Sohyeon Hwang on Community Governance and Decentralized Social Media

We all spend time in online communities, from private group chats and Reddit forums to newer platforms such as Mastodon. But who actually makes the rules there? And who decides what content gets promoted, removed, or shut down? In this episode, we talk to Sohyeon Hwang, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, about how online communities can govern themselves. We take a closer look at what protocols are, what

community-led moderation can look like beyond banning, and why smaller communities can feel more human while still being challenging to run.