Dislike Buttons Could Balance Online Discourse and Save Democracy

The Benefits Far Outweigh the Risks

The “like” button was first implemented on Facebook in February of 2009 — less than a month since Obama took office and a hell of a time for its debut. At first, its reveal seemed like an innocent, long overdue time saver — an elegant design solution for the UX clunkiness that preceded. If you recall, prior to the “like”, multiple people on a single post had to awkwardly reply individually to indicate pleasure, humor, or agreement. At its essence, a “like” is a numeric measure of reach and engagement. It is, in short, a vote. And therein lies the danger. Eight years later, that button made a significant contribution to the environment of toxic discourse in which we found ourselves then, and continue to find ourselves now — a world in which we continue to repeat the same patterns over and over again, where pockets of populism cause havoc, and truth comes limping behind to clean up the mess.

Democracy will always be imperfect if vast swaths of its people are uneducated — or, more accurately, selectively educated. After the national disaster that was the 2016 election, among the endless postmortems of blame (much of it misdirected), a lot of energy desperate for a port went toward the concept of “filter bubbles” — a well-meant but oversimplified…