Can we “fix” social media without ruining them? One (of many) Practical Suggestions.

Twitter’s decision to slap warning labels on some Trumpian tweets – those seeming to incite violence - “was the culmination of months of debate inside the company over developing protocols to limit the impact of objectionable messages from world leaders — and what to do when Mr. Trump inevitably broke it.”

Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday told employees he was standing firm in the company’s decision not to moderate a post in which President Trump said “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” And with less than half a year to the U.S. election, that means the trolls - especially in those Kremlin basements - are looking at a welcome mat.

I am about to offer one small proposal - a potential partial solution - from among many that have never been tried. But first... perspective time.

The problem of toxicity in media is not a new one. Every new medium of communication was applied to nefarious ends, before it eventually lived up to its elevating promise. The printing press was first used to spread horrible hate tracts exacerbating Europe’s religious wars. Only across subsequent centuries did the spread of books truly uplift an increasingly literate population. 

Similar bad-beginnings were seen with the arrival of newspapers and newsreels. In the 1930s, loudspeakers and radio amplified gifted orators with godlike voices, sparking humanity’s worst era. It always starts by empowering predators. But over time, citizens became better at culling wheat from chaff from poison in each technology, and we all grew better for it.

Today (as some of us predicted in the 1980s) a similar transition is happening in digital media at 100x the speed and 10,000x the sheer volume of crap and lying misuse, leaving us with very little time to make the same transition. Meanwhile, evil or fanatical or insane manipulators twist the very concept of “fact” or “truth” out of all recognition. 

We need tools of maturity and we need them fast.

There are two general ways to achieve this. The first -- used in almost every society before ours -- was to set up a caste of censors, gatekeepers, priests or regulators of what the masses may see or know. Our entire Enlightenment Experiment has been a rejection of that approach, which stifled and brought nothing but calamitous error across history. All our values rail against it – e.g. in every Hollywood film. Indeed, so strong is this Suspicion of Authority (SoA) reflex -- especially in Americans -- that our enemies are using it against us, by attacking even the very idea of professional expertise.

The other approach is lateral criticism. Argument (ideally based at least somewhat on facts) can apply reciprocal accountability via markets, democracy and now the innovation of the web. It can work! We and all our vast array of modern miracles are proof. But the whole thing breaks down when we huddle in separated ghettoes of ignorance, reciting incantations and nostrums that are fed to us by evil men.

== Can we innovate ways to save innovative media? ==

In early 2017, I was invited to Facebook HQ, where executives and designers were wringing their hands. They fretted over how thoroughly their platform had been hijacked and abused -- much of it by hostile foreign powers – with clear intent to warp American democracy. And yes, for a brief time, folks at Facebook seemed serious about trying to find solutions, hoping to achieve a three-way win-win, starting (of course) with their top priority:

1 - Protect user growth and profitability.

But ideally these solutions would also...

2 - Maximize user freedom of self-expression.

3 - Reduce the amount and impact of deliberate or inadvertent campaigns of falsehood or incitement.

During my hour-long meeting with executives, I offered possible ways to achieve this trifecta. But I might as well have saved my breath. As the Trump Era became a new (if bizarre) normal, goal number three simply floated away.

So we now approach another U.S. Election. And seeing all their efforts to wreck the Western Enlightenment teetering in the balance, our enemies will redouble efforts to spread tsunamis of lies via social media. Moreover, while Facebook will remain obdurate until the end, Twitter and other platforms are beginning to take this seriously.

So, it is for them that I’ll trot out one – just one – of the proposals I offered Facebook on that futile day.

== The simplest method ==

Envision a pair of small symbols added next to the Thumbs-Up indicator, as in the example below.  Say an exclamation point and a question mark. Generally innocuous, these clickables allow the user to seek more information… or alternative points of view. Note in figure 1 below how they have minimal footprint on the user’s precious screen space.  

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In Figure #1 (above) we see the two symbols are empty and easily ignored.  

Only now I lean on insights from Edward Tufte’s classic book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Because there are many dimensions of useful information that can be conveyed via a mere exclamation point!

In Figure 2 (below) we see how the exclamation point can convey several spectra of information, perhaps throbbing when the host company has detected a suspicious source or bad actors at work. Fullness – as in a thermometer – can show the host’s level of certainty that there’s a problem, while color or texture can bear upon the type of problem.

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Users do not have to memorize any of the meanings! But they’ll learn, over time, that a tiny, flashing red exclamation point means there’s another side to whatever meme they are relishing. Moreover it’s hard to accuse the host company of partisan bias when the same thing happens to every side.

Is an offer of rebuttal enough to cancel toxic memes? Well, it can’t hurt to lure a few of the curious to sample refutations. And that tiny nonpartisan nag could be enough to crack the wall of a Nuremberg rally.

The second kind of clickable Alert-o-meter – a Question Mark - links to sites that are less adversarial and more informative than linked by the exclamation point. Here user preferences play a role. The follow-up path may be encyclopedic or lighter or even entertaining. The aim is to encourage curiosity and depth to the topic.  

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Again, the User is free to ignore the small alert-o-meter symbol. (An hence the host site doesn't drive away angry customers.) Still, it lurks there, serving as a reminder that there’s more to this!

Not only does this help at least a little to re-establish the notion of argument and verifiability … that some sources are more verified and trustworthy than others… but we are entering an era when society may decide to modify the blanket protections enjoyed by social media companies, from all responsibility for malicious content. Ohnly a fool would ignore that possibility. An approach like this one might be just enough to protect the site host from liability for helping to spread lies with dire consequences.

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And there you have it. Just one of a dozen ideas I offered mavens at Facebook in their panic after the 2016 elections … before they realized that the winners of that stolen contest actually wanted no meaningful changes at all, and their best (commercial) interest lay in leaving things alone.

Think about that. And realize -- nothing is likely to happen via self-regulation, or reform, or tweaks like mine, no matter how logical and helpful. Of course they have all sold-out and I am wasting my time.

We all know this dire moment will be resolved massively, in one direction or another. And when it is, a mere couple of innocuously flashing symbols just won’t do.