Regulation is the only answer to drive social media to change. They will not alter their business model otherwise.

I think regulation is coming, but it will only polish off the rogh edges, division will still be there, but it will be less harshly worded. I think even that is a plus. Never mind overthrowing democracy, I don't think the toxicity is good for the people involved at all.

I think the downside is that we're basically letting government get a hand on the controls of this stuff. I doubt we move immediately to whistle blowers and opponents of the status quo being banned, but we're definitely getting closer.

Yossarian wrote:

Why not regulation? For a start, you could use regulation to democratise and demonetise social media feeds by breaking up these companies. Why is that not the answer?

Well that's not the regulation that's been talked about here so far, which is regulation of content. If you open that up to regulation of company structures themselves, that's a much bigger step in the right direction, but still highly unlikely under current political conditions.

Personally, I never meant for regulation to only cover content, but that could certainly be a part of it too.

And I wouldn’t be so sure that company structures wouldn’t be part of this, there are certainly calls for it both in the US and the EU.

In terms of thinking about a reengineering of algorithms and user interfaces a good start would be to look at all the cognitive biases we have, particularly in the social category, and design software that could automate or at least assist in much of the hard work of thinking clearly and correctly. This is a huge and complex research project, and a lot of experiments will need to be undertaken. Thankfully people are working on this stuff - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328431852_Cognitive_Biases_and_Communication_Strength_in_Social_Networks_The_Case_of_Episodic_Frames

And yet more to read.


This seems particuarly interesting though I don't know if anything has come out of it yet -

With social computing systems and algorithms having been shown to give rise to unintended consequences, one of the suspected success criteria is their ability to integrate and utilize people's inherent cognitive biases. Biases can be present in users, systems and their contents. With HCI being at the forefront of designing and developing user-facing computing systems, we bear special responsibility for increasing awareness of potential issues and working on solutions to mitigate problems arising from both intentional and unintentional effects of cognitive biases. This workshop brings together designers, developers, and thinkers across disciplines to redefine computing systems by focusing on inherent biases in people and systems and work towards a research agenda to mitigate their effects. By focusing on cognitive biases from content or system as well as from a human perspective, this workshop will sketch out blueprints for systems that contribute to advancing technology and media literacy, building critical thinking skills, and depolarization by design.

Bret Victor has done some good work on thinking about better tools - http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#media

Suppose there were good access to good data and good models. How would an author write a document incorporating them?

Today, even the most modern writing tools are designed around typing in words, not facts. These tools are suitable for promoting preconceived ideas, but provide no help in ensuring that words reflect reality, or any plausible model of reality. They encourage authors to fool themselves, and fool others.

    (Richard Feynman) The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

Imagine an authoring tool designed for arguing from evidence. I don’t mean merely juxtaposing a document and reference material, but literally “autocompleting” sourced facts directly into the document. Perhaps the tool would have built-in connections to fact databases and model repositories, not unlike the built-in spelling dictionary. What if it were as easy to insert facts, data, and models as it is to insert emoji and cat photos?

The page has many visual examples and references you should check out, and he's done numerous other writings and videos relating to this.

Oh let's all just give up then, never mind eh? Pack it all up lads let's go home!

Na this assumption that Facebook is all powerful and un-toppleable just seems really quite bizzare and incredibly defeatist to me. I get it, I understand where you are coming from, I just massively disagree with the premise.

Fuck making deals with the devil, let's kick his fucking arse.

You compete with facebook by creating a better more useful tool that has no significant downsides to the average person, some kind of decentralisation is necessary to avoid having to rely on funding a massive company and infrastructure. I don't know how to make all this work, but it's something worth trying.

Like I and others have said regulation is perhaps the weakest solution to problems caused or exacerbated by social media.

GurtTractor wrote:

This is what I mean when I say I'm most hopeful for new technologies to get us out of trouble, of course they tend to bring new and different problems but we'll just have to keep marching on and deal with them as we go.

Technologies themselves never get us out of trouble. It's always a question of who controls them and the ends they're put to.

Yossarian wrote:

You want a decentralised social network? Here’s 12: https://bitshills.com/best-decentralized-social-media-networks/ How many people do you know on any of them?

Yes notice how all of those look incredibly similar to either Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook. There's no innovation in the interface. Also they are all to do with blockchain tech which may or may not be a good idea as the basis for future platforms.

The whole "oh but nobody uses this" thing is such a shit self-fulfilling argument against trying to do something new and different. It's not easy to break through and reach some kind of critical mass of users, it will probably take years and years, like political movements. But it's bloody well worth trying, and I would argue that we haven't seen anything of the sort of new ideas I've been posting above yet, so it's far too early to call it as 'hopeless let's all sit back and get Facebooked then'.

JonB wrote:

GurtTractor wrote:

This is what I mean when I say I'm most hopeful for new technologies to get us out of trouble, of course they tend to bring new and different problems but we'll just have to keep marching on and deal with them as we go.

Technologies themselves never get us out of trouble. It's always a question of who controls them and the ends they're put to.

Definitely. I would mention that I tend to think of a broader definition of technology, not just shiny machines but basic ideas and methods that shape our civilisation. No one can have a monopoly on an idea, at least once it has been released into the wild.

I’ll take a short term band aid over the million to one shot that you’re suggesting. Especially as we can keep reapplying that band aid as often as we want without any issue at all.

In that river analogy would you not the short term first to give you time to achieve the long term?

I still don't get the huge reluctance to regulation but I also am not sure I get the massive value in having these huge social networks. Leaving aside the main problems, are they in any way essential to our way of life? I tend not to think so. That's not to say people don't use them in huge numbers or for huge amounts of their time but outside of targeting ads (which yes, I have used for the business) what makes them so valuable that we don't want to regulate them? Communities would still find ways to form, people would still talk. If anything it might help communication if we went a bit back to just phone, email, and text message.

When things were "normal" I remember facing a deludge of communication. WhatsApp, text, phone, email, post, messenger, Facebook comments, Instagram dm, Instagram comments, LinkedIn, twitter.... on and on and everyone thinks they are using the main one. It's draining in of itself and for what end.

Before Facebook and twitter , i could still communicate with just about everyone I needed to and those that didn't want me to I couldn't so good for them.

(Small rant- if you are going to book a restaurant use the fucking booking widget we put on all our social media and sites... don't message us at 3am and then complain at 8am that we didn't get back to you!!)

I'm with Yoss here. Chances of regulation succeeding are far far higher than taking FB head on and reinventing social media's algo's. I also don't believe changing social media algorithms is the definitive answer to protecting people from a new Trump. Closing the wealth, socioeconomic and education gap however is.

Not that people shouldn't keep working on innovating tech and algorithms. I'm a big fan of Linux and still waiting on it to overtake windows as main desktop OS.