Defending Digital Rights in the Surveillance Era (with Jillian York)
We need a more diverse approach to internet governance, says Jillian York, the director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
At the EFF, Jillian has studied the global impact of social media policies and advocated on behalf of global activists and others whose voices are often suppressed.
Today on Revolution.Social, she and Rabble talk about the challenges of content moderation, the importance of end-to-end encryption, and the unintended consequences of age-verification legislation aimed at protecting minors on the internet. They also discuss the theft of copyrighted works that helped train AI large language models, and the necessity of grassroots activism to preserve digital freedoms.
Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz
Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874
This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/
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Enshittification and “Breaking Kings” (with Cory Doctorow at Web Summit)
In this live interview recorded in November at Web Summit 2025 in Lisbon, Cory Doctorow returns to Revolution.Social to talk about building alternatives to “enshittified” digital platforms.
"Apps are websites that are illegal to protect your privacy while you use them," Cory explains. "The reason companies are so horny to get you to use their apps is because they can't be modified in that way. No one's ever installed an ad blocker for an app."
Cory and Rabble also discuss how Europe could export jailbreaking tools as industrial policy, why other countries should respond to American tariffs with a targeted strike against the tech industry, and why tech workers should have unionized when they had leverage.
Chapters:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:06 Anticircumvention Laws & GDPR
00:06:54 Apple and Google's DRM Controls
00:09:14 Chokepoint Capitalism and the EuroStack
00:11:10 Adversarial Interoperability
00:14:09 Printer Ink vs. Stallion Semen
00:15:38 The AI Bubble Will Pop
00:18:48 Tech Bosses Aren't Afraid of Their Workers
Read Cory’s new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It https://bookshop.org/p/books/enshittification-why-everything-suddenly-got-worse-and-what-to-do-about-it-cory-doctorow/d3f8483b158906ce
Follow Rabble on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/rabble.nz
Follow the podcast: https://episodes.fm/1824528874
This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/
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"Our Mission Is To Keep Flickr Pictures Visible for 100 Years" (with George Oates)
Designer, community-builder, and Flickr co-creator George Oates is now the executive director of the Flickr Foundation, which is working to preserve the platform's 21 years of photos for the next 100 years. She helped create Flickr's community guidelines, designed its nested privacy controls, and launched the Flickr Commons program, which partners with more than 100 institutions to make publicly held photography collections more accessible.
“The Flickr community loved it, and actually would help the institutions by describing the photos, and in some cases identifying things like the location they were taken, who was in them, the events surrounding them, stuff like that,” George says. “This really important contextual metadata about these historic photos.”
Today on Revolution.Social, George and Rabble talk about how the online multiplayer Game Neverending evolved into Flickr; the groundbreaking ways the site approached content moderation and avoiding context collapse; and why the sort of hypergrowth that makes Silicon Valley tick is “the antithesis of building a healthy, happy community.” Plus: The plan to save all of Flickr’s photos, no matter what happens.
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This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/
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Vine Revisited and The Fight Against AI Slop
Rabble and Alice Chan, Revolution.Social’s host and executive producer, talk about the launch and overwhelming reception to diVine, a new social video app that resurrects the six-second looping format of Vine and features archived original Vine content.
This time, however, the app is built on open protocols and a promise to focus on real content made by real people, not AI. Within hours of announcing diVine at Web Summit in Lisbon, it had 10,000 signups on TestFlight, Apple’s developer testing app, and its beta program was full. Its early success is proof that new social apps can be built on the Social Media Bill of Rights and that consumers want better ways to connect and share online.
"We accept that one person controls Instagram and one person controls Twitter, one person controls TikTok,” Rabble says. “That is a dystopian nightmare. And so diVine isn't just fun videos, but also shows us a future of social media where power is shared."
You can join the diVine mobile app waitlist and preview the videos people are creating at https://divine.video/
Follow Rabble on Bluesky
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This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://revolution.social/
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Building Human Rights Into the Social Web (with Mallory Knodel)
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. “Nothing was durable at all.”
Today on Revolution.Social, Mallory and Rabble talk about who controls Web 2.0 and how the fediverse gives us a second chance; how she convinced the IETF to evaluate protocols for human rights implications; and why content moderation should be contextual, not universal. They also discuss how Edward Snowden’s revelations changed global internet standards, the 2025 funding crisis and how Ghost provides a model for sustainable open-source businesses.
Follow Rabble on Bluesky
Follow the podcast
This episode was produced and edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm, and executive produced by Alice Chan from Flock Marketing.
To learn more about Rabble’s social media bill of rights, and sign up for our newsletter, visit https://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).
UK