Replacing Facebooktwittergooglamazonsoft

If today's social media landscape is a "vast wasteland," what is the road ahead? This week's New_ Public Festival offered some signposts.

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Given all the problems with civic engagement today—widespread misinformation, heightened polarization, online mobs (and their offline manifestations), fears of censorship by over-empowered tech bros, social isolation, increased mood disorders from online addiction, the list goes on and on--should we fix the tech platforms, or should we start over? I spent much of the last three days attending the New_ Public Festival, listening to leading thinkers and organizers from around the world who are working on these challenges, and here are my impressions. (I should note that I’m on the advisory board of New_ Public, which organized the festival.)

First, the big tech platforms are doing a terrible job at fostering a healthy civic culture. Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud, the co-founders of New_Public, conducted a 20-country survey aimed at eliciting feedback from super-users of salient platforms, asking them to rate those platforms on 14 key signals. Their working premise for deriving those 14 civic signals is that “a flourishing digital public space should be welcoming and safe for diverse publics, help us understand and make sense of the world, connect people near and far across hierarchies and divides, and enable us to act together.”

As their research report shows, only one of the fifteen platforms they studied received a high ranking on any of the 14 signals. That was Reddit, which was rated 1.5 (out of a range of 0 to 2) for its ability to “cultivate belonging” on the site. It also received the highest rating of all the platforms for its ability to “promote thoughtful conversation” but at 1.2 this is not a particularly strong result. Twitter and Facebook tied for the lowest score of any platform or signal with a 0.8 on “show reliable information.”

If you dig deeper into their report, you’ll see that Pariser and Stroud are aware of the nuances inherent in this kind of work. Different users have different value systems, in terms of how they think about the importance of different civic signals. Women rate most of the signals as more important than men (though male Facebook superusers think “make power accessible” is more important then female superusers). Some signals, like “show reliable information,” matter to people across all 20 countries; others do not. “No one platform does it all,” Pariser and Stroud write. “Different platforms excel at different signals for different groups.” I’m not sure if any actually “excel,” however.

And that nuance leads us to where the New_ Public is straddling the question I started this post with. Should we focus on trying to upgrade how the dominant platforms subtly shape civic life? Or should we put our energies elsewhere? This tension was surfaced eloquently during the festival by Ethan Zuckerman, who is firmly in the latter camp. Using the evolution of radio and television as a lesson, he reminded the audience that we can always make fresh choices and “the ways that a particular media works are never inevitable.” Back in 1961, Newton Minow, then the new FCC chairman, told the National Association of Broadcasters they were failing, Zuckerman recalled. Minow’s words are worth recalling:

“When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better.

But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it.”

“We’re at a ‘vast wasteland’ moment in social media,” Zuckerman declared. But then he also pointed out that only eight years after Minow’s “vast wasteland” speech that PBS launched Sesame Street. His point was obvious: we can go beyond fixing what’s broken, and maybe it’s better to build better systems anew.

The New_ Public Festival did a good job of showcasing many exciting projects on that frontier. Some that I strongly suggest checking out:

-Planetary, a new mobile app built by @Rabble (an anarchist coder who was the first employee at Twitter) that seeks to be “social media for humans, not algorithms);

-For the deeply geeky, Golda Velez’s “Blue Sky” blueprint for an open, decentralized standard for social media;

-The Local Voices Network, being led by MIT’s Deb Roy with consultation from Kathy Cramer of the University of Wisconsin (and author of the valuable book The Politics of Resentment), and the new Center for Constructive Communication at MIT, which Roy will be directing (and which is being advised by Martha Minow, a Harvard professor who is one of Newton Minow’s offspring, how’s that for history’s rhyming ability!?);

-FriendCamp, a micro-social network built and run by internet artist Darius Kazemi for a couple dozen of his friends (see RunYourOwn.social, his guide to building one of your own)

Having said that, obviously none of these efforts are about to replace Facebooktwittergooglamazonsoft any time soon. Speaking at the festival, Cory Doctorow, a veteran of these convenings, made a strong case for unbundling the power of the big platforms by requiring “adversarial interoperability” or the ability to plug into the existing services without their permission. It’s a subtle but important solution to the monopolies we are now stuck with—they built their fortresses by taking advantage of the open Internet and then they pulled up the ladder they climbed behind them, making their own services impenetrable walled gardens. And engaging with the existing platforms means having to tolerate charades like the Facebook Oversight Board. One of its members, John Samples, spoke during the festival about needing a “rules-based” system for determining how and when specific content needs to be taken down, leading to a firm but polite rebuke from fellow panelist Anasuya Sengupta, founder of Whose Knowledge, who noted that “rules-based” systems have always been written by and for white people to the exclusion of communities of color.

Now, of course, the hard work remains. Converting the passion of the 5,000 people who watched the festival livestream into actual change is the work of New_ Public. To plug in, start by subscribing to its newsletter.

Odds and Ends

-Nancy Pelosi’s decision to ask Lt. Gen. Russel Honore (ret.) to lead the investigation into Capitol Hill security is encouraging; just glance at his Twitter feed and you’ll see why.

-I don’t know if this is really happening, but the idea that someone using the dating app Bumble has changed her preference to Conservative and is now “matching with MAGA bros and they’re bragging and send her pics and videos of them in the Capitol [and] she’s sending them to the FBI” fills me with schadenfreude.

-There was an impromptu debate between San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin and a bunch of tech VCs on the conversation app Clubhouse last night and it sounds like it did not go well. I’ve been struck, as a very light user of Clubhouse, at how diverse its early user group seems to be, but this tweet suggests that racial polarization and white privilege is rampant there as well. (One thing to keep an eye on, as America’s political dysfunction spirals further, is the privileged hyper-libertarians of Silicon Valley, whose dislike for government has never diminished.)

-Apply: TechCongress is looking for applicants for its 2021 Congressional Innovation Scholars.

-It’s Wikipedia’s 20th anniversary today, so raise a toast to one of the Internet’s most valuable public resources.

-Forgive me for a moment of parental pride, but check out Strava’s “Best Photos of 2020” and scroll down to the “Off-road runner up” photo from Sedona by one Jesse Lieman-Sifry. Wow, right?!