Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

Although the social networking site Twitter remains a popular part of the contemporary media landscape, it is not without its critics. Users of Twitter have reported many disturbing activities happening on that platform, including harassment of female, gay, trans, or Black users, rampant non-human “bots” that spread misinformation, Twitter’s privileging of corporate brands over “ordinary” user speech, and allegations that Twitter has censored political topics. Recently, around one million technologists and activists have decided to leave Twitter behind for a new platform called “Mastodon.” Indeed, Mastodon was built as a critical response to Twitter’s problems. Mastodon has powerful content moderation tools, including an innovative “federation” system which allows for people to run and administer their own version of Mastodon rather than relying on a centralized system. Building on my past scholarship, this project considers Mastodon as an instance of “critical reverse engineering” of Twitter, where Mastodon’s creators took many of the positive features of Twitter and implemented them in a new software package while staving off the negative features of Twitter. The project draws on interviews with nine Mastodon administrators as well as the Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko. It also draws on analysis of Mastodon software, participant observation of Mastodon, and comparison of Mastodon to previous Twitter alternatives I have written about (including GNU social, rstat.us, TalkOpen, ID3NT, and Jisko). Ultimately, the project will assess Mastodon’s capability as a Twitter alternative that mitigates the problems mentioned above. Twitter puts us in a double-bind; it is immensely valuable as a news source and provides its users with the pleasures of connection, but it has in fact contributed to a variety of social problems. Thus, the study of alternatives, such as Mastodon, is important because they may provide a way to get the positive elements of microblogging without many of the negatives. In terms of audiences, this project has international reach. Mastodon was created by a German and has installations across Europe, North America, and Asia. The project is intended to aid Mastodon itself by collecting the experiences of Mastodon administrators into an accessible document and thus contribute to future Mastodon development. In addition, the project has relevance to a wide range of academic fields, including journalism, communication, media studies, political science, and social movement studies. These are also the fields that have produced criticism of Twitter, including analysis of harassment, the use of bots, and censorship. Thus, these fields need to pay attention to alternatives to Twitter because critique of Twitter is not enough; we also have to find and promote solutions to Twitter’s problems.