How to Fix Twitter—And All of Social Media

Tech culture has created a Wild West of real and simulated individuals, and infested its terrain with manias, biases, and irritability. I’m not suggesting that data dignity is a perfect or complete solution, or that it should replace all of the other ideas in play. But no idea is working well enough right now, despite an urgent need, and data digni... See more

Groups would also be incentivized to make sure that their members are real, and to purge the bots, because any benefits of membership would be shared by all who joined. I have my own hopes for how this would work: I’d like to see people in groups agree to smooth out the uncertainty of fate by divvying up rewards—money from micropayments, subscripti... See more

Though the data from such experiments are not fully available for public scrutiny, the evidence suggests that content-feed tweaks more easily generate negative emotions (e.g., vanity or paranoia) than positive ones (e.g., optimism or self-esteem). This is why social media is such a tempting tool for psychological warfare: It can be used to poison a... See more

My purpose here is to point out a logical third option, one that can and should be tested out on a platform such as Twitter. In this approach, a platform would require users to form groups through free association, and then to post only through those groups, with the group’s imprimatur. Why this simple, powerful notion could help us escape the dile... See more