Revolution.Social

Revolution.Social

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 fundamental protections from corporate control and surveillance capitalism. This is the start of a conversation about what developers are building, how they're building it, and what consumers need to be asking for. Guests will include Jack Dorsey (former CEO & co-founder of Twitter); Kara Swisher (host of On with Kara Swisher, co-host of Pivot); Cory Doctorow (science fiction author & former editor of Boing Boing); and Taylor Lorenz (founder of User Mag, host of Power User).

Episodes

Jeff Jarvis on the Death of Mass Media, Twitter vs. UberMedia, and Section 230’s Brilliance

October 23, 2025 • 67 mins
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...
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Harper Reed on Building for Obama, Social Media for Bots & Why Tech Isn't Always the Solution

October 16, 2025 • 72 mins
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 re...
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“Think Like a Commoner" Author David Bollier on the Commons & Why Open Platforms Aren't Enough

October 9, 2025 • 57 mins
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 indi...
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“The Etymology Nerd” Adam Aleksic on Algospeak, AI Slop, and the End of Writing

October 2, 2025 • 58 mins
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, sla...
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Rudy Fraser on Blacksky, Mutual Aid & Reclaiming Social Media

September 25, 2025 • 64 mins
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...
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Techdirt’s Mike Masnick on Growing Bluesky, Clueless Regulators & the Case for Optimism

September 18, 2025 • 74 mins
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...
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Bonus: Cory Doctorow on Sci-Fi Influences & the Social Media Bill of Rights

September 13, 2025 • 20 mins
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 th...
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Cory Doctorow on Escaping Big Tech, Privacy Battles & “Enshittification”

September 11, 2025 • 68 mins
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 frien...
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Taylor Lorenz on Moral Panics, Tech Villains & Protecting Free Expression

September 4, 2025 • 64 mins
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 monetizin...
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Chris Messina on Hashtags, Google+ & the Unintended Consequences of Building Social Media

August 28, 2025 • 65 mins
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 t...
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Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on AI Slop, Quality Content & Social Media Fragmentation

August 21, 2025 • 71 mins
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 Ton...
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"Invisible Rulers" author Renee DiResta on Propaganda, Disinformation, & Online Abuse

August 14, 2025 • 77 mins
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, an...
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Substack CEO Chris Best on Democratizing Media, Content Moderation & Freedom of Speech

August 7, 2025 • 56 mins
"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, C...
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Why We Need a New Social Media Bill of Rights

August 2, 2025 • 20 mins
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 Th...
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Yoel Roth on Banning Trump, Battling Bots & the Difficult Job of Trust & Safety

July 31, 2025 • 56 mins
"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 someth...
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Kara Swisher on Tech Founders' Flaws & Why Social Apps Are the New Cigarettes

July 24, 2025 • 49 mins
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 grow...
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Jack Dorsey on Selling Twitter, Leaving Bluesky & What He's Building Next

July 17, 2025 • 50 mins
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 ...
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The Internet Doesn’t Have to Be Like This

July 11, 2025 • 3 mins
Revolution.Social is a podcast about the future of social media and reclaiming our digital communities, hosted by technologist and community advocate Rabble, a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath — who was Twitter’s first employee. Guests will include Twitter's former CEO Jack Dorsey, journalist & podcaster Kara Swisher, science fiction author Cory Doctorow, and many more.
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