’s “real name” policy requires users to use “the name they go by in everyday life.” Even platforms that allow pseudonyms have rules against misleading and deceptive identities, for example identities that impersonate others, or fake accounts that engage in coordinated behavior to manipulate public debate.

Complicating these efforts to support authenticity, is that in practice, subjective and objective authenticity often conflict. Identities are a good example. Requiring users to use their real name on a platform can make it easier to trust that people are who they say they are, supporting objective authenticity. However, requiring real names can make it harder for people to express themselves by increasing the risk they will be harassed or outed for what they share, undermining subjective authenticity. Similarly, humor is a powerful tool for subjective authenticity. But it often transgresses objective authenticity.

The authenticity paradox can only be managed, not solved. The challenges posed by it must be constantly negotiated by people and platforms. However, efforts to build context and trust hold promise for making it easier to navigate.

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See Anonymity, Chat, Context Collapse, Creators, Manipulation, Misinformation