“Between the Capitol riot and the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, I knew I had to leave Louisiana”

Who: Robert W. Gehl, 45, associate professor of communication and media studies, York University Known for: Dissecting alternatives to corporate social media Moved from: Louisiana Tech University in January of 2023

January 7, 2021, was the day I started seriously contemplating leaving the US. It was three or four in the morning—I’d stayed up watching the coverage of the Capitol attack hours earlier. I remember thinking, We can’t come back from this. We can’t come back from people storming the Capitol Building and trying to stop the transfer of power, then having Republicans still lie about the election being stolen. What solidified my family’s decision to move to Toronto was the Dobbs decision in June of 2022, when the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade and took away the constitutional right to abortion. My partner had no intention of living anywhere as a second-class citizen. We also have a teenage son and thought about the impact on him and whomever he might partner with. The world he would be coming of age in wasn’t one we valued.

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I’m originally from Michigan, but at the time, we were living in ­Louisiana—my wife and I were both on faculty at Louisiana Tech. I’d spent some time in Calgary as a Fulbright Scholar and really respected the people I’d met there who were affiliated with media and communications at universities in Toronto. There’s a critical edge to the Canadian understanding of media. There are several reasons for that—an obvious one is Canada’s relationship to the US media machine. There’s a long history of Canadian work in the field, going back to Marshall ­McLuhan. I think Toronto media studies is the best in the world, and being part of it is so cool.

My work involves looking at media, taking it apart academically and trying to figure out how to make it better. My PhD dissertation was a critique of Facebook, and I’ve always been interested in activists who are building alternatives to corporate social media like X and Meta, which monitor what you do and sell your thoughts to marketers.

This area of research was lonely work for many years—I’m one of the few people in the world who have extensively studied it—but younger scholars are getting involved now, and I’m fostering that. There was a big wave of interest in free, open-source options after Elon Musk bought Twitter. Suddenly, I was speaking with reporters all over the world about Mastodon, the decentralized community-­driven social networking platform, because I’m writing a book on it. This specific moment is fascinating in its own way, with things like #ElbowsUpTech gaining traction. People across Canada are building their own sovereign social technology, setting up and running social media servers for themselves and their friends or for their small towns. They are working around the Online News Act and Meta’s blocking and proving that you don’t have to be totally beholden to American companies. You can do it on your own.