Strategy 5 Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose
Assess Social Media’s Civic Value
Strategy 5
Build Civic Information Architecture that Supports Common Purpose
Recommendation 5.1
Form a high-level working group to articulate and measure social media’s civic obligations and incorporate those defined metrics in the Democratic Engagement Project, described in Recommendation 5.5.
The dangers of social media for democracy
It is not hard to find examples of social media uses that weaken democratic society.
- Problematic practices on platforms like Facebook may impact elections, as foreign and domestic political actors sow disinformation and discord.
- Extremist videos on YouTube may be contributing to a wave of ethno-nationalist violence.
- The shooter behind the massacre at a Christchurch, New Zealand mosque live-streamed the attack on social media and relied on it to spread his manifesto.
These examples, among many others, demonstrate the undeniably negative influence of social media, and as such they have fueled reasonable calls for regulation and reform.
But social media is not inherently bad for democracy
Many other examples demonstrate how social media platforms are strengthening democratic society.
- In Tunisia during the 2010 revolution, protesters bypassed censors and attracted international media attention by sharing footage on Facebook.
- The #MeToo movement has used social media to bring about change at a global level.
- During the COVID-19 crisis, social media and videoconferencing technologies helped people around the world sustain a sense of connectedness, helping to ensure that physical distancing did not result in utter civic isolation and atomization.
- #BlackLivesMatter grew from a hashtag to an organization to a movement that is now a leader in the fight for racial justice
There is a lesson in this: we need to work not only to prevent the detrimental impacts of social media on democracy but also to understand—and articulate a positive vision for—what social media can do for democracy.
Assessing the proper role of social media
Today’s platform developers and social media users should engage in an open and candid conversation to articulate what social media should do for us as citizens in a self-governing society.
Metrics must be developed to understand how well a platform fulfills different areas of civic purpose: for instance, user exposure to a diversity of viewpoints. By 2026, these metrics should be in use to capture changes flowing from the recommendations in Strategy 5. They will help us draw distinctions between social media, generically understood, and civic media, designed for practices that are themselves supportive of democracy.
Champion
Civic Health Project, Civic Signals Project, The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and CivicLex are committed to working to implement this recommendation in order to help reinvent American democracy for the 21st century.
Civic Health Project, Civic Signals Project, The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and CivicLex are committed to working to implement this recommendation in order to help reinvent American democracy for the 21st century.
Civic Health Project is dedicated to reducing toxic partisan polarization and enabling healthier public discourse and decision-making across our citizenry, politics, and media. Through grant making and advocacy, Civic Health Project supports initiatives that empower Americans to reject tribal partisanship and come together to solve our nation’s greatest challenges.
The Civic Signals project, a partnership between the National Conference on Citizenship and the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, is working to facilitate dialogue by bringing together experts to reimagine the public goods that can be generated in digital spaces. This and similar projects can support the development of metrics for evaluating the benefits or harms to democracy of social media platforms.
The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst studies the civic and social role of internet platforms, and advocates for approaches to digital infrastructures that treat platforms and supporting technologies as public spaces and public goods, not purely as profit-making ventures.
CivicLex is a civic education and media organization based in Fayette County, Kentucky that works to help residents understand and get involved with the issues, policies, and processes that shape where they live.