CommonList brings together feeds from organising and activism groups and local and national news. It primarily focuses on Lambeth in London. It monitors social media, websites and news media through a mixture of rss feeds, web scraping and automation.
News media tends to focus on problems, with less attention on solutions. There is an endless stream of stories about unaffordable living costs, exploitation and conflict but the work that people are doing to address those problems is usually overlooked.
Our social media timelines are increasingly manipulated by money, with promoted posts, paid-for accounts and bots swamping everything else. The major social media platforms are no longer ways to connect with each other, but instead one-way attention farming machines.
All of this means that there is a need to highlight the work that people are doing in their communities to address the problems they face, and to highlight open communication platforms.
- Paul