Would Friction Improve Social Media? 1/1/2022
New forms of discrimination
Sahar Massachi writes about
a different approach, one that is emerging in companies across the social media landscape: integrity design. Integrity workers like me try to defend a system from attackers who have found and learned to abuse bugs or loopholes in its rules or design. Our job is to systematically stop the online harms that users inflict on each other. We don’t (often) get into the muck of trying to make decisions about any specific post or person. Instead, we think about incentives, information ecosystems, and systems in general. Social media companies need to prioritize integrity design over content moderation, and the public needs to hold them accountable about whether they do so.
Massachi offers two examples. One is a “driving test” that a user must pass before being able to use all of the features of the app. This test might be intended primarily to make the user prove that he or she is a human being and not a bot. The other example is a “speed bump” in which someone who makes heavy use of an app would be shut down for a while in order to slow them down.
These proposals strike me as discriminatory. They are not discriminatory based on the content of the user’s actions. Perhaps that is an improvement, especially if you think that content moderators are biased against conservatives. But the “driving test” and “speed bump” approach to discrimination strikes me as a cat-and-mouse game. It is likely that the most harm-producing mice will learn how to evade the cat, and you will just end up with frictions that annoy the innocent while the guilty carry on.
Internet culture is not so much an engineering problem as it is a cultural problem. We are at a point in history where some really nasty cultural viruses are circulating. The status of liberal values is declining. The status of “social justice” is too high on the left. The status of various conspiracy theories is too high on both the left and the right. For me, that is the crux of the problem.
Thanks to one of my seminar participants for a pointer to the article.
Sorry, Arnold. You are wrong. As long as nasty barbarians continue to grab and consolidate their coercive power, they will erase and eliminate everything they don't like. You may not like it but "thanks" to the pandemic, they have finished the destruction of all liberal values. Unfortunately, too many cowards are helping and appeasing them. As of today, it looks too late to save the U.S. bureaucracy, universities, and social media --even if the barbarians and their servants were defeated, their rebuilding would be costly and take a long time.
Something that I think would help social media would be punishing the “echo chamber”. If you think of each pair of users in a social network as having a “similarity score” (how similar they are in the types of posts they interact with), then someone speaking to an echo chamber would get most of their “likes” from people with high similarity scores to themselves.
Deboosting people with high echo chamber scores and boosting people with low echo chamber scores would improve discourse drastically. And I think it would be hard to game without actually improving discourse.