The Tower and the Park: Structural Misalignments of Social Media
Channel: The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Date: 2022-07-07

Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street, and One Liberty Plaza, the multi-billion-dollar tower, represent a complex power play between public and private interests. In the digital realm, social media grapples with a similar contention: social networks would not exist without platform businesses and yet their public benefits are at odds with the drive for private profit.

This Berkman Klein Center event featuring Joanne Cheung discusses her research and open access article Real Estate Politik: Democracy and the Financialization of Social Networks, which emerged from the Berkman Klein Ethical Tech Working Group and was originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Social Computing, "Technology Ethics in Action: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives" (Part 1, Part 2).

Cheung argues that “social networks are privately owned public spaces caught between the misaligned incentives of public good and private profit” and that their business models perpetuate historical inequities.

Cheung’s article also explores the structural problems with social media from the perspective of land use. She compares the financialization of attention by platforms with the financialization of land by commercial real estate development—and explores activist land use models for public interest technology.

This event took place on May 17, 2022.