(Great article in Quartz on how social media can play an important role in national ,and even global, constructive discussion on pressing issues by better moderating the Trending News and separating real from conspiratorial manipulated content. The good news is that the social media has the tools to do it by adjusting its algorithms and flagging questionable content. f. sheikh)
This week Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most famous living philosophers, turned 90. A week before, Congress hosted yet another hearing investigating tech platforms Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple.
What does one event have to do with the other?
In 2006, long before social media echo chambers were a worldwide phenomenon, Habermas warned that “the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across the world” would lead to “a huge number of isolated issue publics”—micro public spheres that threaten the shared national conversations that are essential to democracy.
Habermas’s philosophies and the antitrust investigations both point to a fundamental issue we face today: the concept of a public sphere, and what tech companies and the government can and should do to protect democracy.
Facebook, like Twitter and Google, represents the modern version of the public sphere that Habermas and other democracy theorists have called for. With more of our lives lived online, we’ve stopped prioritizing physical spaces, and therefore lost shared spaces spaces for public discourse.
The internet has largely satisfied a human desire for connection, but it doesn’t necessarily cultivate a democratic exchange of information.
Democratic discourse depends on a shared understanding of what matters, what the facts are, and which sources and speakers are reliable.
Trend setting
Before its untimely dismissal, Facebook’s “Trending” feature lived in the small white box on the upper right-hand corner of your home page, allegedly listing the news stories most widely shared and discussed across Facebook’s ecosystem.
Although problematic in its application, this tool had the potential for an entirely citizen-driven solution to an age-old problem of the public sphere: determining what issues deserve our attention, and how much of it.
Features like Trending in theory help support and maintain the social media space as a venue for public conversation in democratic discourse—if platforms can stick to implementing them the way they were initially advertised.