Online Community Organizing Is Not an Oxymoron

2024 finds us in the throes of election season in the U.S. and around much of the world. As a result, we are once again inundated with journalism warning us that new media and technologies are distorting and corrupting the public sphere that democracy needs to flourish. I have nothing to add to these gloomy accounts here.

I am convinced, however, that we should continue to look for, understand, and spread the silver linings that accompany the accelerating migration of our civic life into online spaces. Toward this end, three years ago I shared a conversation with Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud, founding co-directors of New_ Public, a nonprofit they had started-up. Their goal was to reimagine new media and technologies and use them to build constructive online spaces that served democratic purposes. The title of that post–“Can Social Media Be Saved?”–conveyed the question we talked through. At the time, Eli and Talia were cautiously optimistic that it could be.

Fast forward three years. If that is how the project started, how is it going? To get an update, I recently caught up with Deepti Doshi. She has taken the baton from Talia and now serves as Co-Director of New_ Public with Eli. Deepti spent seven tumultuous years, from 2015 to 2022, working at Facebook. Both there and in her new role, she has focused on how to encourage and enable people to be constructive stewards in online communities. Deepti’s vantage point now that she is two years into the work at New_ Public is thus especially telling. The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Daniel: Let’s start with your journey. Before you joined New_ Public, you worked at Facebook. Currently it has 3 billion users, or nearly two out of every five people on earth. Yet you decided to leave for a lean startup in civil society. Why did you make that shift? 

Deepti: To understand why I left Facebook for New_ Public probably requires understanding why I came to Facebook in the first place. Before that, I had started a community organizing tech platform in India that was using local civic issues to bring the rich and the poor together, bridging one of India's deepest divides. Our aspiration was to use these collective experiences to strengthen our social fabric as a foundational base for democracy in India. We had just come out of the Arab Spring. It felt like Facebook as a platform was going to provide the opportunity for grassroots collective power to really manifest itself. Back then, Facebook had some 2 billion users, and I was inspired by that scale. 

But seven years later, after trying in lots of different ways at Facebook, I realized it wasn’t going to happen. I believe that the people at Facebook are good, but the incentive structure that we were up against, with our customers being advertisers, really limited us. We got so many good ideas from the Facebook group admins that I worked with about what they needed to make their spaces healthier. But I kept running up against the company not prioritizing those ideas because they were not going to change the growth metrics that their customers wanted to see go up. Given these experiences, I came to believe that you can’t have a surveillance-based advertising incentive structure and healthy social spaces online. They are fundamentally at odds with one another. I wanted to be able to expand my imagination about what is possible, as opposed to being constrained by a business model — and that's what took me back to my roots in civil society.

Daniel: Give us an update on New_ Public. You, Eli, and the team are “reimagining social media…to explore creating digital public spaces where people can thrive and connect.” How do they differ from the kinds of online spaces we may be more familiar with? 

Deepti: Our curiosity and inquiry started by asking ourselves the question: if we could rebuild an algorithm for a newsfeed that was going to optimize for healthy democratic outcomes as opposed to growth and engagement to serve advertisers, what would that algorithm be? And as we embarked on that inquiry, we realized that that was actually the wrong question to be asking. It was grounding the question in information, when in fact, when people are spending time together online, it is much more about relational dynamics and how people interact with one another. With that reframing, we realized there was a lot to learn from public spaces — parks, libraries, public schools, even our sidewalks as spaces that in their best cases have been designed for the purpose of community and cohesion. We took that way of thinking into our digital worlds — in a moment when Twitter was billing itself as a kind of town square. That's what we mean by digital public spaces: online spaces that are intentionally designed for the public to be in relationship with one another. 

What are the barriers you're bumping up against?

I see three areas that need to be unlocked. The first involves new incentive structures, business models, and forms of investment that support the digital public spaces we want to build. Public partnerships may be part of the answer. We have a partnership with global broadcasters across Canada and Europe, where the incentives for this are aligned. Jonathan Soros has been evolving a model of investment called mission-based equity, where there is agreement between the investors, the end users, and the employees to really ensure that they are all aligned around the public impact.

Second, we also need to develop the technological infrastructure, such that governance of these spaces can in fact be done collectively and in a decentralized way. It can’t be centrally commanded and controlled through the men who sit here in Silicon Valley. It is exciting to see new platforms like Bluesky and others on the Fediverse begin to take hold a bit, but we still have a long way to go to make that infrastructure friendly to the masses of people. 

The final piece to me is leadership — the people piece. This is where we come to the conversation around community stewardship. When we aspire for a healthier internet, it's not just business and technological innovation that is going to get us there. At one point Wikipedia was a joke. Today, it is a really reliable source of information. One of the reasons why it is a trusted space is because of the hundreds of moderators who take responsibility for curating, editing, and verifying the information that is found in that space. We call this community stewardship.

Similarly, our libraries are only a building. It's the librarian – Mr. Michael, in my case, at the library around my corner where my kids go–who animates the craft program on Tuesday afternoon, organizes the chess program on Friday afternoon, and sets up the story times over the weekend. He is a community steward. For a big chunk of my career at Facebook, that's who I worked with, these group admins. I'm not suggesting that all online groups are public-spirited, or that all group admins are perfect community stewards.Yet there is a segment of publicly-spirited community stewards who do this work of moderating and administering these online spaces in a way that strengthens our communities. We really need to invest more in them to realize our vision of a healthy ecosystem of digital public spaces. 

Daniel:  What are the hallmarks of public-spirited community stewardship in digital spaces? And how do people serving in those roles get better at it?

Deepti: One of my favorite things about working with these community stewards over the last several years has been how fun they are. These are quirky individuals who care about their quirky communities in these digital spaces. They are a little bit weird--but we're all weird in our own little ways!  The thread that connects those that we're calling public-spirited community stewards is a real commitment to concerted and fair moderation, and to innovation around moderation. They are not just taking the tools that the big platforms make available. They are making them their own. 

So let’s take, for example, Lola Omolola's Facebook group, which began as "Females in Nigeria" and is now two million women from all over the globe, sharing stories together in an online community. They have their own tools for keeping things civil. Members use a grumpy cat meme as a soft indication that your comment isn't really following the norms of the community. It’s not a rejection or shameful, but a little nudge that is very human and supports the community to be healthy and safe. I like that commitment to careful, thoughtful, considered moderation and the very intuitive understanding of human behavior that the best stewards show. That is a big part of the magic.

Frankly, the tools that they need aren't available, so they're hacking their way around it to make these spaces truly welcoming for all people, and to enable constructive conversations. But in this same example that I just shared, Lola told me three or four years ago that she spent 60 hours a week moderating her group. That is work that in most instances is uncompensated, unrewarded, and until very recently unrecognized. And so that is something that we really, really must unlock if we want to get to this vision of public spaces online that supports our plurality and builds our cohesion.

Daniel: If New_ Public is wildly successful over the next few years, how will the world be different as a result of the work you have underway?

Deepti: At least everybody in America will have a digital community that they can go to that allows them, as Danielle Allen says, to see, be seen by, and shape their community.  The impact of their participation in that community will be real to them in their offline lives, too. They will have a greater sense of belonging and increased social trust with their neighbors. That is what is motivating us. We believe that's necessary for a stronger democracy. We don't have to take these social spaces as granted, and then presume that we just need regulation to curb the excesses of capitalism. We can use our public and moral imagination to create different sorts of spaces to begin with. New_ Public is very much focused on these online spaces. I see a whole set of up-and-coming entrepreneurs who are thinking through and creating alternative social spaces that are healthier. I hope that we are able to help that ecosystem really take hold, because who knows all the different sorts of innovations we can come up with?

Daniel: From your lips to God’s ears, Deepti! Thank you for this illuminating update. And good luck with the work you and the team have underway.