Our digital public squares aren’t so healthy. Can we fix that ? | Salon.com
▻https://www.salon.com/2023/01/28/our-digital-public-squares-arent-so-healthy-can-we-fix-that
Despite living in a hyper-connected world, rates of loneliness and depression are higher than ever. We know a great deal about how to design our physical spaces to encourage community connections – libraries, town parks, and adult education centers – but we are just scratching the surface in figuring out how to strengthen social connections and build civic engagement in our online spaces. Can we translate these real world designs into our online platforms to bolster our communities and our democracy?
Digital pioneers are demonstrating the value that online spaces can provide in fostering community and social cohesion. Some of these groups are not new, like Black Twitter, but are finding ways to survive, and even thrive, within larger toxic social media platforms. Others, like gift sharing communities, are working out exit strategies from traditional social media sites because they have found these structures are overly focused on profit over public interest. Still other pioneers are growing their own platforms to ensure a design that emphasizes local community values.
Ethan Zuckerman, from the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure, points out that in addressing issues of misinformation and vitriol online we may be too focused on trying to fix our old social media platforms. Instead, we should focus on creating new spaces that have explicit civic goals and are designed for equity and social cohesion. Real-world communities need to be involved in intentionally designing their own local digital public spaces rather than leaving this work to global tech companies.
People have found ways to thrive on Black Twitter, but being on Twitter is not without its challenges. Platformed racism is the result of a design ethos in Silicon Valley that applauds a hands-off philosophy to support innovation and growth. Outsiders sometimes jump on Black Twitter hashtags and post racist comments and there are reports of police gathering information from Black Twitter. Trolls, cancel culture, and harassment can make Twitter a traumatizing place for many people. Algorithms designed to drive engagement end up promoting offensive content. Community guidelines addressing negative behavior are under-enforced and with Elon Musk’s tenure the hands-off philosophy has shot through the roof and further escalated vitriol and misinformation on the platform.
Twitter’s design encourages simplicity, impulsivity and incivility. It cues emotional thinking rather than encouraging us to analyze content or re-consider making a post. But, despite its design flaws, small private groups have also emerged on Twitter and have been able to thrive by blocking trolls and curating feeds to minimize the toxicity that is built into the platform. Private student groups on Twitter, such as those that started among friends who attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), continue after graduation to provide community and networking. Both the larger Black Twitter public space and the small private groups provide members with valuable support and shared experiences, despite the design of Twitter, not because of it.
The Buy Nothing Project is an early model of how to build a value-based platform with a hyper-local focus. Their biggest challenge has been trying to promote values from within a system that runs counter to those values. The design of Facebook actively encourages people to stay online and join more groups. Many Facebook private groups are wonderful — groups that support cancer patients, new Moms, church youth groups — but the platform’s focus on growth and keeping people online, rather than fostering better social cohesion and improving our offline lives, sets the wrong tone.
Buy Nothing has now created its own app to better foster community as it transitions off of Facebook. They have found that size matters and small is better in order to limit posting and emphasize real world connections. Size also impacted feelings of safety as real-life local connections became more difficult when local groups got too big. The infrastructure of Facebook made it difficult to limit group size and to draw flexible boundaries around neighborhoods to connect diverse groups while keeping it local.
Tiens, Front Porch (Vermont) me fait penser aux raisons du succès de Biblio-fr dans les années 1990-2000
Facebook is opaque about how it addresses harmful content and how its algorithms are designed. Content is posted immediately. With 4.75 billion posts shared daily it is impossible to track and remove users who are engaged in selling drugs, child pornography, and spreading misinformation. On Front Porch, posts are first reviewed by paid human moderators and then posted. If someone behaves badly, such as writing insults about a neighbor, that person is contacted and the guidelines are explained: Neighbors can disagree with something someone has posted and voice their opinion, but personal attacks are not allowed. The design of Front Porch prevents illegal activities from being posted. It may be that what works for many towns across Vermont may not be the best design for those in Nevada or New York City, but this type of locally based platform could be modified to accommodate different community values.
Third places are places outside of our homes and workplaces that provide essential neutral places where we can relax, interact with friends and strangers and enjoy ourselves. Ray Oldenburg first described third places decades ago, at a time when people were moving to the suburbs and third places were disappearing. These informal community gathering places provide a sense of belonging and connection that can strengthen community ties. Libraries, gyms, and cafes can be accessible to everyone and conversation and community building, rather than solely pursuing commerce, are top priorities.
Sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book Palaces for the People, traces the importance of public squares throughout history. These “palaces” can offer neutral spaces where everyone is welcome. Klinenberg argues that the future of democratic society rests on developing shared values and shared spaces. These spaces provide connections where people can linger and make friends across group lines and are intentionally designed to promote socialization and connection.
Tech companies maintain that they cannot moderate online communities because that would jeopardize our right to free speech and because there is simply too much content flying across these networks to track. Both these issues are false flags. We now know that the core infrastructure of these platforms is intentionally designed to amplify vitriol and misinformation because this increases engagement, keeps us online longer, and provides tech companies with billions of dollars from ad revenue. It doesn’t have to be this way.
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