Jemmy
Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed
alyaza [they/she]Every design choice that social media platforms make nudges users toward certain actions, values, and emotional states.
It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.
Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.
Social media platforms are bringing massive changes to how people get their news and how they communicate and behave. For example, the “endless scroll” is a design feature that aims to keep users scrolling and never reaching the bottom of a page where they might decide to pause.
I’m a political scientist who researches aspects of technology that support democracy and social cohesion, and I’ve observed how the design of social media platforms affects them.
Democracy is in crisis globally, and technology is playing a role. Most large platforms optimize their designs for profit, not community or democracy. Increasingly, Big Tech is siding with autocrats, and the platforms’ designs help keep society under control.
There are alternatives, however. Some companies design online platforms to defend democratic values.
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The same problems exist in the fedivwrse, so it's not because of profit.
Profit makes it worse, but the real problem is humans can be shitty - all of us - at one time or another.
OpenStarsIt is soooo very hard to overcome our natural biases. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5Peima-Uw7w .
Human can be shitty, but giving the control over to the few shitty people who want to profit off of making the world more shitty is whole lot of worse than people being shitty at one time or another.
It exists in here too but also that's why it's the fediverse, you can switch to a less shittyverse.
Match!!
CrisThis looks super cool, I'll have to make time to come back and read this!!!
For others interested in this topic, this is something that Erin kissanne on Mastodon is very passionate about and her articles are always kick ass
MudManNo, it cannot.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.
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