Social media can connect us, divide us, entertain us and enrage us. We’d love if online spaces were made safer and better moderated to keep the nasty parts at bay, but in the end it often comes down to how we moderate ourselves, with some people understandably pulling back from their digital lives just to protect themselves.

We spoke about the good, the bad and moderation of social media with journalist Aoife Barry, the author of ‘Social Capital: Life online in the shadow of Ireland’s tech boom’. This book is like a Reeling in the Years of online content, and we highly recommend you pick up a copy.

You can follow Aoife online @sweetoblivion26 on Twitter and Instagram, and check out these links for more:

— Find where you can pick up a copy of Social Capital here: http://linktr.ee/aoifebarry

— Subscribe to Aoife’s newsletter at https://sweetoblivion.substack.com

— Read more about the court case Aoife and other women took against their harasser here: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/04/22/it-felt-as-risky-being-a-teenage-girl-on-the-internet-as-it-did-being-a-teenage-girl-in-real-life/

— Find out more about BeReal, the social app we are big fans of, on Silicon Republic: https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/what-is-bereal-photos-instagram

— And more about the problematic Tattle, here: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/tattle-life-investigation

— And a little history of Scunthorpe Problem can be found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

We spoke at length with Aoife and couldn’t fit it all in here, but we will release her interview in its entirety in our bonus feed next week. And we’ll be back in a fortnight with an all-new episode.

And follow us @fortechssakepod on your platform of choice.

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