Can Social Media Be Saved?

One theme of The Art of Association is how social media and the technology platforms that hook us into using them are eroding the underpinnings of civil society and democracy. In today’s post, we hear from two innovative leaders who are exploring how these media and technologies could be reimagined and used to build constructive online communities that serve democratic purposes. Eli Pariser was the Executive Director of MoveOn.org, where he led that network’s opposition to the Iraq War and its ground-breaking approach to engaging citizens online. He subsequently co-founded Avaaz, the global nonprofit petition platform. Eli is the author of The Filter Bubble: How the New Personalized Web is Changing What We Read and How We Think. Dr. Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud is Professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, where she also directs the Center for Media Engagement. Talia is the author of Niche News: The Politics of News Choice and numerous other scholarly publications.  Eli and Talia are the co-directors of New_ Public, a joint project of the Center for Media Engagement and the National Conference on Citizenship. The mission of the project is to “inspire and connect designers and technologists to build more flourishing digital public spaces.” I recently caught up with Elia and Talia to learn about their work. The following interview is a lightly edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Daniel: How has the New _Public project grown out of what each of you have been up to previously? How did you end up joining forces to collaborate on it?

Talia: For me, the through line is thinking about how the media could better operate in a democracy. My first book was called Niche News. It looked at how partisanship and media mix in ways that are potentially dangerous for democracy. Out of that grew more of a focus on solutions. If there’s a problem facing democracy, what can we do to try to fix it or make things better? That morphed into the Center for Media Engagement, which I founded and direct. The Center’s work asks, how can we work with media to help them meet both their democratic and business goals and responsibilities? New_ Public is a reaction to a platform environment that doesn't live up to its democratic potential. Things are quite amiss right now.  Eli and I ended up collaborating because we both were starting to kick around similar sorts of ideas and sharing them with various individuals. We realized we had complementary strengths.

Eli: My passion, dating back to when I was in college, has been the question of how do you leverage technology in support of a better democracy? In the first chapter of my career, I was trying to figure out how to build citizen engagement with MoveOn.org. I had been an early internet cheerleader, buying into the idea that technology was going to be inherently democratizing. But when I stepped back in 2009, I started wondering if that was really what was happening. That led to The Filter Bubble, which was me trying to figure out what it meant that we were increasingly living in these algorithmically mediated platform spaces online. As we got into the Trump era, concerns about disinformation and the poisonousness of the online environment came to the top of the public conversation. That conversation was so important. But it was very reactive and focused on how we mitigate these harms. It was not saying what a vision for a better environment might be. That’s the thread that I was pulling on. It turned out Talia was pulling on it as well. And that's why we started this project together, to understand what kind of online environment might be conducive to a healthy pluralistic democracy.

Daniel: Say more about why you're optimistic we can realize that goal.

Eli: I've moved from being a technological determinist in my early career to whatever the opposite of that is. These tools are ours to use to build the kind of society that we want. Far from being fatalistic or deterministic about it, we have a lot of choices about the kind of digital environment we create. But because of the overhang of Silicon Valley rhetoric and ideology, we're not really thinking big enough about what that might look like. One of the fun things about this project has been looking at times throughout history where people are saying, hey, on the one hand, we've got a lot of social stress and rupture, but on the other hand, we have this opportunity to build new kinds of institutions to address it. That's why I'm excited and optimistic about this next chapter for digital life. Everyone's getting to the point of, okay, this problem isn't going to fix itself. We have got to figure out what it is that we want and start to build a different kind of digital space.

Talia: We see the need, right? The public is not satisfied. Governments are not satisfied. There's clearly an issue here. People are putting a lot of energy into what might we do differently. And we see platforms starting to ask not only how do we tackle these problems but also what is our vision? I'll add there's a lot of research and a substantive theoretical and empirical tradition that suggests we can make a difference in this space.

Daniel: Eli, in a very powerful Ted Talk, you used the analogy of our physical public spaces like parks or libraries and how they shape the behavior within them as a way of understanding and designing better digital public spaces. What do you mean by that?

Eli: It was Talia who first got me thinking about this. When you're thinking about content moderation and news feeds, you tend to conceive of what people are doing in digital spaces as information exchange. That in turn can lead to a very rationalistic conception of what people are doing together—sending facts (or bad facts) back and forth. It’s all about the content. Talia said, well, what if instead of thinking about this just in terms of feeds that we are ranking, we think in terms of spaces. It quickly opened a whole new perspective for us. When you think about people in spaces, yes, they're exchanging information, but they're also exchanging all these nonverbal signals. They're clustering and grouping and moving around and figuring out where they fit and where they don’t. There is individual and group behavior. You also start to realize that the science of figuring out how to shape behavior of strangers coming together isn't a new problem for the Internet. It is as old as the earliest attempts to build human settlements. We've been trying to figure out the problem of how you create spaces where lots of people come together, especially if they don't know each other and they don't already have norms together, for a long time. As we dug into it, we could see we've made some of the same mistakes before. The Robert Moses era of technocratic urban design has a lot in common with the way we're structuring digital spaces right now: homogenous, top-down, and centering some needs over others. So, it just seemed like there was a lot of richness with this metaphor. It got us thinking about people in a different way.

Talia: We know metaphors really matter. If you look at the metaphors that are being used for digital life right now, they are out of date. One is the information superhighway. Another is big data. These are just not consistent with the way in which people think about how they behave in these spaces. They are not thinking about, “what's that bit of information that I am transmitting and that's coming back to me?” We are thinking about the relationships that are happening in online spaces. As soon as we started thinking about this as space, we both realized that it was incredible powerful in unlocking playful ways of thinking about how you do things online, of what it is that we want to see online.

Daniel: This project has a public or collective conception of our behavior and engagement with each other online versus a private and atomistic pattern. Are others thinking and working along the same lines?

Talia: We've been very strategic about moving from the individual focus to a more public focus. Instead of thinking about, say, user-friendly design, why not think about public-friendly design? There are lots of reasons things ended up in this individualized bucket. Not least among them, it's so easy for companies to ask, how do I maximize things for this one person? How do I design the algorithm to keep them on the site longer? It's much harder to think about publics. But it is a burgeoning area of thought. The more that we work on it, the more we see, oh, there's a group in Australia that’s thinking along these lines, and others around the world. It’s just bubbling up!

Eli: People are realizing the limits of the individualized lens for solving some of the problems in front of us. That you can build a function that optimizes for every person's well-being and end up with civil war is a problem! To go back, one of the things that the spatial metaphor quickly Illustrates is that in physical communities we use different kinds of structures to build social cohesion and functional communities. There's no community I know of that tries to do all of that within the structure of a for-profit company. If you're trying to organize something like a park or a library or school or sidewalks, there are other structures you'd probably want to use. In our digital landscape right now we're putting a tremendous amount of weight on the Facebooks of the world to not just to be functional businesses but also solve like a whole host of public problems. The spatial metaphor offers a different way to think about what we need alongside those skyscrapers, if you will, to make things work. There are a lot of people around the world who are also animated by this other mission—to build out the other pieces of digital civil society we need for everything to work well.

Daniel: What are the essential elements of better digital public places?

Eli: We spent two years trying to answer this question. After talking to people across a whole bunch of disciplines and doing a survey across 20 countries, we ended up identifying four building blocks and fourteen civic signals. The building blocks are Welcome, Connect, Understand, and Act. These are the functions you need to have a flourishing digital space. The civic signals are the more specific attributes that you want in each building block. For example, it's not just about connecting, but it's about connecting in a way that introduces groups to each other rather than in a segregated fashion. When we asked people how well they thought their favorite platforms were doing, even the super-users of the platforms gave them no better than middling marks on the things that were the most important. Nobody was nailing it. In fact, on some signals like humanization, all the platforms are doing poorly. Citizens who use these platforms who are rendering these verdicts. There's a lot of room for improvement.

Talia: This was an exercise in showing there actually is a way that you can articulate a vision of what it would mean to have more public friendly digital spaces. Doing all this research, especially internationally, we found that least some people in all these countries saw these civic signals as important. There's often an impulse to say, oh, but we're a global platform, or want to be, and that means that you can't think of what signals you want to send in a particular place. How would you begin to design for them? But I don't think that's the case. There are differences in terms of which signal you might prioritize, but there's something that people across very different cultures want to see in their digital lives. We did some surveying at two points in time, and we just shared some of the work we did in the middle of the pandemic because we thought maybe it might have changed how people thought about the signals as they were transitioning to live much more digitally. I expected there to be changes. Instead, there's a lot of stability. People who think these signals are important tend to think so over time, even in the middle of a very large pandemic. There is something there with these building blocks. And if you're a platform, the idea is that you could look to these signals and use them as a checklist–so, what are we doing internally to try to make people feel welcome? Is it succeeding or not? How might we tweak that to make people feel more welcome? Our hope is that this could be a starting point, not an ending point, for thinking about how platforms could better serve publics and societies and communities.

Daniel: What are some promising examples of the intentional and edifying digital spaces you're looking for from a democracy standpoint?

Eli: One we look at a lot and hopefully will be doing some work with on the research front soon is a network in Vermont called Front Porch Forum. You could call it “slow” social media, media that's very locally based. Users validate that they live in a particular neighborhood or area in Vermont. You can post once a day, and everything gets read by the moderators before it gets posted. There are strong norms for posts and if you don't follow them, your post gets sent back with a nice note saying like, hey can you rephrase this in a way that's a little more friendly or generous or neighborly? From an engagement standpoint, you’d think it would be kind of a disaster because flame wars are great for getting people riveted and refreshing their screens. But over time it's really developed this reputation as a place where people can have these like high-quality neighborhood conversations that have some of the qualities of newspaper’s letter to the editor page, but the speed and accessibility that digital communications allow. It’s a great example of the kind of thing you can build when you put aside the constraint of having to go up into the right on an engagement chart and instead think about, how do I serve this community well?

Talia: One example I would give is Change My View on Reddit. It’s this really interesting space where people will share a particular perspective and they're required by the forum to be up for conversation. It's not a place for hostility or debate. It’s well moderated. It gives people a chance to hear views unlike their own and think about things from different perspectives. I find the tenor of that Reddit to be a helpful one. It’s people listening to each other and hearing other views and, in the aspirations of the forum, being open-minded about changing their view. There’s something about that that's worth capturing and thinking about how it could be instilled in other social media and public forms.

Eli: It’s worth noting with Change My View that the aspiration is built into the incentive structure of the medium. You get delta points if your comment is good at changing people's views on that topic. So, there's a relationship between the design, the incentive structure, and the kind of conversation that's happening. It’s such a great example that it is possible for us to have totally different conversations than the sort we are having now. But we really need to think about the incentives embedded in how these spaces are designed. 

Daniel: How do we avoid digital engagement that pulls us away from the actual places where we live and work and go to school?

Talia: That's absolutely important. In fact, it’s one of the signals -- strengthening local ties. It's something we heard repeatedly across our focus groups in five countries. We saw it on the surveys. People feel it is important that they have these local connections and so that is baked into what we're thinking about. If you look at ways that this could be done, it might be Facebook, for instance, indicating whether people are constituents when they're writing a comment on an elected official’s Facebook page. That's a minor thing that you can do, but it still gives a sense of locality because then the representative knows who their constituent is, and their constituent is able to speak to someone in a position of authority in government for their local area. This can take place even within a large global platform. And then places like Front Porch Forum are directly targeting specific locations. So that's another approach to creating a local character to these social spaces.

Eli: This is a quandary I've been thinking about a lot. I live in a Brooklyn neighborhood called Fort Greene, not far from Park Slope, where there is an extraordinary digital space called Park Slope Parents that is super functional. It is the place you go to find childcare or figure out where to send your kid to preschool or, or a whole bunch of other parenting-related issues. In Fort Greene, there's a similar group, but it's much more of a Wild West setting, with scammers, no quality control – that kind of space. Why is Park Slope Parents so good and this other thing not so good? A lot of it comes down to a particular community builder, Susan Fox, who has made it her mission for like 15 years to make Park Slope Parents what it is. At first, she was a volunteer. Then she eventually figured out an economic model that would support her and other people doing really extensive moderation to make it work. In Fort Greene, because of a bunch of factors, there wasn't that person and there wasn't that moderation structure. One of the questions that I think about a lot is what do we need to do to support people like Susan, and to make it more appealing to become that kind of community steward? Because that's one of the things that you see—whether it's online communities or offline communities—you need people who really care about them and are willing to put in the work to make them good. If you're just a tech start-up and you're building for scale, the first thing you want to do is get that off your balance sheet. But if you're a community or society, you have to figure out how to support that function.

Daniel: It strikes me that there is an innovative combination of old-school civic leadership and community organizing at the heart of what you are describing, and the technology and social media are just enablers.

Eli: Yes, that is a really important frame for us. No one’s going to be able to just type up a new protocol and solve society. It's always going to be this interplay between particular people and communities and then the type of technologies that either support or foil what they're trying to do. That's where the solution is found, in that interplay.

Talia: That's what has been so exciting about this project. It’s brought both technologists and community leaders into contact with one another. Sadly, those two fields don't always have connections with one another. They have developed in two different streams. That has been a real insight and why it is pleasure for us to be part of this growing community.

Daniel: Looking ahead, if the effort you are co-leading is wildly successful, how would the world be different in five to ten years’ time?

Talia: We would have a different platform landscape. Platforms will be nothing like the way that they are now. They will be places where we go to work together to build better societies and the good of communities rather than how do I pop off the next great zinger to get as many likes as possible? And I would see New_ Public as being a hub, a place where people who are thinking about this come to share their ideas about what works and what doesn't. All the major players in 10 years’ time would be saying, ok, let's go to this convening to find out what the latest research on this is, to share what we've done, and make this even better. That would be the wildly successful version in my mind.

Eli: To build on that, decentralization and increased pluralism in digital spaces are going to happen whether we're part of it or not. We are moving out of the era of one or two top-down platforms driving everything. But do we end up in an online world with well-functioning gated communities for those who can afford them and then just a Mad Max scene outside of that? That's one possible future. The future we want to push toward is where it's not just the gated communities but everyone who has access to community spaces that really work. That is going to require some really some big breakthroughs and imagination and building to get there. I would love to see us be part of that story, of how we kind of build those institutions that help everyone have access to high-quality digital spaces.

Daniel: How can people who might be interested follow, learn from, or perhaps even participate in what you're up to?

Eli: The easiest thing might be to subscribe to our newsletter where we try to feature some of the voices and some of the projects that are happening in the space. It is an exciting time because, in response to some of the rising authoritarianism around the world, there are so many people who are doing these awesome projects that are about reinventing democratic practices in different ways. The newsletter is organized around these themes. More broadly, we have a lot of big ideas that we're really excited about, but we're a small project! So, we are looking for support to help build this kind of space where community leaders and technologists can collaborate to build a future for the internet that we want.

Talia: We held an online festival earlier this year where people exchanged all kinds of ideas. We'll be looking to do more events in the future and will certainly share plans in the newsletter so people can find out about opportunities to get involved. We're also eager to hear from people. If people have a great startup idea that they want to share, or they are thinking through something, or they've encountered a challenge, we want to hear these stories and elevate them and figure out solutions. People should feel welcome to get in touch with us directly.

Eli: We've spent the last few years trying to kind of get our heads around the research and the qualities needed in digital spaces. In our next couple of years, we are looking to be more active in helping facilitate the experimentation and design and prototyping in the space. We are looking for collaborators to do that. Let’s try some stuff out and see what that could unleash!

Daniel: Thank you, and good luck with this terrific initiative!