What is "Alternative" about "Alternative Social Media"?

Hello, everyone! I'm excited to be here with you.

I first want to acknowledge the co-author of this paper, Roel Roscam Abbing, who's wrapping up his excellent dissertation on the fediverse at Malmö.

He and I are publishing this paper in the journal Réseaux, in a special issue, 'Internet(s) alternatif(s)' -- it will appear in French and English. So, Roel and I are interested in what to do about a key problem: namely the fact that major parts of our social lives are dominated by corporations or billionaires.

We got a recent lesson in this problem with Musk's purchase of Twitter in 2022,

which led to many people realizing that a problem of corporate social media is that, well, it's corporate, and dominated by people like Musk or...

Mark Zuckerberg, here modeling the latest in surveillance techology. Instead of this, Roel and I are interested in how...

...it could be otherwise, which is a motto for Science and Technology Studies (one that I associate most with the sociologist Steve Woolgar.)

And for years, there have been activists building social media that is otherwise: alternative social media. Both Roel and I have been studying these alternatives for quite some time. We've also been wrestling with the meaning of 'alternative.' Which brings me to the paper I'm talking about today.

In our paper "What is 'Alternative' about 'Alternative Social Media'?", Roel and I make two key contributions to alternative social media studies. One is a history of Alternative Social Media Scholarship, a field that we argue starts in the late 2000s. The second is a working defintion of alternative social media, with an emphasis on "working." I'll quickly cover each today.

First, the history of ASM scholarship. We divide this into three phases.

Phase one, starting roughly in 2008, is predominantly found in computer science research that focuses on creating peer-to-peer social media -- this is inspired, we argue,...

by concerns about social graphs. Recall the growing interest in social graphs and the claims made about social graphs by Facebook at this time.

Since we're in Brazil, a special shoutout goes to Twister, a peer-to-peer microblogging system first put into operation by Brazil's own Miguel Freitas in 2013.

We find a critical turn around 2011 or so with the Unlike Us conferences and later edited collection -- note the subtitle, "Social Media and their alternatives." This collection mostly includes critiques of corporate social media, but it also includes a great deal of criticism and analysis of alternatives.

A third phase is shifting away from assumptions that technical decentralization might lead to progressive outcomes. The discussions about deplatforming and "alt-tech" figure into this...

...as well as an interest in good governance in alternative social media.

While we don't write about this, I'm wondering if we're entering into a fourth phase -- perhaps focusing intensely on open protocols...

Or, maybe social media that actively resists the use of generative AI. (Speaking of which, no generative AI was used in our research, nor do I consent to any of it being fed into any LLMs)

Ok, that was way too brief on the history -- happy to talk more in Q and A. On to the second part, our working definition of ASM.

"Alternative social media are social media developed in complex relation to mainstream social media. ASM are marked by high interpretive flexibility as they emerge. As dynamic systems, they never totally stabilize. The best approach to their study is for the scholar to be situated." Let's focus on parts of this.

"complex relation to mainstream social media"

This can involve outright opposition to everything corporate social media does, and often this appears in technical distinctions, like "Facebook, but decentralized", or governance distinctions, like "Twitter, but better moderation" or "Twitter, but free speech!"

This is largely what I've been calling "critical reverse engineering" for some time now.

But the 'complex relationship' is not purely oppositional. We also see moments of collaboration -- particularly at standards bodies, including funding and support for the protocols used by alternatives.

An example here is the Social Web Foundation, which advocates for ActivityPub (a protocol that enables a major alternative social media system) but also takes funding from Meta.

Let's talk high interpretive flexibility at emergence.

Early phases of alternative social media are often marked by users/members playing with affordances, and the resulting struggles over meanings and users. This has certainly marked histories of corporate social media, but fortunately in the case of ASM, these struggles are less abstracted away from user/members. In fact, while critical analysis of CSM is marked by external guesswork, ASM researchers often have a great deal more access to how user interpretations get codified in the technology or governance.

An example of this is the early history of the Twitter alternative Mastodon, which faced many, many user demands (and, to be fair, met many of them) in its early days.

Related to emergence, let's talk dynamism and the lack of stabilization.

One of the great challenges of this line of research is that stabilization is endlessly deferred, AND that the very idea of what is 'alternative' shifts over time.

To illustrate this, for many years the 'gold standard' of alternative social media was to push towards the ideal of the decentralized network, typically by developing protocols for that.

But now that is no longer just a goal of alternative social media. Corporate social media, such as Meta's Threads and Bluesky, also are contributing to open protocols and are arguably decentralized.

Finally, let's talk about how ASM scholars need to be situated.

I don't think it's radical to recommend researchers be explicit about their strong objectivity. I also don't think it's radical for researchers to listen to claims about alterity but to always be skeptical about them.

We have arrived at this because we have seen proclamations about alternative social media made from a "view from nowhere" while actually being very focused on specific perspectives. For example, a recent Pew Research study of alternative social media that solely focuses on alt-right social media. Or, I will put myself in here -- my 2015 article about ASM basically assumed that ASM would save us from corporate social media. A far richer approach would of course be for the researcher to be situated while also reflecting on the positionality of the systems under study.

Here we'd point to recent work by Clark-Parsons and Lingel, where researchers' selection of objects and conceptual lenses intersects with claims made to alterity on the part of the groups under study -- an emic/etic way of thinking.

So, there it is again, our working definition, in its fullness. We hope our fellow Alternative Social Media scholars are able to use this fruitfully.

With that I will conclude, and thank you!

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