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EFFecting Change: How to Build a Decentralized Web that Truly Works for All
This week, Social Web Foundation Executive Director Mallory Knodel joined EFF’s Babette Ngene and public interest technologist Bruce Schneier for a conversation about how to build a decentralized web that truly works for all. The discussion was part of EFF’s EFFecting Change series and explored what the fediverse can offer as an alternative to today’s…
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New in Tech Policy Press, “The Web Needs a Context Layer Built on a Shared Protocol”
Years of thinking from scholars like Francis Fukuyama and Renée DiResta have gone into what are called “middleware” solutions to content moderation. With Evan Friedman from FABRIC, this is our contribution to the solution space—a standardized protocol suite to facilitate an opt-in way of seeing how different communities understand the same story, where they disagree,…
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We Are Everywhere: The Social Web Foundation’s 2025 Annual Report
Into our second year our mission to foster an open, decentralized, and user-centric social web continues. SWF are official W3C members, we have secure core as well as project support through 2026 and, well, we have been all over the world talking about the fediverse. Today we are publishing our 2025 Annual Report to spotlight…
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Social Web Foundation at RightsCon 2026
Update 4 May 2026: We are sad to report that RightsCon was cancelled by the Zambian government over the political nature of its program, dealing a blow to the global human rights community. SWF remains committed to our human rights work, particularly to expand open social adoption in the Global Majority. Next week the human…
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Shaping What Comes Next: Inside the IGF Expert Group Meeting
Last week at the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Expert Group Meeting we considered what changes to this 20-year-old, UN initiative are required now that the UN General Assembly has made it permanent. This small, invitation-only gathering was tasked with the future of the IGF as a permanent UN mandate and how it achieves outcomes. Now…
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New Report: AI, Agency and Protocols– Power and Governance in Open Social Networks
With Modal Foundation, PublicAI and Project Liberty Institute, the Social Web Foundation wrote a paper on the expert workshop held at the AI Action Summit in New Delhi. Open social protocols promise to deliver user agency. As adoption grows, users encounter new tradeoffs across technical, economic, and governance dimensions. These tradeoffs are unique to open,…
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Automating Justice, Designing Power: Reflections from the Commission on the Status of Women
By Mallory Knodel This week I spoke at the United Nations 70th Commission on the Status of Women in a session titled “Automating Justice: Can Artificial Intelligence Increase Women’s and Girls’ Access to Justice?” The recording is available on the UN’s WebTV. I also delivered a short intervention at an EU side event on Preventing…
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AI and the New Social
Mallory is heading to India later this month to kick off something we’ve been building toward for a while: the first in a global series on AI and the social web. Alongside the AI Impact Summit in Delhi, SWF is holding space for dialogue among a focused group to dig into what comes next as…
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Notes from the Digital Competition Conference
This week I (Mallory) was at the Digital Competition Conference hosted by the Knight Georgetown Institute representing SWF. Conversations unlocked cooperation between tech, law and regulation that is needed to rein in market abuse by gigantic digital infrastructures. What made this conference especially valuable was how consistently the discussion balanced between all three. I was…
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Building Human Rights Into the Social Web
Last week Mallory and the Internet Exchange team hosted a series of events related to human rights and the social web at MozFest 2025 in Barcelona. Mallory joined Rabble on the revolution.social podcast— Check out the episode below or wherever you get your podcasts. In addition, with Mozilla’s support we convened a MozFest Fringe Event…