Democracy & Elections

The Lawfare Podcast: Decentralized Social Media and the Great Twitter Exodus

Jen Patja, Alan Z. Rozenshtein, Quinta Jurecic, Kate Klonick
Tuesday, November 8, 2022, 12:00 PM
Meet The Authors

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Subscribe to Lawfare

It’s Election Day in the United States—so while you wait for the results to come in, why not listen to a podcast about the other biggest story obsessing the political commentariat right now? We’re talking, of course, about Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the billionaire’s dramatic and erratic changes to the platform. In response to Musk’s takeover, a great number of Twitter users have made the leap to Mastodon, a decentralized platform that offers a very different vision of what social media could look like. 

What exactly is decentralized social media, and how does it work? Lawfare senior editor Alan Rozenshtein has a paper on just that, and he sat down with Lawfare senior editor Quinta Jurecic on the podcast to discuss for an episode of our Arbiters of Truth series on the online information ecosystem. They were also joined by Kate Klonick, associate professor of law at St. John’s University, to hash out the many, many questions about content moderation and the future of the internet sparked by Musk’s reign and the new popularity of Mastodon.

Among the works mentioned in this episode:

Topics:
Democracy & Elections
Back to Top
Jen Patja

Jen Patja

Read More
Jen Patja is the editor of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security, and serves as Lawfare’s Director of Audience Engagement. Previously, she was Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics and Deputy Director of the Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier, where she worked to deepen public understanding of constitutional democracy and inspire meaningful civic participation.
Alan Z. Rozenshtein

Alan Z. Rozenshtein

@ARozenshtein
alanrozenshtein.com
Read More
Alan Z. Rozenshtein is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School, Research Director and Senior Editor at Lawfare, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Previously, he served as an Attorney Advisor with the Office of Law and Policy in the National Security Division of the U.S. Department of Justice and a Special Assistant United States Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland. He also speaks and consults on technology policy matters.
Quinta Jurecic

Quinta Jurecic

@qjurecic
qjurecic.bsky.social
Read More
Quinta Jurecic is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was previously a fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare.
Kate Klonick

Kate Klonick

Read More
Kate Klonick is an Associate Professor at St. John’s University Law School, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Harvard Berkman Klein Center and a Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Humane Studies. Her writing on online speech, freedom of expression, and private internet platform governance has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, Yale Law Journal, The New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, the Washington Post and numerous other publications. For the 2023-2024 academic year, she was a Fulbright Schuman Innovation Scholar in the European Union where she was a Visiting Professor at SciencesPo and University of Amsterdam researching and writing about the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act.
}

Subscribe to Lawfare