Building Mental Models

The arena in which individuals come together to share issues of importance, exchanging opinions through discussion and deliberation. It is within the public sphere that society develops an understanding of ourselves — our collective wisdom. 

The public sphere of course does not represent a ...

Social media has inserted itself between each of us and our daily experiences, moderating and manipulating the information we receive about our society.

Platforms do this by profiling us over time and using those profiles to target us with selective content - custom curated news, ads, and p...

The biggest problem with social media is not the content itself, but the machinery of targeted distribution.

To fix this, we have two options: ban profiling and targeting practices or make the strings visible so we know when we are experien...

We can make the strings visible without disrupting business models, but we need to do it in an aggressive way. For example, we could require that every piece of content on social media be clearly labelled in ways that allow us to understand how it fits into the public sphere.

Is it sha...

Currently platforms like Facebook and Twitter allow users to see primitive targeting information about advertisements. To find this information, users need to click multiple times, which they will rarely do. 

We should push for transparency in targeting. This means requiring platforms to cl...

• The warped public sphere we each inhabit is not random. It is custom-curated to target us with information that will most likely resonate.
• This dynamic amplifies extreme perspectives and drives polarization, but even worse, it destroys our collective wisdom as a society.

Software systems can amplify human abilities and enhance human intelligence. Social media does the opposite. It distorts our collective intelligence and degrades our ability to make good decisions about our future. It ...

The misinformation and disinformation propagated by social media create a chain reaction of harm, acting as a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society.

Focusing on content alone distracts from the core problem of social media.

Social media red...

Social media has distorted the public sphere beyond recognition. Each of us now has a deeply flawed mental model of our own communities. This damages our collective wisdom, but it is not the content itself that is most responsible. We must instead blame the machinery of distribution.