Innovation Monitor: How to fix social media (a few ideas)

Innovation Monitor: How to fix social media (a few ideas)

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As the #StopHateForProfit movement continues to gain momentum and major brands pull Facebook ads, there’s a great deal of conversation happening on “how to fix social media.”

This week we’ll take a look at a number of ideas, ranging from legislative, product and UX, business models, antitrust, and more, about how we can possibly start to fix many of the political and societal challenges raised by platforms.

Are there relatively simple fixes Facebook and other algorithmic content platforms can make, or are the problems intrinsic to the very core of the businesses? Groups like the Center for Humane Technology have been raising awareness around the dangerous socio-emotional impacts of these platform for years, and it may feel like we reached a tipping point where many are now questioning how these systems are built.

To begin, earlier this May anti-big tech Senator Josh Hawley told USA Today that “social media is best understood as a parasite on productive investment, on meaningful relationships, on a healthy society.” His sponsorless bill, the SMART Act, proposes an extreme form of curbing: 30-minute time limits, a mandatory FTC report on social media addiction every three years, and the banning of infinite scrolls.

More broadly, Hawley isn’t the only one in the Senate targeting social media addiction (see Ed Markey’s CAMRA Act). However, there are less perhaps polarizing ideas out there that are worth our attention. Ideas ranging from Demetricatation, Chronologization, Limited Sharing Velocity, and Explainability — summed up in this Margins’ post — present a number of simple product fixes that could potentially move us in the right direction without requiring wide-scale coordinated public and private action:

(Note: Demetricatation is expanded in the main curated section, so I’ll quickly sum up the latter three in the intro):

Chronologization: After Twitter’s IPO, the company began leaning away from the reverse chronological feed and more on an algorithmic one, with tweets injected from accounts you don’t follow. This is currently the default, though you can still toggle reverse chrono. The post suggests to “keep the feed reverse chronological by default. Every time a person logged in, they could manually opt into an algorithmically ranked feed, but they’d receive a cigarette label style warning on the dangers of algorithmic consumption.”

Limited Sharing Velocity: In a BuzzFeed interview last year, developer Chris Wetherell, who led the team that created the retweet button in 2009, recalled thinking that “we might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.” “Lizard-brain share” might get you something innocuously viral, like the Cowboy Museum’s head of security taking over its Twitter account, but you’re also getting deadly lynch mobs. “Maybe, you limit the number of times any specific tweet could be retweeted or replied to.”

Explainability: When Twitter first put a warning label on a tweet by President Trump, it may have felt like the smallest, simplest action one could take. However, it reflected a monumental moment that takes us down a much-needed path towards transparency and accountability. Even small changes like chronological feeds and demetrication can have outsized impacts on the revenues of companies like Facebook. Their algorithms were built to optimize for revenue. This week Mark Zuckerberg claimed they won’t change policies regardless of the threat to their revenue. Does that mean they would be happy to risk their 42% net and 84% gross margins in the interest of making their product a safer one?

For those that are celebrating the 4th of July, we wish you a safe, fun and socially distant holiday weekend! As always, we wish you and your community safety, calm, and solidarity as we support each other through this unprecedented time. Thank you again for reading.

All best,
Erica Matsumoto Stop Tweeting by the Numbers

If you don’t count sports stats and academics, we didn’t talk metrics that much before social media. How many friends does Myspace Tom have? That video has a million views! 200 retweets and counting. Our stat senses have dulled over the decade and change. We don’t raise our eyebrows so much, unless something reaches Despacito levels (for reference, the views on that MV are a billion shy of the population of earth).

Though, we still follow our own posts as fervently as ever. That’s why we’re impressed with the simple power of Benjamin Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator, which removes the stats from this Like counters, the number of friends you have, and notifications. Try it and measure your own reaction (if you still have a Facebook account).

Slate — 9 min read

Read More Social Media Platforms Claim Moderation Will Reduce Harassment, Disinformation and Conspiracies. It Won’t

Longtime Silicon Valley investor and Facebook opponent Roger McNamee guest writes this Time piece on social giants’ apology narratives, opaque fallbacks, and overreliance on content moderation as an effective solution (it’s a horrible job, if you haven’t heard). McNamee argues that promises of increased moderation is a band-aid solution, and doesn’t tackle the root causes.

“Despite copious evidence to the contrary, too many policy makers and journalists behave as if internet platforms will eventually reduce the harm from targeted harassment, disinformation, and conspiracies through content moderation. There are three reasons why it will not do so: scale, latency, and intent.”

TIME — 7 min read Read More Senate Bill Aims to Boost Accountability for Section 230 Without Gutting It

Senators Brian Schatz and John Thune have introduced the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency Act (PACT Act), which “promises to make internet companies more responsible for their online moderation.” In a nutshell:

• “Companies would have to explain their moderation practices through a readily-available acceptable use policy.”
• “They’d have to provide quarterly, ‘disaggregated’ reports on takedowns and other actions, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology would lead a ‘voluntary framework’ for guidelines and best practices.”
• “The bill would limit Section 230’s ability to to protect companies from actions by federal regulators and state attorneys general, and would have the Government Accountability Office examine the possibility of an FTC-run whistleblower program for online platforms.”

Engadget — 2 min read Read More How Facebook Can Fix Itself

Xoogler, Ex-Pinterest(er?), and ex-Facebooker Barry Schnitt pens a sort of open letter/essay to Facebook employees, tracing how we got to this sorry state, why Facebook isn’t doing as much as it could (“I do not think it is a coincidence that Facebook’s choices appease those in power who have made misinformation, blatant racism, and inciting violence part of their platform”), and what Facebook can do:

“I’d put the company in lockdown. We did it in 2011 when Google was launching Google+. They had orders of magnitude more resources, more engineers, the largest distribution platform in the world, and had committed everything to squashing Facebook. We worked day and night and kicked their ass. We humiliated them. This challenge is even more daunting but also infinitely more important. I know you can do it.”

OneZero — 9 min read Read More Column: Mark Zuckerberg Just Made the Case for Breaking Up Facebook

Zuckerberg virtually met with 25k employees last month to address the company’s decision to leave the Trump posts untouched, and tensions didn’t exactly ease up since then. LA Times journalist Michael Hiltzik iterates Senator Elizabeth Warren’s suggestion to break Facebook up in smaller pieces, calling to mind a quote from US diplomat Adolf Berle, who wrote during the 1932 campaign that “Whatever the economic system does permit, it is not individualism. When nearly 70% of American industry is concentrated in the hands of 600 corporations, the individual man or woman has, in cold statistics, less than no chance at all.”

“Among the few options that fall short of government regulation of speech on social media — almost certainly a legislative non-starter — is for employees and users to apply pressure. A ‘delete Facebook’ movement, akin to the ‘delete Uber’ drive among users protesting the ride-share company’s profiteering practices, is in barely a fetal stage. But it could grow if the company’s solicitude toward Trump generates public discontent. The outbreak of resignations by executives is also modest, thus far.”

Los Angeles Times — 9 min read Read More This Week in Business History July 2, 1921: The first major radio broadcasting event takes place; a boxing match in Jersey City.

An estimated 400,000 people listened, on homemade radios and at public listening sites, to a boxed match between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. The broadcast was organized by media pioneer David Sarnoff.

A 2 minute National Geographic profile on David Sarnoff (and remind you, that’s not actually David Sarnoff!)





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