Category Archives: Facebook

Fixing Digital Public Spaces

Posted on Monday, February 6, 2023 by No comments yet

Leslie Stebbins was quoted in a recent Salon article, “Our digital public spaces aren’t so healthy… Can we fix that?” (read full article here) that…

Tech companies maintain that they cannot moderate online communities because that would jeopardize our right to free speech and because there is simply too much content flying across these networks to track. Both these issues are false flags. We now know that the core infrastructure of these platforms is intentionally designed to amplify vitriol and misinformation because this increases engagement, keeps us online longer, and provides tech companies with billions of dollars from ad revenue. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Further, Stebbins adds, We should focus on creating new spaces that have explicit civic goals and are designed for equity and social cohesion. Real-world communities need to be involved in intentionally designing their own local digital public spaces rather than leaving this work to global tech companies.

Front Porch Forum gets a nice spotlight in the article…

Front Porch Forum […] focuses on real world community building. It is the antithesis of Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter. Rather than try to keep users online, it strives to get people offline and more connected to their local Vermont neighbors. Most people spend five or ten minutes a day online to get news that their neighbors have posted: lost dogs, bake sales and announcements of upcoming school board meetings. It is funded by donations and local ads based on where someone lives, but it does not track user behavior and advertising does not drive platform design.

Independent research on Front Porch [Forum] shows that it builds social cohesion and is improving the resilience of local Vermont communities. Building stronger community cohesion produces many intangible benefits such as high civic engagement, more instances of neighbors helping neighbors, and lower crime rates.

Poll: Two-thirds of Americans want to break up companies like Amazon and Google

Posted on Friday, September 20, 2019 by No comments yet

Interesting article by Vox today.  Some key take-aways…

 

Escape From Facebookistan

Posted on Monday, May 21, 2018 by No comments yet

Can a public sphere worth living in ever be built online? Micah Sifry includes an interview with FPF Co-Founder, Michael Wood-Lewis, in his article appearing in The New Republic, Escape From Facebookistan

“In the same way people need banks to hold their money safely and to help it circulate, creating businesses and jobs, they also need trustworthy online digital forums to hold their social identities and help foster beneficial connections between friends, neighbors, and the larger society.” • Micah Sifry

Alternatives exist! Thanks for recognizing Front Porch Forum in your article!

Click local! When will “local first” arrive on digital shores?

Posted on Monday, April 11, 2016 by No comments yet

I couldn’t agree more with former Vermonter, Dan Gillmor’s recent piece…

Journalists: Stop complaining about Facebook, and do something about it

Dan focuses on Facebook’s growing dominance as a news distributor…

How should we respond? From my perspective, two primary schools of thought have emerged. One is to embrace that dominance, albeit with some unease, and fully participate in Facebook’s ecosystem. Another is to persuade Facebook to take seriously its growing responsibility to help get quality journalism in front of as many people as possible.

Both of those approaches assume that Facebook is too big, too powerful to resist that we have no alternative but to capitulate to its dominance. But if that is true, the consequences will be disastrous. We will be living in the ecosystem of a company that has repeatedly demonstrated its untrustworthiness, an enterprise that would become the primary newsstand for journalism and would be free to pick the winners via special deals with media people and tweaks of its opaque algorithms. If this is the future, we are truly screwed.

I say: no. Let’s not give up so easily. Instead, let’s resist and find a way out of this trap… (click to read the full article)

And… to add to Dan’s call… let’s go beyond journalism.  Let’s click local for retail, for discussion, for classifieds, for reviews, for sports, for entertainment, for networking and more.  Many communities have local efforts underway, and they struggle to capture people’s attention as so many of us habitually scroll through our Facebook feeds, go to Amazon, Yelp, etc.  Why not try local efforts?  While the internet and mobile devices still hold the promise of decentralization of power, we now know that the digital juggernaut is also acting as a giant concentrator of wealth into a small number of pockets.  Thousands of local taxi companies replaced by Uber and Lyft.  Thousands of local bookstores replaced by Amazon.

To quote Dan one more time…

I say: no. Let’s not give up so easily. Instead, let’s resist and find a way out of this trap.

Need local survey respondents?

Posted on Tuesday, April 28, 2015 by No comments yet

A Burlington business reached out to the community with a survey this month and got more than 500 responses.  They used social media, their own popular e-newsletter and Front Porch Forum to get the word out.  Here’s where they got their respondents:

45% Front Porch Forum
40% Company’s e-newsletter
8% Facebook
7% Twitter