Why the Internet’s Dark Side Can Be Transformed with the Right Social Networks
Countless speculations have emerged about the negative aspects of the internet. The prevailing arguments assert that social platforms breed cruelty, hasty reactions, and the dissemination of false information, all while allowing these actions to occur without consequence, instantly and on a large scale. It is evident that our communication technology and habits must be upgraded to meet the requirements of pluralistic democracies in the digital age. However, this does not mean we have to abandon the social web or avoid scalability. At MIT, where I am a professor and the director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, my colleagues and I have extensively pondered how to improve and enhance the internet to make it a more valuable and productive space. What we have discovered is that we can design new types of social networks that foster constructive communication, such as listening, dialogue, deliberation, and mediation, which can actually be effective.
To comprehend what we should build, we must first examine how social media took a wrong turn. In the early days of Facebook and Twitter, they were referred to as “social networks.” However, when we observe how these platforms operate now, their primary objective has shifted far beyond social connection. Since the introduction of advertising, their primary purpose has become keeping people engaged with content for as long as possible, in order to maximize ad exposure. Today, powerful AI algorithms deliver personalized content and ads tailored to capture and retain people’s attention, even if the content is emotionally provocative and polarizing. In this scenario, quieter voices are drowned out, and most individuals resort to passive consumption and emotion-driven sharing of content. Peer-to-peer communication is reduced to trivial chatter due to the risks of being cancelled or trolled, thereby suppressing meaningful conversations. This is particularly harmful to young individuals, who feel compelled to be on social media but refrain from expressing themselves genuinely due to potential ostracism and bullying.
It is evident that democracy faces significant threats in such an environment. Social media distorts our perception of others by amplifying false and harmful stereotypes, which leads to dehumanization and even violence. Furthermore, the crucial function of open debate and dialogue in the pursuit of truth becomes nearly impossible. One might assume that, by now, we would have learned to self-regulate our use of social media naturally. However, the power of these platforms to captivate our attention and incite reactions is immense. In 1985, media critic Neil Postman warned about the dangers of a television-centric culture, where individuals “amused themselves to death.” He argued that the entertainment aspect of television superseded its more serious functions in education and journalism. Postman, who passed away in 2003, would undoubtedly be horrified by our current state.
As rational individuals retreat to the private sphere or distance themselves from the social web, the loudest and most polarizing voices are left to dominate the internet. While regulations can and should be implemented to tackle this issue, they are not sufficient on their own. We must also create alternatives that cater to the needs of democracies in the digital age. These new networks do not need to compete with established social media platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok in terms of entertainment value, but they must offer scalable spaces specifically designed for high-quality and genuine public discourse. In developing such spaces, we must also cultivate new communication practices that effectively integrate these spaces into our civic and democratic affairs.
For many years, my team of colleagues at MIT and Cortico (a nonprofit organization I co-founded with Russell Stevens and Eugene Yi) has been diligently working on these challenges. Prior to the 2016 presidential election, we conducted a thorough analysis of Twitter and mainstream media coverage. The conclusion was that Twitter could not provide meaningful insights into the voting decisions of individuals, despite journalists placing excessive focus on the platform as a lens through which to understand the world. The dominant voices on the platform made it difficult to grasp the complexities and nuances of people’s thoughts and opinions across the country. In my view, Twitter had become tainted as a social listening channel at the end of 2016, and it has only worsened since then.
To gain deeper insights, some members of our research team embarked on a listening tour in 2017. The aim was to step outside our Cambridge bubble and engage in conversations with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, particularly in rural and conservative areas of the nation. We organized small gatherings of community leaders where open-ended questions about their hopes and concerns for their communities were discussed. The discoveries we made may seem obvious, but they were quite profound: face-to-face conversations had the power to dispel myths and create a nuanced understanding of others. We realized that people were willing to engage and share their perspectives, as long as there were trusted intermediaries facilitating these conversations. Additionally, we recognized the challenges of truly escaping our own bubble.
These experiences prompted us to explore how we could design online communication spaces that replicate the magic we had witnessed in person. We began with a simple experiment: the creation of a “listening box,” a tabletop kiosk that displayed prompts similar to the ones we had used in face-to-face conversations. It allowed people to record their stories in their own voices and listen to the stories of others. The intention was for a local newspaper to utilize these voices as input for articles. Unsurprisingly, we found that people shared much more profound stories when one of our team members was present, actively listening.
During this time, I started collaborating with Kathy Cramer, an exceptional political scientist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who had abandoned traditional public-opinion research methods such as surveys and focus groups in pursuit of something better. Kathy had spent years traveling around rural Wisconsin, immersing herself in coffee klatches and recording open-ended conversations about civic matters with small groups of locals. She dedicated several more years to comprehending these conversations. Her book, “The Politics of Resentment,” describes what she refers to as “rural consciousness” – an entirely different worldview that was new to her despite living just a few hundred miles away. Kathy’s work inspired us to shift from listening to individuals one-on-one to utilizing facilitated small-group conversations as the foundation of our listening process. Her approach of listening with curiosity and systematically making sense of others’ perspectives greatly influenced our vision for the properties that a social network should foster in people.
Therefore, we began experimenting with what we called a “digital hearth.” This concept served two purposes: first, it recorded small-group conversations, and second, it played back excerpts from previous conversations at the facilitator’s command. The latter feature was essential because it enabled facilitators to introduce different perspectives into the group. We also developed software to store speech recordings, manage data privacy, and provide tools for identifying patterns within and across conversations.
Using our new tool, we facilitated small group conversations where individuals could speak and listen to one another regarding local issues. The digital hearth recorded the conversations and incorporated excerpts from previous discussions. We collaborated with experts in facilitation to devise open-ended conversation prompts that made it easy for anyone to participate. We implemented well-established dialogue practices to encourage the sharing of personal experiences rather than mere opinions, which proved to foster mutual respect more effectively.
Through all of our work, we came to a major realization: our conversations possessed a key element that many online interactions lack – clear roles for key participants. We had conversation organizers, facilitators, curators, prompt designers, and analyzers who contributed to the process. This structured approach allowed us to create an environment that facilitated meaningful conversations and empowered individuals to share their authentic experiences.
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