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PODCAST

Revolution.Social

Rabble a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath

A podcast about the future of social media and reclaiming our digital communities. Revolution.Social is hosted by technologist and community advocate Rabble, a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath — who was Twitter’s first employee and hired Jack Dorsey. In weekly interviews, Rabble will interview thought leaders, technologists, academics, and more about the need for a new social media "bill of rights." Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need

technology politics

All Episodes

50:37

Building Human Rights Into the Social Web (with...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/11/13

Mallory Knodel is the executive director of the Social Web Foundation and former CTO of the Center for Democracy & Technology. Her roots go back to the activists, anarchists, and dreamers who built the open web, and then lost control of it to big business.“Especially in the smaller circles of digital human rights organizations and so on, [they] really understood that everything that they would work so hard for … could just be so easily undone from the top-down of a huge corporate,” Mallory says

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83:15

How to Overthrow Dictators Without Violence (with...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/11/06

Political activist Srđa Popović led the movement that overthrew Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in 2000. Since then, his organization, Canvas, has trained activists in over 50 countries how to build successful nonviolent movements—and he says most people misunderstand how change actually happens.“When we start working with them, they often say, ‘Oh, I'm too busy doing things, I don't have time for planning,’” Srđa says. “If I was given a dime every time I've heard that, I would probably have a

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55:18

Banning Kids From Social Media Isn’t the Answer (with...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/10/30

Pamela Wisniewski is one of the leading researchers on how social media affects teens, working at the UC Berkeley-affiliated International Computer Science Institute. In an era of moral panics around youth online safety, she believes the solution is to empower teens and teach them resilience, rather than restricting them. "We treat it as if our teens should know how to act online without any kind of training," Pamela says. "We don't give our 16-year-olds the keys to our car and just say, 'Hey, go

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67:13

Jeff Jarvis on the Death of Mass Media, Twitter vs....

Revolution.Social ·

2025/10/23

In books like The Web We Weave and podcasts such as Intelligent Machines, journalist and educator Jeff Jarvis — formerly the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York — has traced the history of media from the Gutenberg press to AI. And he says that today’s attempts to clamp down on the internet are nothing new."Whenever there's an explosion of speech, those who controlled speech resent it," Jeff explains. "They try to fight it, they try to

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72:48

Harper Reed on Building for Obama, Social Media for...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/10/16

2389 Research CEO Harper Reed was previously the CTO of President Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign, where he helped redefine modern political technology. Before that, he was CTO of Threadless, the crowdsourced T-shirt company that accidentally invented crowdsourcing. Harper has spent his career building systems that bring people together online—but also exploring why technology often produces unintended consequences. He recently published a paper on creating a social media ecosystem for AI

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57:34

“Think Like a Commoner" Author David Bollier on the...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/10/09

When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons."The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated individuals and that the social context and the Earth is irrelevant."

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58:48

“The Etymology Nerd” Adam Aleksic on Algospeak, AI...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/10/02

Adam Aleksic, known to his social media followers as the “Etymology Nerd,” has built a massive audience by decoding the origins of words, accents, and memes. In his new book Algospeak: How Social Media is Transforming the Future of Language, he talks about the ways our social media algorithms have accelerated the “context collapse” that changes the words we use.“You perceive this creator using a word like, I dunno, rizz, ate, slay, served,” Adam says. “These are all from the ballroom scene in the

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64:56

Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, Mutual Aid & Reclaiming...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/09/25

Rudy Fraser is the founder of Blacksky, a community-driven project building on top of the AT Protocol while remaining independent of Bluesky, where that protocol originated. At Blacksky, he and his team are applying the principles of mutual aid and community ownership to algorithms, moderation teams, and governance tools for the Black community, giving users more control over their means of communication.“For me, community really means mutual accountability between the one and the many,” Rudy

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74:48

Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on Growing Bluesky, Clueless...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/09/18

Techdirt founder & editor Mike Masnick has long argued that the internet’s power should lie with its users. In his landmark 2019 essay, Protocols, Not Platforms, he laid out a vision for how decentralized systems could preserve free speech while avoiding the pitfalls of centralized control. That vision has since helped inspire Bluesky, where Mike now serves on the board.“Your right to free speech does not include the right to put a billboard on my front lawn or to come into my living room and yell

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20:33

Bonus: Cory Doctorow on Sci-Fi Influences & the...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/09/13

We had more to talk about with Cory Doctorow than we could fit in this week’s episode. In this bonus ep, the science fiction author and internet rights activist talks to Rabble about being raised by science fiction in Toronto, and his one objection to the social media bill of rights: the right to “own” your connections to other people.“I think ownership's a really bad model for it because property frameworks don't work well on things that are not rivalrous,” he says. “Who owns the relationship

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68:42

Cory Doctorow on Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles &...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/09/11

Sci-fi isn’t about hypothetical technologies, but rather about challenging the social impact of that tech, says author and activist Cory Doctorow. And in the real world, we must be just as conscious of the societal impact of the tech products we use. “Apologists for Big Tech would like you to think that all of the properties of their platforms are ... inevitably coterminal,” he says. “You cannot have a conversation with your friends without someone like Mark Zuckerberg spying on you from asshole to

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64:43

Taylor Lorenz on Moral Panics, Tech Villains &...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/09/04

Journalist and Power User host Taylor Lorenz has reported on the fall of Vine, influencers who accept "dark money," and the proliferation of far-right content on Substack, just to name a few.Today on Revolution.Social, she joins Rabble to talk about why governments, including the U.S., are advancing laws to restrict free speech online; the misleading moral panics that have led to apps being banned; and the challenges of monetizing online communities as platforms become gatekeepers. They also

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65:39

Chris Messina on Hashtags, Google+ & the Unintended...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/08/28

Chris Messina is best known for co-founding BarCamp and giving Web 2.0 the hashtag. Now on Revolution.Social, he joins Rabble to talk about the bigger picture of what has gone right, and wrong, with social media. In this episode, he and Rabble unpack why Google+ failed, the unintended consequences of hashtags, and how algorithms have reshaped our digital lives. They also discuss why defending authentic human connection may be the most urgent challenge for the next generation on the

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71:38

Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on AI Slop, Quality...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/08/21

After the introduction of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, the blogging platform Medium got ten times busier, says CEO Tony Stubblebine — and that was not a good thing."Most of it was slop," he says. "Our job got a little bit harder on the filtering side. Actually, a lot harder on the filtering side." Luckily, Medium had already built human-run systems to combat spam, and began deploying them to filter out AI slop. Under Tony, the company has worked to focus on high-quality writing for

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77:02

"Invisible Rulers" author Renee DiResta on...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/08/14

Renee DiResta has spent a decade tracking how small groups can hijack global conversations — and why the same tactics still work today. The author of "Invisible Rulers" and a leading academic researcher on online influence, she joins Rabble on Revolution.Social to unpack the hidden forces shaping what we see — and believe — on social media.Drawing on years of work investigating the history of propaganda, election interference, and networked movements, Renee shares how fringe ideas can be made to

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56:04

Substack CEO Chris Best on democratizing media, the...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/08/07

"If you're a consistent advocate for freedom of the press, you will unfortunately have occasion to quarrel with every party and every side of the political spectrum," says Substack CEO Chris Best.As one of the most important platforms for independent writing online, and one of the only ones not reliant on advertising, Substack has sometimes attracted controversy for its content moderation policies. Today on Revolution.Social, Chris and Rabble talk about the "Nazi bar" problem, the

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20:50

Why We Need a New Social Media Bill of Rights

Revolution.Social ·

2025/08/02

Thanks for listening to Revolution.Social! in this bonus episode, recorded live at Web Summit Vancouver in May 2025, Rabble speaks with Penny Daflos, reporter for CTV News Vancouver. They discuss Rabble's work as part of the founding team at Twitter, why we need to reframe and create social media 'rights' for both developers and users, and how to create better places to connect online. Follow Rabble: ⁠YouTube⁠ ⁠Bluesky⁠ This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from

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56:48

Yoel Roth on Banning Trump, Battling Bots & the...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/07/31

"Content moderation decisions are like assholes," says Yoel Roth, the former head of trust & safety for Twitter. "Everybody's got one." The underrated challenge of working in trust and safety is that every decision could affect millions of users, and the reasons for those decisions are often opaque. Today on Revolution.Social, Yoel and Rabble talk about what goes on behind the scenes when a platform like Twitter wants to do something like ban President Donald Trump; how moderation best practices

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49:21

Kara Swisher on Tech Founders' Flaws & Why Social...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/07/24

The founders of social media companies like Facebook and Twitter never cared about the lofty ideals they claimed, says longtime tech journalist and podcaster Kara Swisher."I never thought they were idealistic. I thought they were there to make money," she says. Swisher, who co-hosts Pivot and also hosts On With Kara Swisher, likens tech giants to the Borg from Star Trek, constantly absorbing smaller companies to fuel their growth. But she sees potential for better user experiences and moderation

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49:49

Jack Dorsey on Selling Twitter, Leaving Bluesky &...

Revolution.Social ·

2025/07/17

Twitter never should have been a traditional tech company, says Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey. Instead, it should have been designed as a protocol — like email, or podcasting.“That was the pure expression of it from day one,” Dorsey says. “And it was never really allowed to be that because it was on this fast track to becoming a public company.” Today on Revolution.Social, Dorsey explains why it’s still possible to build a successful business on top of open protocols and

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21 results

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