The Idea Incubator/Reforming Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms can be reformed so they balance free speech with privacy, safety, and factual accuracy.

Today’s social media platforms are widely criticized for being a public menace while providing an unhealthy user experience. Social media platforms can be reformed so that they balance free speech with privacy, safety, and factual accuracy. Here are a few ideas:

Affirm Prosocial Values: Clarify the prosocial purpose of the platform and require each user to affirm their support for identified prosocial values.

Adopt strong authentication: Speech becomes authentic when we know who is speaking. Knowing the true identity of each individual human user makes them accountable for what they are posting and encourages them to address us on human terms. Bots, imposters (including deepfakes), and trolls will be held responsible for their actions or they will disappear. Users with specific personal safety concerns, such as whistleblowers, may require exceptions. Because your freedom ends where mine begins, users who post (or amplify) harmful content can be held personally and legally accountable for the damages they cause.

Reform recommender algorithms: By default, recommender algorithms will be off to prevent algorithmic radicalization.  Users can then choose to turn on recommendations that use transparent, user-selected settings. Users may wish to prioritize high-quality, public-interest content such as civic discussions, science-based information, and verified journalism over clickbait and sensationalism. This reform allows users to hunt for information without themselves being hunted. Because attention is biased, recommender systems designed to direct user attention to enraging and engaging content amplifies bias. Turning off recommender systems frees users to pay attention to their attention without be surreptitiously captivated by amusement and spectacle.

Remove Paid Advertisements: Today’s advertisement-driven revenue model provides a financial incentive to the platform to increase user engagement. However, because enragement increases engagement, this provides an incentive to feature (and recommend) content that enrages users. This promotes outrage, divisiveness, and polarization of the user community. Ad-free platforms can generate revenue in a variety of ways, including: 1) Flexible user fees, 2) Fremium plans, 3) User donations, 4) Philanthropic support, 5) Public (e.g. trans-national government) support, 6) Fines on non-compliant platforms, and others.

Users Rate Users: Encouraging users to publicly rate other users based on the privacy, safety, and factual accuracy of their postings will provide incentives toward responsible and trustworthy use of the platform.  The community can take responsibility for encouraging civil behavior.

Fact Checking On-Demand: Platforms could provide a fact-check button that would engage various fact-checking services (likely AI assisted) to quickly assess the factual accuracy of content. Fact-checking services used for this would be required to describe their policies, influences, and suitability. Misleading or controversial claims would be appropriately identified.

Transparency: In his book On Freedom, Timothy Snyder argues for a charter for transparency based on three principles: 1) Things should be transparent to us; 2) we should not be transparent to things; and 3) we should not be oppressed by data we cannot see.

User Portability: To increase competition and to mitigate network effects, platforms should make it easy for users to move from one platform to another. This includes interoperability, data and social graph portability, and movement tools.

Ethical Design Standards: Platforms should follow ethical design guidelines that minimize exploitative engagement tactics like infinite scroll, autoplay, and manipulative notifications. Features like "quiet mode" or "delayed posting" can help reduce impulsive, emotionally charged interactions. Add optional features that promote healthier digital habits, such as daily time limits, reminders to take breaks, and analytics showing engagement patterns.

Taken together these reforms can help users collaborate, create, and navigate information landscapes more wisely. We can improve our social media platforms to combat truth decay and misbelief by finding common ground and uniting!