• In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Tressie McMillan Cottom (Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information and Library Science) discussed the phenomenon of “Dry January,” reminding us that “anything that becomes popular has politics.” McMillan Cottom explains the language we use to talk about “clean living” is binary (if you aren’t clean, you’re dirty) and morally loaded. Dry January “takes a choice and compels people to talk about it, to proselytize it, and ultimately to perform it.”
  • Brooke Harrington (Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College) appeared on The Daily Show to discuss the “Broligarchy” of tech billionaires present at Trump’s inauguration. “We’ve had oligarchs in the past in America. We’ve had Carnegies, and we’ve had Rockefellers. But aside from making sure they didn’t get regulated or taxed too much, they kind of stuck to their own business. They just wanted to get rich,” Harrington commented. “But the broligarchs really have an explicit political agenda. And it is essentially antidemocratic and almost monarchical.”
  • Pen America interviewed Joan Donovan (Assistant Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media Studies in the College of Communications at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute) about how the proliferation of political disinformation online has shifted in the past decade and the role of disinformation in Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. “[In] 2016, people are very focused on this notion of fake news. They realize that the internet is essentially full of spam, and there are different ways in which stories that are novel and outrageous are combined to create attention. … By 2020 though, things had really shifted. The tech companies are clamping down on anonymous accounts,” Donovan explained. “Between November 2020 to January 6, 2021, we get a glimpse into the future of what social media offers as a tool for organizing society, and no longer are they relying on anonymous accounts to push this content.”
  • Meduza ran an article on how Ukraine has changed due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine War. Volodymyr Paniotto (Ukrainian sociologist and Director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology) discussed shifting attitudes towards ending the war, trust in political figures, attitudes toward the Russian language, and how migration out of Ukraine has contributed to a demographic crisis. Paniotto also describes how “new grounds for social stratification have emerged over these few years. Now, what a person did and where they were during the war has become a dividing factor.”
  • Hannah Wohl (Associate Professor of Sociology at UC-Santa Barbara) and Lindsey Cameron (Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania) wrote an article for The Conversation on the illusions of flexibility and autonomy for workers in the platformed gig economy. The authors compared experiences between ride-share drivers (Uber, Lyft) and porn performers (OnlyFans), finding that companies often promise flexible scheduling and the ability to turn down bad work offers. However, in practice, this autonomy is illusory; workers tend to accept whatever work they are offered, as companies are gatekeepers for work and workers don’t have any guarantee of future gigs.
  • Mark Zuckerberg recently appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast, talking about how Meta will no longer moderate hate speech and misinformation. Zeynep Tufekci (Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton) wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times in response, critiquing Zuckerberg’s “posturing” and discussing difficulties in moderating content and managing the relationship between private companies and government. “Hate speech in the 21st century is a complicated issue. We can’t just moderate our way out of our very real conflicts over immigration, transgender rights, pandemic response and other issues,” Tufekci explains, “Zuckerberg conveniently neglected to mention that Facebook profits off tribalizing, inflammatory, conspiratorial content, which has been shown to keep people scrolling. He is right, however, that … fact-checkers lost a good deal of public trust by overstepping their boundaries.”