Taking back social media could be world changing
update: I’ve started a discussion group on this subject. This is not “my group”, nor is it just for one particular project or ideology. Please join in if you’re passionate about this topic: https://www.loomio.org/g/4dCuiAPo
Imagine for a second that the numbers had shifted a few percent the other way, and Clinton had won instead. The following statement would still be true (for liberals in particular):
About half of American voters have a position so different to yours that it seems deeply reprehensable that they even think it.
This statement has been true in American politics for a long time, and I can understand why. As a liberal, it feels like the stakes are so high. When the “other side” wins, minorities are harmed, and we destroy the planet that keeps us alive.
So, while my urge is partially to fight and organise and “win” against the opposing points of view, if the goal is to change minds, being self-rightous isn’t very effective (even if you’re right).
“If you really want to change someone’s mind on a moral or political matter, you’ll need to see things from that person’s angle as well as your own. And if you do truly see it the other person’s way — deeply and intuitively — you might even find your own mind opening in response. Empathy is an antidote to righteousness, although it’s very difficult to empathize across a moral divide.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
This isn’t a world-shattering insight. In fact, in the last few days, I think I’m the 450,000th person to blog about this. Likewise, I’m also about to be the 449,000th person to point the finger at social media for causing much of this problem.
We’ve known about the self re-enforcing nature of social media bubbles for a long time. This book is seven years old now, and there have been many articles written during that time. However, with the surprise of a Trump election victory, suddenly everyone is talking about it.
- How Facebook Warps Our Worlds (NYTimes)
- How social media creates angry, poorly informed partisans (Vox)
- How We Broke Democracy (Medium) by Tobias Rose-Stockwell
- The ‘Filter Bubble’ Explains Why Trump Won and You Didn’t See It Coming (NYMag)
- Facebook, in Cross Hairs After Election, Is Said to Question Its Influence (NYTimes)
The problem is clear. I’ve heard a couple of potential solutions.
1. Reform Facebook
Articles in the mainstream media, typically conclude their analysis by asking what facebook is going to do about it, and covering Zuckerberg’s responses to that question. It’s a reasonable question, Facebook’s massive dominance in the social media space means that it has more effect on the shape of our civilisation that most national economies. In almost any other period in history, it would simply have been nationalised to fix the problem, but that clearly isn’t going to happen.
2. Buy Twitter
In the Guardian, Nathan Schneider proposed that Twitter, our second largest place for online discussion, was disapointing investors and likely to be a commercial failure but if purchased by it’s users and run as a co-operative for the public benefit, it could be judged a huge success by different criteria. If you want to get involved with that campaign, it’s being discussed in this Loomio group.
Both of these approaches are based on leveraging existing large social networks, because starting a new one is a task generally thought to be impossible.
Why is it is impossible? Because of the Network Effect. This essentially states that the larger a network is, the more valuable it becomes at an exponential rate. Once Facebook’s meteoric rise took it to a certain size, it became so large that it’s impossible for another network to compete because people you know wont be using it. Google Plus anyone? How about Ello, App.Net or Diaspora?
But what if right now is a special moment?
There’s no doubt that the left is reeling in shock right now. Without wanting to detract from the very real reason for that, and the important work to be done, I wonder if perhaps this moment could be for the left what other shocks have been for the right?
What if this shock is enough to motivate a few tens of thousands of people to try experimenting with new ideas for what social networking could look like? Sure, they’d mainly be liberals at first, but what if that core group was committed to the idea of diverse conversation on the internet by seeing content from people they don’t already know and agree with, and realised that would include creating a safe space for people who don’t agree with them to enjoy?
Here are two possible visions for what outcomes of that might look like:
1. We learn something, and make existing social networks take notice
Through experimenting, we come up with some better feature ideas, and through demonstrating the demand for them, we start to see a few of them being introduced by Facebook and others.
2. We shoot for the moon
We get enough traction to attract a hundred thousand, then a million people, into a a social network running the best results we can come up with through experimentation. That social network is a platform co-opererative, owned by and working for it’s users. No ads, no social media bubbles, no creepy tracking you across the internet.
Is that a thing? Can we do that?
If you’re asking yourself about it, then yes, perhaps we can. I’m sure that I’m not the only person thinking about this. I’m probably not the only person writing about it. I don’t even think that the technology side of it is all that hard. What we need are the experimenters. We need psychologists and sociologists. We need activists and marketers.
As a way of starting the conversation, I’ve thrown together a couple of my ideas for what I might like my feed to look like in some future social network. I don’t own this, it’s open source, feel free to use it if you like, or chat to me about ideas.
www.filterburst.com
This isn’t intended to be an advertisment though, that’s not a real social network, just a conversation starter. To take part in the conversation, I’ve linked it to this feature voting page:
https://filterburst.useresponse.com/
I’d love to hear your ideas, and perhaps they will spark at least one project that will implement some of them.
