65 Aviv Ovadya and Luke Thorburn, “Bridging Systems: Open Problems for Countering Destructive Divisiveness Across Ranking, Recommenders, and Governance,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, October 26, 2023, https://knightcolumbia.org/content/bridging-systems.
66 Tom Cunningham, “Ranking by Engagement,” Tom Cunningham, May 8, 2023, https://tecunningham.github.io/posts/2023-04-28-ranking-by-engagement.html; “Ranking by Engagement,” Integrity Institute, May 8, 2023, https://integrityinstitute.org/blog/ranking-by-engagement.
67 Jonathan Stray, “Designing Recommender Systems to Depolarize,” First Monday 27, no. 5 (2022), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v27i5.12604.
68 For example, studies suggest that platforms play a role in driving people to untrustworthy websites and that Facebook played a smaller role in 2020 than in 2016. Ryan C. Moore, Ross Dahlke, and Jeffrey T. Hancock, “Exposure to Untrustworthy Websites in the 2020 US Election,” Nature Human Behaviour 7 (2023): 1096–1105, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01564-2.
69 Gordon Pennycook and David G. Rand, “Fighting Misinformation on Social Media Using Crowdsourced Judgements of News Source Quality,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 7 (January 28, 2019): 2521–2526, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1806781116.
70 Eric Jaffe, “The ‘Contagion’ of Social Networks,” Los Angeles Times, September 13, 2010, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-sep-13-la-he-social-networks-health-20100913-story.html.
71 Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud’s nonprofit organization New_ Public maintains a Substack with research into how norms shape digital spaces. See, for example, “Understanding How Norms Shape Digital Spaces,” New_ Public, Substack, December 10, 2023, https://newpublic.substack.com/p/understanding-how-norms-shape-digital.
72 Philip Bump, “From the Election to the Riot, Nearly a Third of Facebook’s Top Link Posts Were from Right-Wing Media,” Washington Post, January 12, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/12/election-riot-nearly-third-facebooks-top-link-posts-were-right-wing-media.
73 Renée DiResta, “Free Speech Is Not the Same as Free Reach,” Wired, August 30, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/free-speech-is-not-the-same-as-free-reach.
74 “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach: An Update on Our Enforcement Philosophy,” Twitter Blog, April 17, 2023, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2023/freedom-of-speech-not-reach-an-update-on-our-enforcement-philosophy.
75 Di Zhao, Pouriya, and Auro, “Twitter: The Algorithm,” GitHub repository, 2023, https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm.
76 Ragul Bharvaga et al., “Gobo: A System for Exploring User Control of Invisible Algorithms in Social Media,” CSCW (2019): 151–155, https://doi.org/10.1145/3311957.3359452.
77 Francis Fukuyama et al., “Report of the Working Group on Platform Scale,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, November 17, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/report-working-group-platform-scale.
78 Ethan Zuckerman and Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, “From Community Governance to Customer Service and Back Again: Re-examining Pre-web Models of Online Governance to Address Platforms’ Crisis of Legitimacy,” Social Media and Society 9, no. 3 (July-September 2023): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051231196864.
79 Tobias Rose-Stockwell, Outrage Machine: How Tech Amplifies Discontent, Disrupts Democracy—and What We Can Do About It (London: Piatkus, 2023), also summarized in brief essay form in Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “Facebook’s Problems Can Be Solved with Design,” Quartz, April 30, 2018, https://qz.com/1264547/facebooks-problems-can-be-solved-with-design.
80 James Vincent, “Twitter Is Bringing Its ‘Read Before You Retweet’ Prompt to All Users,” The Verge, September 25, 2020, https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/25/21455635/twitter-read-before-you-tweet-article-prompt-rolling-out-globally-soon.
81 Avie Schneider and Scott Horsley, “How Stock Market Circuit Breakers Work,” NPR, March 9, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813682567/how-stock-market-circuit-breakers-work.
82 Renée DiResta and Tobias Rose-Stockwell, “How to Stop Misinformation Before It Gets Shared,” Wired, March 26, 2021, https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stop-misinformation-before-it-gets-shared.
83 Renée DiResta, “Elon Musk Is Fighting for Attention, Not Free Speech,” The Atlantic, April 14, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/elon-musk-buy-twitter-free-speech/629571.
84 For more suggestions on friction, see Ellen P. Goodman and Karen Kornbluh, “Social Media Platforms Need to Flatten the Curve of Dangerous Misinformation,” Slate, August 21, 2020, https://slate.com/technology/2020/08/facebook-twitter-youtube-misinformation-virality-speed-bump.html; Ellen P. Goodman, “Digital Information Fidelity and Friction,” Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, February 26, 2020, https://knightcolumbia.org /content/digital-fidelity-and-friction; Brett M. Frischmann and Susan Benesch, “Friction-in-Design Regulation as 21st Century Time, Place, and Manner Restriction,” Yale Journal of Law and Technology 25 (August 2023): 377–447, https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4178647. Also see the library of design interventions broached by user experience (UX) researchers that can be found at the Integrity Institute’s website at https://integrityinstitute.org.
85 St. Aubin and Liedke, “Most Americans Favor.”
86 For an in-depth examination of these volunteer moderators as a civic labor force in online governance, see J. Nathan Matias, “The Civic Labor of Volunteer Moderators Online,” Social Media + Society, April 4, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305119836778.
87 Spandana Singh, “Everything in Moderation: An Analysis of How Internet Platforms Are Using Artificial Intelligence to Moderate User-Generated Content,” New American, July 22, 2019, https://www.newamerica.org/oti/reports/everything-moderation-analysis-how-internet-platforms-are-using-artificial-intelligence-moderate-user-generated-content.
88 “Topologies and Tribulations of Gettr: A Month in the Life of a New Alt-Network,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, August 12, 2021, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/topologies-and-tribulations-gettr.
89 David Thiel and Miles McCain, “Gabufacturing Dissent: An In-Depth Analysis of Gab,” Stanford Digital Repository, June 1, 2022, https://doi.org/10.25740/ns280ry2029.
90 Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, “A Pro-Trump Social Network Wants to Corner the Anti-vax ‘Jizz Market,’” Rolling Stone, March 16, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/covid-vaccines-infertility-antivax-gettr-social-media-1234697898.
91 Jay Caspian Kang, “What Bluesky Tells Us About the Future of Social Media,” New Yorker, May 12, 2023, https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-bluesky-tells-us-about-the-future-of-social-media.
92 Alex Heath, “This Is What Instagram’s Upcoming Twitter Competitor Looks Like,” The Verge, June 8, 2023, https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/8/23754304/instagram-meta-twitter-competitor-threads-activitypub.
93 DiResta, “How Online Mobs Act.”
94 Joseph B. Bak-Coleman et al., “Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 21, 2021, https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025 764118.
95 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Martin Hammond (London: Penguin Books, 2006).
96 Anya Schiffrin, “Fighting Disinformation with Media Literacy—in 1939,” Columbia Journalism Review, October 10, 2018, https://www.cjr.org/innovations/institute-propaganda-analysis.php.
97 Institute for Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda, How to Recognize It and Deal with It (New York: Institute for Propaganda Analysis, 1938), 2.
98 Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee, The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin’s Speeches (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939). The ABCs of propaganda were “ASCERTAIN the conflict element in the propaganda you are analyzing. BEHOLD your own reaction to this conflict element. CONCERN yourself with today’s propaganda associated with today’s conflicts. DOUBT that your opinions are ‘your very own.’ EVALUATE, therefore, with the greatest care, your own propagandas. FIND THE FACTS before you come to any conclusion. GUARD always, finally, against omnibus words.”