1w ago

Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed

www.niemanlab.org

It is a design choice to offer a news feed that combines verified news sources with conspiracy blogs — interspersed with photos of a family picnic — with no distinction between these very different types of information. It is a design choice to use algorithms that find the most emotional or outrageous content to show users, hoping it keeps them online. And it is a design choice to send bright red notifications, keeping people in a state of expectation for the next photo or juicy piece of gossip.

Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

Technology @beehaw.org

alyaza [they/she] @beehaw.org

1w ago

Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed

www.niemanlab.org /2025/07/social-media-can-support-or-undermine-democracy-it-comes-down-to-how-its-designed/

Technology @lemmy.world

Pro @programming.dev

2w ago

Social media can support or undermine democracy — it comes down to how it’s designed: Platform design is a silent pilot steering human behavior.

www.niemanlab.org /2025/07/social-media-can-support-or-undermine-democracy-it-comes-down-to-how-its-designed/

7 comments

It’s not just democracy, but information quality in general.
This is what we get for seeking profits more than truth.
- The same problems exist in the fedivwrse, so it's not because of profit.
  Profit makes it worse, but the real problem is humans can be shitty - all of us - at one time or another.
  
  It is soooo very hard to overcome our natural biases. An interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/5Peima-Uw7w .
  
  Human can be shitty, but giving the control over to the few shitty people who want to profit off of making the world more shitty is whole lot of worse than people being shitty at one time or another.
  It exists in here too but also that's why it's the fediverse, you can switch to a less shittyverse.
- actually, yeah, is there a Fediverse equivalent of Wikipedia?

This looks super cool, I'll have to make time to come back and read this!!!
For others interested in this topic, this is something that Erin kissanne on Mastodon is very passionate about and her articles are always kick ass

No, it cannot.
They are confronting what is obvious, effective tools to undermine democracy with some weird experiment that is at best a niche effort to do online social engineering much more than it is social media.
Social media is a destructive force. By nature. Yes, Fedi as well.
You learn to manage in society, maybe. Like you do addiction and cancer and crime. The techno-optimism stuff is borderline delusional at this point.

7 comments