Our Mission Statement
Young people today want social media that connects and entertains without undermining their health and emotional well-being. We are growing an intergenerational community to explore, experiment, and deploy solutions that will give a new generation of media consumers and creators meaningful agency and ownership of their increasingly media-centric lives. Â
The Sustainable Media Center is a 501c3 organization formed by a diverse and inclusive board of over 200 leaders in media, technology and academia who want to foster and facilitate positive change to the current state of social media .Â
What Does Sustainable Media Mean?
Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability is not about the physical environment for media, it’s the social and economic resources we commit to the world of information and ideas that we live in.
The state of media today is not sustainable. It doesn’t sustain the health and well-being of our children, of our society, or our democracy. In its current incarnation, it profits from monetizing hate. We aim to build the future of sustainable media, to hold makers and distributors of media to be measured on a higher standard. A standard that doesn’t profit from knowingly doing harm.
Sustainable Media seeks a revenue stream that doesn’t put the media makers in conflict with their media’s ethical mission. So, for example, a news organization can’t be sustainable if the only way to remain solvent is to be paid by platform partners who facilitate and garner their revenue from amplification of misinformation, hate, or other anti-social community standards. If media companies’ underlying economic survival requires funds generated from platforms that make substantial revenue from amplification of misinformation, these media are not sustainable.
The State of Social Media Today
The state of social media today is not sustainable. It doesn’t sustain the health and well-being of our children, of our society, or our democracy. In its current incarnation, it profits from monetizing hate. We aim to build the future of sustainable media, to hold makers and distributors of media to be measured on a higher standard. A standard that doesn’t profit from knowingly doing harm.
Sustainability means meeting our own needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability is not about the physical environment for media, it’s the social and economic resources we commit to the world of information and ideas that we live in.Â
Sustainable Media seeks a revenue stream that doesn’t put the media makers in conflict with their media’s ethical mission. So, for example, a news organization can’t be sustainable if the only way to remain solvent is to be paid by platform partners who facilitate and garner their revenue from amplification of misinformation, hate, or other anti-social community standards.Â
If media companies’ underlying economic survival requires funds generated from platforms that make substantial revenue from amplification of misinformation, these media are not sustainable.
