Pushkin, this is solvable. I'm Jacob Weisberg. I do think we'll look back in ten years or twenty years at this era of the Internet and be like, it's so crazy and kind of cute that we thought that you could connect all of human society through one hundred and eighty or two hundred and thirty character snippets of text. In the early two thousands, Eli Pariser was running move on dot org and thinking about how to reach people through the Internet. It was during that time that Pariser
realized something important. The algorithms being used by companies like Facebook were standing between his work and the wider audience he was trying to reach. Pariser introduced the world to the idea of filter bubbles and warned that they could be isolating us from ideas and perspectives we might not already agree with. It. Now seems that many of the algorithms used by social media companies, not just Facebook, have contributed to the political polarization we're experiencing today. We saw
a kind of worst imaginable case scenario on January six. Yeah, how much of the blame for that do you think goes to the social platforms? The social part of It allowed people both to coordinate and find each other and then to create this kind of shared reality. People showed up not totally knowing if they were playing a role and they were coast playing or if they were actually ready for battle, and that's a very volatile situation these days.
Pariser was working with Professor Talius Stroud from the University of Texas on a project called Civic Signals. They're looking at the social cues that are rewarded are punished across social media and how online platforms might elevate different signals
to design healthier digital spaces for all of us. When you think about all of the civic spaces in a community, there are very few that are like, here's the place where you go when you want to walk up to strangers and tell them what you really think about the most intense political beliefs that you have. Instead, we've got basketball courts and tennis courts, which are really about like coexisting across lines of difference. Paris Are believes that social
media can be redesigned to support social cohesion. My solvable is creating digital spaces that we have a stronger social fabric that help us come together as a community. As a society. ELI, this interview is going to begin, unusually with an apology from me to you. I don't know how well you even remember this, but about a decade ago, when your book The Filter Bubble came out, we did public debate, one of those stage debates, and you argued that you were right, and I argued that you were
wrong about filter bubbles. And I realized some years ago that in fact, you were completely right and I was completely wrong. I appreciate that I stopped clocks and all of that. It's nice to be right once in a while. We saw a kind of worst imaginable case scenario on January six, yeah, with an insert violent insurrection at the Capitol. How much of the blame for that do you think
goes to the social platforms? I mean, it's it's only been a short time, But what have we learned about that event in relation to the kind of social media polarization that you've been focused on. I'm not a person who would say one hundred percent. There are other forces at work that are driving the kind of autocratic moment that we were up against, and that are driving violent
extremism in the United States. But I think the social part of it allowed people both to coordinate and find each other and then to create this kind of shared reality which was one part fantasy and one part real, right, Like people showed up not totally knowing if they were playing a role and they were coast playing right, or if they were actually ready for battle. Yeah, I mean, let's dig into that a little bit, because they're you know, they're a bunch of things that are interesting and super
alarming about them. I mean, one of them is this, you know, this point you make about extremists having a way to get together. But the other aspect of it you were kind of i think alluding to qan On and the you know, in the nature of it, it's not a classic conspiracy theory that comes out of politics. It is more like, you know, some kind of you know, science fiction narrative that has elements of fantasy and game right, And part of the fun of it is that you
get to co create that reality. Right. It's it's not just that you're being handed this narrative. Is that you get to find the clues and you get to piece together the pieces along with a lot of other people. You know, It's like if you've ever watched a film where a bunch of investigative journalists like discover the big dark secret at the center of a country or whatever. It's actually that same feeling that these conspiracy theories drawn, which is like we're a team together, you know, kind
of pulling the curtain back and showing the world what's happening. Yeah, thinking about how to reform social media, which is something you've been thinking about a long time. One of the key problems is how you prevent that. I mean, we'll get into in a minute. You know, some of your ideas about fostering you know, more positive democratic ideas, small d democratic ideas in a minute, But at the very least, you want to stop violent extremists from organizing activity. How
do you do that? It's starts with what drives people toward violent extremism, right. A lot of that is a sense of purposelessness and powerlessness and a lack of other forums in which to feel like you have some agency, and so you have to address things on that level. But I also think, yeah, the platforms that we have are so ill equipped still to really address these problems.
And I think there's a reason that empires historically have have fallen, and that you know, well, which is that having a huge human system of civilization dependent on the decisions of one individual is an inherently fragile way to organize social functions. And that's essentially what we have in Facebook and Twitter both. Yeah, Well, the the algorithm problem that they are trying to maximize for amount of use,
length of use, depth of use. But the other thing I keep harping on is their seeming inability for them to have real standards and hold to them. In the end, these companies respond to public pressure and when the public pressure is great enough, they eventually do something about it. And you know, with the banning of Donald Trump, you could argue that he violated their standards, but realistically, if he violated their standards in January, he violated them, you know,
since he's been on the platform. Similarly, there are other cases, you know, other dictators around the world who are you know, who make more extreme and violence threats to Donald Trump and aren't going to be kicked off anytime soon because Facebook isn't being pressured about it. Now, Facebook does seem to be taking some steps in the directions of standards.
It's set up this Supreme Court an idea I think that my colleague Noah Feldman originally originated and they're they're not ruling on this whether Donald Trump stays permanently banned, But what do you think about the capacity of social media platforms to do the right thing? I mean, are they capable of it? To me? You know, all of that points toward just the fragility of this model. It's
a bad way to organize things. Now. It's a bad way even if you give him, even if he's a very wise person, and it's especially you know, it gets almost comically problematic when you imagine, you know, God forbid, you know, he gets fit hit by a bus and you have all of a sudden, the estate of Mark
Zuckerberg making these decisions. Nothing against Priscilla Champ, but like you get into this very weird world of you know, some of the most important decisions about speech, about how we are related are in this the hands of this you know, very small group of people who may not have any direct expert chise. And even with a Supreme court, you know, what does it totally mean to have a supreme court but not a legislature or an to an
executive you know, those things generally go together. For a reason. Well, I mean, I guess you could argue the analogy that the Mark Zuckerberg is the executive and the Supreme Court is deciding whether his decisions are compatible with the Constitution, I eat the rules that are set in place, and they do have, it seems, the ability to overrule him. So if they decide that Trump wasn't fairly banned, they can unban him. And Mark Suckerberg is said he'll be
bound by that. He's said that, but he isn't. Actually, they're not able to enforce that over if he said no, there's no recourse. There's no like sergeant at arms of Facebook who's going to come and push the button to put Trump back on. So what else would work or what would work better in terms of governance for these social media companies. I mean, if they have a Supreme Court, as you say, do they need did they need other branches of a government? How should they be structured to
be more accountable? That question? And if governance is really important, And I'm not suggesting that every company, every platform needs to have a kind of democratically elected board, but I do think in the long run, these kinds of spaces work best when they are accountable to the communities that they serve, and part of what is missing right now is any kind of feedback loop that requires them to do that. In some ways, we in the United States have it the best because at least a lot of
the folks who work at these companies live here. But if you talk to folks in other parts of the world, yeah, there's just very little resources or interest in figuring out how do we make a platform like that serve folks in South America or in Malaysia, And so really thinking about models where there is some sense of collective ownership collective governance is a piece of the p And one of the things that my partner in this effort, Talia Strout, and I have been thinking about is what lessons we
can take from physical public spaces that might inform digital ones. So talk to me about some of the public infrastructure things that could create a positive impact, positive influence here. Sure, yeah, So, I mean I think it's useful again to start with, well, what works in physical space and why. And I've been very captivated by work that Eric Kleinenberg and other sociologists have done showing, you know, for example, the value of
having parks in a neighborhood. It's not just about health or about having a nice place to go with some green trees. It's about those are the places where people form a sense of familiarity with each other, where they encounter other people in the community who they otherwise might not seek out and are like it's okay, I can I can deal. And ultimately where they form a sense of collective identity where you know, they have this shared
reference point. You know, if you were to operate a park like a business, some of those functions would fall away. And so to me, you know, part of this is about how do we build institutions that serve those functions in digital life that are not going to be met by you know, companies looking to maximize their their profits. Yeah, but even with parks, it's a it's a really good example. There are parks that really work from the point of view of creating that kind of set and ones that
really don't. You know, the ones that don't or you know, if people feel they're dangerous or they're dirty, or they're you know, their crime taking place. And the ones that do, I mean, they're even you know, people who study this kind of thing point all sorts of really subtle design decisions.
I remember when they were opening Brian Park in New York, they made a big thing out of the chairs not being anchored down, and so people show up in the park and they can adjust the chair, and someone would before sitting in the chair adjusted, you know, even like you know, a few inches. But somehow that you know, gives them a sense of kind of ownership of the space. Yeah, you know, never would have occurred to me. But what are the social media equivalents of those that kind of
thinking about about public spaces. Well, so you're referring, I think, Tom, there's a wonderful book that I've spent a lot of time kind of thinking about the public life of small urban spaces, which was written by William White in the seventies.
And he actually, you know, here's this great character who like ran around New York with a video camera or a film film camera, filming you know, Bryant Park for like, you know, a day and trying to figure out like when are people here, why are they here, what are they doing? And he noticed this thing about the chairs and the and how it offered people this sense of dignity that they could like establish their relationship to each other. Thank you, by the way, excellent giving me that the
real reference of what I was passing on. Well, it's funny because I've I've used that example literally because it is this small design decision that has these big consequences.
One of the things that White and Jane Jacobs and a bunch of the other folks who have really thought about public space note is so part of it is about the design, and I think there are ways to think about how you offer people that sense of dignity and that sense of Another thing that he writes about Bryant Park that Brian Park has varying degrees of publicness. So this will mean more to people who have spent a lot of time in New York. But there's areas
where you're in public, but you're really pretty private. You're sitting at a chess table, you're not kind of making a big scene of yourself, and then if you walk out into the middle of the field, everyone can see you and you can do your big spectacular thing. And so it offers people this way to vary intuitively modulate, like how much do I want to be seen? How much do I want to be watching others and social media.
You know, it's very unintuitive and it's sort of a binary, right, Like I can be seen potentially by everyone on the Internet or no one. But having that sense of kind of intuitive modulation isn't isn't part of the picture. The other thing that folks like White and Jane Jacobs have pointed to is like, part of this is about design,
and part of it's about people and programming. When you look at spaces that are flourishing, there are a bunch of people who kind of take some ownership or some stewardship of those spaces, their activities that happen there that draw people in. It's not just like a blank canvas. And this for me was one of the big kind of aha moments in this work that I've been doing right now, because it's such a contrast to the kind of Twitter notion of like let's build the minimal communications
platform and see you know what emerges from that. This is really saying like, no, you've got to be really conscientious, and this is what people observe about parts that are really working, and especially that are working to be kind of inclusive and equitable. You're thinking very actively about like what's going to get which communities out and how do we build the right kinds of activities and spaces that are going to serve those communities. And ultimately a lot
of the time it comes down to co design. So how are we actually working with the people in this community together to come up with what we want this space to be? You know, that to me is pretty far from what it feels like to be on Facebook or start a Facebook group. Yeah. When I think about pro social behavior on digital media, the thing that springs first to mind is Wikipedia, which is a company that's it's a not for profit. It has a very large
number of very dedicated volunteers. You know, I'm sure there are all sorts of this, all sorts of partisanship and stuff, but there are also people who are very committed to weeding it out. And often when you go to Wikipedia, you find exactly what you're looking for, gives you the references, and sometimes you find things that are like incredibly good. And you know, volunteers have done this out of a sense of you know, they enjoy doing it, but it's
it's for public good. How do you cultivate that? Well, if you agree with me about Wikipedia, yeah, are there other examples and how do we spread that ethic. I totally agree about the promise of Wikipedia, and I think it's also worth really noting again that you know, Wikipedia is so amazing in so many ways, but even now the ratio of male to female editors is like two to one, and that's after a lot of hard work by the Alcohen CEO Katherine Maher to like pull in
more female editors. And it had real consequences in terms of what stories, you know, what articles got put on Wikipedia, because you would have these kind of like, you know, ninety page treatises on some Maga character that was a venture us to like dudes who are nerds, and you know, not the most basic information about Mary Cury or whoever. So the point there is, I think the fallacy was we'll just let everyone, anyone edit without a whole lot
of structure, and we'll find our community. And that kind of worked, but it kind of didn't. And so I guess the point is until they really started thinking seriously about how do we get women editors, how do we get editors from the global South, there were these big gaps in what that product was. And so to me, it's sort of just saying social problems are a bigger part of the challenge than the technology problems. Where do you see social media working? I mean, what are the
positive examples to build on in your mind? What's interesting is when you get away from the need to show a kind of like exponential up into the right growth curve, there are lots of wonderful examples of communities that are really functioning. One that I like to think about is a platform in Vermont Front Porch Forum, which is it's basically like a heavily moderated daily newsletter for your geographic area, and anyone can post. You have to prove that you
live there. But if you write a nasty note or whatever, it's sent back to you with a nice little like, hey, Eli, it sounds like you're having a moment. Can you rewrite this? And because you can only post once a day, like, it's really hard to maintain a flame war for like seventeen days running. It's possible, but you really got to
be into it, you know. I think that's a really interesting example of like if you increase moderation and you don't focus on engagement over you know, minutes and seconds, but you're thinking about long term you can actually create these really different kinds of conversations. And in Vermont, even as Facebook use has gone up, two thirds of a Vermont households are on front porch forum. So again it's like if you were just trying to maximize engagement, it
wouldn't be the most effective way. Like flame wars are great for engagement, but they're not actually very good for substantive community conversation. I mean two thirds of households. That sounds incredible, you know, is that just because things are like that in Vermont and they're very specific minded and people get along with each other. I mean, if you try to do that in Florida, Arizona, you know, do you think the same thing can work? Yeah, I mean
I think both. I really feel like it wouldn't be the exact same thing. And I think this is one of the challenges that we have with our tech environment right now. It's just I really think there is no one algorithm that is going to work for three billion humans. It seems like that's just a very hard task from the start. So figuring out how you build some of the local character and local community into the spaces that
we're all relating in actually seems really important. But that said, I think, you know, making healthy, flourishing communities is both really difficult and not that difficult. And the part that is not that difficult is you just need people who are willing to spend a lot of effort making it good and doing the hard work of like setting up the events, managing different groups of people that may be antagonistic to each other, building a sense of community identity.
And I feel like in the physical world there are people who have those jobs. They're like the park you know, activities coordinator, or the librarian or the social worker. They like do those functions. We rely on, you know, kind of volunteer moderators who have other jobs to do that in digital life, and so I think that's the part
that's like, it's not that hard. It's just a lot of work and it's expensive, and if you're trying to create something that has a great growth curve, it's the first thing that you take out of the balance sheet. But there's a gap between people's express preferences and they're revealed preferences. When you ask people, they often say they
want to hear a big range of viewpoints. They want to be informed citizens, They want to participate in a civil, constructive dialogue, and yeah, they'd like to be on a social media platform that does that. But in fact, when I mean from on Front Porch, sounds like it's an exception, but a lot of the attempts I've seen to try to create those more socially constructive forums flounder because people
don't find them as enjoyable. You know, when it comes down to it, that's that's spinach, and there's there's candy over a Twitter, right, and and you know, I'm not someone who who wants to take candy away from anyone, But I really think it's about actually increasing the diversity of the options that we have for different ways of relating to each other. Those two pieces can coexist, just like you know, you have parks and then you have
amusement parks or whatever. Do you see positive things happening anywhere in commercial social media either? I mean, these platforms all have a different personality, and some of them at least seem much less virulent. But you know, the kind of thing you admire on Vermont Front Porch. Yeah, do you see like the indications of that breaking out any work in the commercial world. Yeah, I mean, I think
there are pieces all over the place. Talian I did some so basically part of our work was trying to identify the fourteen kind of qualities of healthy digital public spaces, what we're calling kind of the signals, and we did this survey where we asked people about different platforms and how they felt the platforms were doing on those signals. Reddit got pretty high marks on a number of these kind of community functions from its users relative to a
Facebook or Twitter or some of these others. I think that scans became as Reddit has been much more thoughtful from the beginning about kind of how do you build a sense of norms that are enforceable around these sub communities.
And that doesn't mean that you don't have the Donald or you know, some of these other you know, pretty toxic subreddits, but it does mean that at least, you know, if you're a person who wants to take on the task of building a community, you have some of the tools that you need in order to do that well and it doesn't become a kind of free for all or you know, only the most high engaging posts, when there's definitely like a step forward from what you can
see in some places on Twitter. Yeah. I started working on the internet in nineteen ninety six at Slade, and we had something called the Fray, which was an early you know, open discussion board, and you know, we saw had a preview of a lot of them. But one of the things that was most apparent was the more knowledge that was required to participate in the discussion, the
better that discussion was. So something on which everybody had an opinion, ie, you know, presidential election politics generally would tend to degenerate pretty quickly. But if we had a we did have a you know, threat about the weekly poem, you know, and there was that was that was optimal. I mean, the only people who participate in that were people who liked poetry. A lot of them knew something
about it. It was a great conversation. But similarly, something that involved technical expertise you'd have a pretty good discussion about because the people who were sort of know nothings and just wanted to be disruptive didn't really have so much of a way to participate. Right. I think it's important to say that good social media both means you know, having difficult conversations in a different way, but it also means finding other conversations to have that aren't the incendiary
political ones. When you think about all of the civic spaces in a community, there are very few that are like, here's the place where you go when you want to walk up to strangers and tell them what you really think about the most intense political beliefs that you have. That's not a thing for a reason, mostly, which is
it's very unpleasant and it doesn't work out well. Instead, we've got basketball courts and tennis courts and community centers and all these other places which are really about like coexisting across lines of difference, not about like digging into the places of deepest disagreement. And I think figuring out how to build more of those spaces digitally is just as important as solving the problem of like how do
we argue argue better or more civilly. Yeah, well, you're starting to sound like Marshall McLuhan, which you know very much agree with that there are things about the mode of communication that end up dictating the tone and they've the content. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll look back.
I do think we'll look back in ten years or twenty years at this era of the Internet and be like in a sort of amused way, like it's so crazy and kind of cute that we thought that you could connect, you know, all of human society through like one hundred and eighty or two hundred and thirty character you know, snippets of text. That's like a really hard medium to connect people together. And you know, when we're all living in whatever weird you know, augmented reality world,
I think we'll look back at this with some amusement. Yeah, well, if you're not waiting around for Facebook and the other social media companies to solve this problem on their own, and I don't think either of us are. I wonder what you can do to help solve the problem. How can listeners fight polarization and social media and contribute to
more more constructive kinds of interactions. There's two pieces. One is the value for everyone of those people who take kind of ownership of making a space hospitable and welcoming and doing the hard work of mediating between the different people who are there and figuring out who's not there who should be taking on those jobs at a kind of social fabric level really matters. So that's I think
one place to go. I think the other places I'm really excited about this kind of explosion that we're moving into of other models for digital social spaces with parks and with libraries. They're also mundane and every day that we can forget that it took these real social movements in moments of great upheaval to set up those kinds of institutions, and I think now is this moment where we need some new kinds of institutions to deal with the upheavals who we're facing now. And so I'm just
really excited about people joining that. And I think it's a project that you don't have to be, you know, a coder to be able to contribute to how was Eli pariser He and Alia Stroud codirect the Civic Signals project. Will include a link to their work in our show notes. Will also include links to the writers that Eli mentioned, so that you can learn more about ways to get involved designing and supporting more civically minded social media is one part of the solution to the divisions we face.
Large companies, with their proprietary algorithms, will continue to impact the health of the metaphorical air and water of our so called digital cities. Next week, our polarization series continues with a conversation with Cornell professor Nathan Bettius. He thinks that just as Americle works to ensure its food safety and air quality, it ought to enforce health standards around algorithms too. I hope he'll join us for that conversation.
Solvable Senior producer is Jocelyn Frank, Research in Booking by Lisa Dunn. Catherine Girardot is our managing producer, and our executive producer is Mia Loebell. Solvable is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us really helps to get the word out. You can find Pushkin podcasts wherever you listen, including on the iHeartRadio app and Apple Podcasts. I'm Jacob Weisberg.