As tech insiders warn about an impending apocalypse, Ethan Zuckerman of UMass Amherst examines those claims in an appearance on The Prospect Podcast. Zuckerman discusses AI agents going rogue in the Hugging Face incident, as well as recent calls from tech leaders to slow down AI development. With Trump dismissing safety concerns, Zuckerman also discusses US competition with China, how global thinking around AI differs—and why he doesn't trust the industry to self-regulate. He explores how we can reclaim agency around AI, and the importance of local and community-oriented conversations, including a surprising initiative from a Maori radio station. Plus, what might a uniquely British AI look like?
Expertise
AI
A.I.
Social Media Governance
Technology and Social Change
Digital Public Infrastructure
Online Community Governance
Social Media
Biography
An international expert on designing and advocating for versions of social media are designed to have positive social and civic impacts, Ethan Zuckerman is frequently sought out to discuss idea for moving beyond existing models of funding and governance in social media and on the internet. His lab at UMass has built alternatives to conventional social networks, focusing on increasing user control over the algorithms that govern what's visible on social media. Through random sampling methods, his lab has revealed what YouTube and TikTok are being used for by users around the world. This approach to increasing transparency of media platforms through "unpermissioned research" is now investigating systemic biases in large language models and other AI systems.
The hidden world beneath the shadows of YouTube's algorithm
BBC
2025-04-23
Ethan Zuckerman explains how he and a team of scientists devised a way to compile metrics about YouTube that it hasn’t been willing to disclose, such as how many videos have been uploaded to the platform.
Move over, Bluesky: Front Porch Forum is Vermont’s most popular social network
The Boston Globe
2024-12-05
Ethan Zuckerman comments in an article about Front Porch Forum, Vermont’s most popular social media network. Under the platform’s strict terms of use, only community members, using their real names, may post.“It is proof that you can build other forms of social interaction — and it’s a good reminder that we probably need that,” Zuckerman says.
Ethan Zuckerman is interviewed about free speech and expression. “I think freedom of expression is this idea that we want to hear what people think and feel and believe, and we want them to say those things as freely as possible,” he says. “But we also recognize at the same time that what one person says has a real effect on what other people are able to say or feel comfortable saying.”
Lawsuit against Meta asks if Facebook users have right to control their feeds using external tools
AP online
2024-05-05
Ethan Zuckerman is interviewed about a federal lawsuit against Meta filed on his behalf by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, over an internet browser extension he has developed that would allow Facebook users to unfollow all of the content fed to them by the platform’s algorithm.
Threads Is Rolling Out on the Web. That Just Might Save It
WIRED online
2023-08-24
Ethan Zuckerman comments on the rollout of the web version of Threads, the text-based social media platform marketed as an alternative to X, formerly known as Twitter. “I joined Threads within 48 hours of it opening up, like everybody else, but I haven’t really used it, and the reason is that I access most of my social media on my laptop,” Zuckerman says, adding that mobile-only platforms are more difficult for scholars to research.
After a Year of Focus on Big Tech's Harms, Why We're Still Waiting on Reform
TIME online
2022-09-14
Instead, the biggest changes since last year may be in the minds of consumers, who now are more skeptical than ever of Big Tech. “We’ve had what people are now calling a ‘techlash’ against this idea that social media is always a good thing and is part of the world getting better and better,” says Ethan Zuckerman
A Frustrating Hassle Holding Electric Cars Back: Broken Chargers
The New York Times online
2022-08-16
“Often, those fast chargers have real maintenance issues,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has owned a Chevrolet Bolt for several years. “When they do, you very quickly find yourself in pretty dire straits.” In the winter of 2020, Mr. Zuckerman was commuting about 150 miles each way to a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The cold winter weather can reduce the driving range of electric cars, and Mr. Zuckerman found himself needing a charge on the way home.
Ruling could dampen government efforts to rein in Big Tech
AP News online
2022-07-03
Ethan Zuckerman comments in an article about how a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling on climate change could dampen efforts to reign in the tech industry.
Ethan Zuckerman comments about the rise of social media platform Telegram as a result of Russia’s media crackdown following the country’s invasion of Ukraine.
Misinformation Is Destroying Our Country. Can Anything Rein It In?
The Nation print
2021-05-10
Zuckerman comments about possible ways to rein in online misinformation. He says, “The Nazis right now have an incentive to build alternative distributed media, and the rest of us are behind because we don’t have the incentive to do it. My real deep fear is that we end up ceding the design of this way of building social networks to far-right extremists, because they are the ones who need these new spaces to discuss and organize."
To Thrive, Our Democracy Needs Digital Public Infrastructure
Politico online
2021-01-05
"This is why a growing group of scholars and technologists have started looking at new ways of supporting flourishing online public life by focusing on parks and libraries for the internet — what scholar Ethan Zuckerman calls “digital public infrastructure.”
Fragmented and humbled: How social media could emerge from the post-election crisis
The Boston Globe print
2021-01-24
"The events of the past few weeks “could be an ugly path that might get us toward a very different media environment,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a University of Massachusetts Amherst professor who has been working on ways to better orient social media toward civic conversation and public benefit."
Video hosting sites like YouTube are commonly understood through their professional creators and viral content, but they are also rich, global repositories of cultural memory and everyday life. However, their opaque, algorithmically optimized, commercial structure poses challenges to research. We argue that such platforms function as “accidental archives” that capture details of quotidian life that often escape curatorial intention. To consider the unique insights into daily life that such archives preserve, we examine two other accidental archives: a collection of late 20th-century photos and the preserved ruins of Pompeii. We present a four-part mixed-methods approach to researching quotidian video: solving the technical problem of random sampling, conducting metadata analysis, using additional computational means to augment data, and qualitatively analyzing video content.
Musk isn’t disrupting the government. He’s breaking it
Prospect
Ethan Zuckerman
2025-02-24
Ethan Zuckerman writes that Elon Musk’s strategy to “move fast and break things” is not what voters wanted. “It’s one thing to move fast and break the business world and an entirely different thing to move fast and break government. Musk is breaking systems that voters, through their representatives, chose to pay for with tax dollars. Breaking these systems means breaking the democratic processes that led to their creation in the first place,” Zuckerman writes.
Ethan Zuckerman writes that despite liking Facebook, he is suing the platform’s parent company, Meta, in an effort to ensure that users have more control over what appears on their feeds.
Let the community work it out: Throwback to early internet days could fix social media’s crisis of legitimacy
The Conversation
Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci
2023-10-24
Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci argue that a return to the early days of the internet where the community, rather than social media companies, oversaw online content, could solve social media’s current “crisis of legitimacy.” They write, “Why should a few companies – or a few billionaire owners – have the power to decide everything about online spaces that billions of people use? This unaccountable model of governance has led stakeholders of all stripes to criticize platforms’ decisions as arbitrary, corrupt or irresponsible.”
Ethan Zuckerman examines the media dynamics of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the marked differences in how Putin and Zelensky use media and social media to frame their own narratives.
Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them (Book)
W. W. Norton & Company
Ethan Zuckerman
2021-01-19
Zuckerman says: "How can you change society if you lose faith in institutions like governments and corporations? Mistrust: How Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them (2021) looks at democracies like the US through the lens of mistrust in institutions, a massive social trend."
