I was relatively active when it was still possible to talk about the "netroots" as a community until the internecine conflict about Obama just got too toxic for me. (And my mother died and making two minyanim a day was suddenly much more important than whatever some internet personality was yelling.) The political blogosphere, depending on the site, might have provided only caricatures of the other side and the 2008 primary was so awful that I now keep my presidential primary online discourse to a minimum, but it was very effective in getting people to participate and pay attention to small details about the political process that were under the MSM's radar. And most of the bloggers didn't make a living by blogging. You could get healthy civic engagement out of that in the offline world. Social media incentives are very different. To be fair, it is possible to get good information from both political science Twitter and election data Twitter. But an ordinary citizen who doesn't know very much will walk into an environment where people can confine their "activism" exclusively to online; the activism is often of "personal is political" type; users don't have long histories of past statements for many or most of the people they are engaging with just from a history with the site; and many of the rewards are for one-liners at the expense of whatever foolish thing someone on the other side said. This is not a recipe for productive conversations about politics even with one's own family. All this leads me to conclude that you COULD make money with a civic engagement site. But scale and trying to be everything advertiser-friendly to everybody at once might have to be sacrificed. The sites might have to be replacements for local journalism in some way.
Extremely simple things that Facebook and Twitter could both do are
a) let users discover who to follow and what groups to join entirely by themselves
b) not place content in users'feeds for the sole reason of getting an emotional rise out of the users.
Social media companies need to do more to take down obvious hate speech when it is reported to them, but I am not willing to think that the answer is taking down "disinformation" as much as encouraging people to have more media literacy.
I was relatively active when it was still possible to talk about the "netroots" as a community until the internecine conflict about Obama just got too toxic for me. (And my mother died and making two minyanim a day was suddenly much more important than whatever some internet personality was yelling.) The political blogosphere, depending on the site, might have provided only caricatures of the other side and the 2008 primary was so awful that I now keep my presidential primary online discourse to a minimum, but it was very effective in getting people to participate and pay attention to small details about the political process that were under the MSM's radar. And most of the bloggers didn't make a living by blogging. You could get healthy civic engagement out of that in the offline world. Social media incentives are very different. To be fair, it is possible to get good information from both political science Twitter and election data Twitter. But an ordinary citizen who doesn't know very much will walk into an environment where people can confine their "activism" exclusively to online; the activism is often of "personal is political" type; users don't have long histories of past statements for many or most of the people they are engaging with just from a history with the site; and many of the rewards are for one-liners at the expense of whatever foolish thing someone on the other side said. This is not a recipe for productive conversations about politics even with one's own family. All this leads me to conclude that you COULD make money with a civic engagement site. But scale and trying to be everything advertiser-friendly to everybody at once might have to be sacrificed. The sites might have to be replacements for local journalism in some way.
Extremely simple things that Facebook and Twitter could both do are
a) let users discover who to follow and what groups to join entirely by themselves
b) not place content in users'feeds for the sole reason of getting an emotional rise out of the users.
Social media companies need to do more to take down obvious hate speech when it is reported to them, but I am not willing to think that the answer is taking down "disinformation" as much as encouraging people to have more media literacy.