Embrace the Shift to ‘Prosocial Media’

We’ve grown so used to the idea that social media is damaging our democracies that we’ve thought very little about how we might build new networks to strengthen societies. We need a wave of innovation around imagining and building tools whose goal is not to capture our attention as consumers, but to connect and inform us as citizens.

When Mark says it is time for Facebook to shift from a focus on friends and family to “the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all,” you can see the promise of a virtuous circle of engagement.42 Where engagement seems to be the wrong fitness functio