Designing less cruel social media
2020-07-11 — 2026-03-09
Wherein an iterative remaking of online commons is proposed, with IndieWeb and Fediverse noted, and platform rules are to be set by compensated mini-publics convened for moderation and privacy.
What if we could do less harm minimization of social network behaviour because social networks were less toxic, less addictive, and less fruitful for weaponized corrosiveness?
What might such networks look like? Since this is an evolutionary process, I suspect we need to consider an iterative design process, rather than hoping to nail the perfect solution in one go. Maybe think about everything here as a plausible “next move” rather than the “end game”.
1 Indieweb
The artisanal social media movement is a good start. See Indieweb for more.
2 Fediverse
See Fediverse for more.
3 Platform democracy
See Towards Platform Democracy: Policymaking Beyond Corporate CEOs and Partisan Pressure for more.
Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms make incredibly impactful decisions about the speech of billions. Right now, those decisions are primarily in the hands of corporate CEO’s—and heavily influenced by pressure from partisan and authoritarian governments aiming to entrench their own power.
We propose an alternative: platform democracy. In the past decade, a new suite of democratic processes have been shown to be surprisingly effective at navigating challenging and controversial issues, from nuclear power policy in South Korea to abortion in Ireland. These processes have been tested around the world, overcome the pitfalls of elections and referendums, and can work at platform scale. They enable the creation of independent ‘people’s mandates’ for platform policies—something invaluable for the impacted populations, the governments which are constitutionally unable to act on speech, and even the platforms themselves.
Key quote.
The Challenge: Who decides? (On divisive platform policies)
- Complex policy issues: Online platforms must make policy decisions around controversial issues such as content moderation, political advertising, recommendations, and privacy.
- Deciders often compromised: Currently, either platform CEOs (and their teams) ultimately determine platform policy or powerful governments do; often neither is rewarded by serving the public.
- Negligible public mandate: The public is continually impacted by these decisions and cares about their downstream outcomes (e.g. censorship, misinformation, violence, surveillance), but their perspectives are rarely incorporated (beyond one-sided studies).
- Platforms are stuck: Even platform CEOs often don’t want to be held responsible for these decisions—there may be no action that ’looks good’ or which can forestall retaliation from partisan politicians or governments.
- No obvious alternative: Even within functional democracies, governments are often limited constitutionally or by partisan gridlock. Platform-based referendums have been attempted, but had negligible response rates.
The Context: New democratic mechanisms have handled tough issues at national scale.
- New democratic decision-making processes have now been shown to make thoughtful decisions and be broadly trusted, without most of the damaging political dynamics of referendums and elections, and for a tiny fraction of the cost.
- When designed well, these processes can work even when no existing powerful actor is trustworthy and when no one wants to be held responsible for a decision.
- They often involve creating a demographically representative “mini-public” that is compensated for a fixed time period to learn about an issue from the many multi-stakeholder perspectives, deliberate together, and voice their conclusions.
- This may seem idealistic and implausible. But these new “representative deliberation processes” have now beenused to support complex policy-making around the world, tackling issues from abortion in Ireland to nuclear power in South Korea.
The Opportunity: Platforms can use these processes to tackle controversial issues.
- Platforms working with governments, civil society, can have experienced and neutral facilitators deploy these new processes for the toughest policy questions.
- Policy decisions will then be made by the impacted populations and informed by key stakeholders, often leading to a strong public mandate (which may even help defend against partisan or authoritarian overreach).
4 Incoming
Interesting research: Sarah Dean whose work on the higher order effect of recommendation algorithms looks tasty (Andrus et al. 2021; Dean and Morgenstern 2022; Hron et al. 2022; Xu and Dean 2023).
In Fixing social media Pinterest CEO Bill Ready commits Pinterest to being more wholesome than its competitors.
Nick Punt on de-escalating Twitter.
I am not persuaded by the stickiness of debubble, the ‘thoughtful Twitter debate’ app, but maybe?
Mildly interesting ideas for better social networks, although not ideas on how they would attract customers.
Lauren Weinstein, Social Media Is Probably Doomed
The Coddling of the Australian Mind? A Review of the Evidence
Center for Humane Technology TED-izes it.
Adam Mastroianni, Reading the news is the new smoking
How to Make Tech Products (that Don’t Cause Depression and War)
-
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
Introducing Civility, by Peter Lewis
This paper outlines the thinking behind the Civility, an iterative project with the potential to build a collaborative public interest network to better connect government, civil society and citizens.
The project is both practical, building better tools for stakeholder and community engagement, and political, constructing an alternative medium for engagement to the commercial platforms that regard user activity as an asset to be exploited.
[…] it proposes three discreet but inter-dependent initiatives:
- A set of digital tools to support collaborative engagement at a stakeholder, member and public level
- A public database of agreed insights to base collaboration around
- A community of registered users who would build a civic network of engaged citizens from the ground up.
-
Announcing Maven: We’ve created a new kind of social network—a serendipity network—that’s directly inspired by insights from open-endedness and Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.[…] On Maven, you follow interests instead of following people. The result is it’s no longer a popularity contest because you don’t need followers and we don’t count likes. The open-ended approach in effect provides an alternative to objective popularity-driven social media. And the resultant change in incentives means genuine, curiosity-driven conversations are more likely because getting attention stops being the primary concern.
Note that this seems to describe TikTok also.
See Maven.