The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

New Bibliography Items: Alt-Tech's Paranoia and an Unfinished Migration

Robert W. Gehl, 01 Aug 2025

Here are some of the latest items we’ve added to the bibliography.

The paranoid infrastructural imaginary of alttech: understanding how the reactionary mind fuels digital fascism

In this article in the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Corrina Laughlin draws on a year-long ethnography of Gab, the far-right, white Christian nationalist social media site. She contrasts the rhetoric of Gab founder Andrew Torba with the actual experience of using Gab. “In my analysis,” Laughlin writes, :I chart Torba and his users’ shifting understanding of their place on the internet and track three central concepts that Torba continually returns to as he writes about internet governance. I find that as Torba constructs his understanding of and for ‘digital sovereignty,’ ‘the regime,’ and ‘the parallel economy,’ he displays and promotes what I call a ‘paranoid infrastructural imaginary’–– a concept that I argue is central to the alt-tech movement and crucial for understanding an aspect of the ‘reactionary mind’ that is fueling what Christian Fuchs (2022) has called ‘digital fascism’ or ‘Fascism 2.0.’”

Priorities and exclusions within Trust and Safety industry standards

This New Media & Society article, from the ASM Networks’s own Blake Hallinan and co-authors, compares the schema of content abuse from the Trust & Safety Professional Association (an emerging professional group) with the actual practices of a variety of streaming platforms. Notable for ASM scholars, Hallinan et al consider “alt-tech” platforms – the sort of sites that tend to promise free speech absolutism. Alt-tech platforms have gained noteriety by leverage a discourse of openness and free speech absolutism (which in turn often get coded as right-wing platforming). As Hallinan et al find, however, alt-tech’s “rebellious ethos generates further tension when, for example, a platform is publicly traded, as the case of Rumble illustrates. What Rumble users want does not necessarily align with what Rumble investors want, leaving the platform to perform a balancing act of signaling regulatory compliance and risk management to investors without alienating their users.” Sex work, for example, is beyond the pale for much of alt-tech. It turns out that alt-tech systems also engage in a variation of trust and safety. It’s intriguing considering this article alongside the Laughlin article described above.

A media ecology of ecological media? Conceptualizing environment-oriented communication and its digital footprint in climate change activism

In this New Media & Society article, Bussoletti et al focus on the relationship between climate activists and social media platforms. They focus on FridaysForFuture (FFF) Rome. Their analysis demonstrates the double-bind of contemporary activism – particularly environmental activism. There are “two fundamental conflicts that imbue FFF-Rome’s practices but are relevant to all actors of social change involved in climate activism: (1) the tension between addressing the climate crisis via digital tools, which contribute to environmental harm, and (2) advocating for systemic change rooted in anti-capitalism and anti-corporatism while utilizing platforms whose logic aligns with these models.” Speaking personally, this will be required reading when I next teach about social movements and media.

Straddling Two Platforms: From Twitter to Mastodon, an Analysis of the Evolution of an Unfinished Social Media Migration

In this article in Social Sciences, Peña-Fernández et al consider the incomplete migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon. The authors examine 19K accounts of “users who identified themselves as supporters of the switch.” As they write, “the results show that the migration campaign was a reactive response to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and was led by a group of highly active academics, scientists, and journalists. However, a complete transition was not realised, as users preferred to straddle their presence on both platforms. Mastodon’s decentralisation made it difficult to exactly replicate Twitter’s communities, resulting in a partial loss of these users’ social capital and greater fragmentation of these user communities, which highlights the intrinsic differences between both platforms.” Given the later growth of Bluesky, a follow-up to a study like this might examine how people spread their microblogging practices across X, Bluesky, and federated social media.

Decentralized Social Media

This “catchword” article in Business & Information Systems Engineering examines decentralized social media in comparison to centralized social media. As such, the authors Ciriello et al take a broad view of the field, considering a wide variety of examples (e.g., federated, blockchain, peer-to-peer). One area of emphasis in the article is governance. As they conclude, “social media governance operates on a spectrum, enabling hybrid models that combine decentralization with centralized elements. While DSM enhances user stewardship and transparency, adoption remains constrained by governance inefficiencies, financial instability, and usability challenges.”