The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

Researcher Interview: Karen Frost-Arnold

Robert W. Gehl, 14 Jul 2025

In this ASM researcher interview, Robert W. Gehl talks to Karen Frost-Arnold. Frost-Arnold is a Professor of Philosophy at Hobart & William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY in the US. Her research focuses on the philosophy of the internet, the epistemology and ethics of trust, social epistemology, philosophy of science, and feminist philosophy. Her book Who Should We Be Online? A Social Epistemology for the Internet was published by Oxford University Press in 2023. Their conversation focused on Frost-Arnold’s 2024 article “Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media.”

For those of us not in your field, what does it mean to study the social epistemology of the internet? What excites you about this area of study?

Since social epistemology is the study of the social dynamics of knowledge, social epistemologists study how social practices, habits, institutions, and structures shape what we know (and what we don’t), and they develop theories for what should be done to produce reliable, unbiased, and just knowledge.

I find using social epistemology to study the internet exciting because there are so many pressing challenges and exciting possibilities for producing knowledge together online. For example, how should online spaces be moderated? How can we use the internet to unlearn our biases and prejudices? What kinds of practices and sociotechnical designs discourage the spread of harmful disinformation? Social epistemology can be a really interdisciplinary approach to addressing these questions.

What brought your attention to federated social media as a site of inquiry into social epistemology?

I first heard about federated social media from Sarah Jeong’s 2017 Vice piece about Mastodon, and I got an account. I was really excited about the possibilities of federated social media, but I couldn’t find any philosophers thinking about it, and I was very disconnected from researchers in other fields thinking about alternative social media. So I just couldn’t figure out how to connect ASM to my research.

Five years later, I was learning a lot about epistemic decolonization (the process of removing the influences of colonization on knowledge production and recentering knowledge production in the hands of the previously colonized) from amazing scholars like Veli Mitova and Abraham Tobi at the University of Johannesburg. This got me thinking about ways that online knowledge infrastructure needs to be in the hands of the people, rather than Global North tech companies, and I really started digging into work on ASM.

The ASM meetup at the 2022 Association of Internet Researchers conference and the Social Media Alternatives library were super helpful for me to find work that others were doing in this area.

One thing that struck me about your paper is that your social epistemology approach could be used as a tool when folks start their own fediverse instances. How might your approach guide things like making a code of conduct and making decisions about federation and defederation?

I love this question! There’s so much to say.

Basically, I think current social epistemology gives us a useful toolbox for thinking about how to produce knowledge well. For example, feminist accounts of objectivity recognize that each of us have our own biases, and that bias can be managed, even though it may never be fully erased. Feminist epistemologists suggest two ways we can manage bias: 1) discussing decisions within a diverse community, and 2) starting inquiry by centering the knowledge and lived experiences of the oppressed and marginalized.

So when folks are making decisions about what a code of conduct should be, or whether to federate or defederate with another instance, they should first ensure that these decisions are not made just by one person, who is likely to have their own biases. Instead, the decisions need to be debated within a group of folks from different backgrounds. Second, that discussion needs to center the experiences of marginalized people, who are most likely to be aware of the kinds of harmful online behavior that a code of conduct should prohibit to make the instance a thriving community.

This means asking questions such as: who in our community experiences oppression, and what kinds of misconduct are most likely to prevent their full participation in the instance? What kinds of policies are marginalized people asking for in a code of conduct?

Additionally, the “epistemologies of ignorance” literature provides tools for identifying ways that the knowledge of marginalized people is suppressed and how policies are often misused to silence them. So folks starting an instance need to be attentive to how privileged people may try to enforce (or call for enforcement of) a code of conduct in ways that make them comfortable, but which silence those with less power.

For example, when people of color call out racism in online spaces, they are often perceived by white people as attacking or harassing the racist users. White folks may try to appeal to codes of conduct to censor people of color simply for objecting to racism. This means that thinking through issues of power in moderation needs to happen not just at the stage of creating policies for codes of conduct or defederation; instead, folks need to attend to power dynamics at every point in the moderation process.

Zooming out a bit from your paper, how do you conceptualize the relationship between social epistemology on the internet and broader historical contexts? In other words, how much of what is knowable is conditioned by history, and how might we use the internet to imagine something better than structural racism?

First, I should mention that a lot of traditional social epistemology does a terrible job of recognizing the ways that history shapes what is knowable. Unfortunately, a lot of the work in my field attempts to be apolitical in a way that makes it also ahistorical.

But my work is influenced by feminist epistemologists, philosophers of race, queer epistemologists and others who reject that approach. The truth is that much of what I, as an individual, can know is conditioned by my social location (my race, gender, class, etc.) and much of what kinds of knowledge circulate in a community (and which kinds of knowledge get uptake in that community) is shaped by the power relations at play in a particular historical moment.

So that means that we can’t imagine the internet to be a level playing ground where it’s possible for everyone to have a free exchange in the marketplace of ideas. Power shapes all of our online spaces.

What excites me about alternative social media is that so many of its proponents are people who recognize this. ASM folks want to create online spaces that are owned by the people, rather than powerful corporations.

Of course, this alone doesn’t guarantee justice in federated social media (Johnathan Flowers’ work on the whiteness of Mastodon illustrates this, as does the example of Gab). But at least there’s the possibility for people to create just and inclusive online spaces where we can have conversations that challenge the dominant forms of knowledge that prop up white supremacy and other forms of injustice.

One of the main themes in social epistemology is that privilege has a tendency to hide itself so that privileged people are often ignorant of their own advantages whereas oppressed people are often more aware of the gaps, biases, and ignorance of dominant knowers and dominant knowledge systems. ASM gives marginalized people tools to create their own spaces and to advocate for practices that center their voices. And it can give privileged people a space to unlearn their own ignorance by listening.

Big tech companies just do not have a profit incentive to center the needs of marginalized people in their policies and practices. So I’m excited by opportunities federated social media provide for us to imagine new, more just worlds together online.

Where do you think ASM research should go from here?

I’m still learning and growing in this field, so I hesitate to say I know where the field should go. But I just finished Michael Kwet’s book Digital Degrowth, and I’m really interested in exploring how ASM might help us collectively work towards a decolonial, sustainable internet.

The Global North simply has too much power in our digital lives, and we are facing looming ecological disaster that tech companies are supporting. I’m interested in collaborating with folks who want to explore how ASM might be part of building an internet owned by (and managed for) the global majority rather than tech elites.