How to Build the Future of Social Media

At the Polarization Lab in North Carolina, multidisciplinary researchers – including social scientists, statisticians and computer scientists – are breaking apart the social media status quo to rebuild it, one peer-reviewed brick at a time

- Por Prof Chris Bail. Photographs by Getty Images

WHAT'S WRONG WITH SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS AS WE KNOW THEM?

We've just accepted that how social media is now, is how it's always going to be. But Facebook started as a site for college students to rate each other's physical attractiveness. Instagram was essentially a way to organise alcohol-based gatherings, and was originally called Bourbon. Why should we accept these platforms that were designed for sophomoric purposes as the status quo, as the inevitable?

Meanwhile, incivility, hatred and outrage have never been higher. There's evidence that suggests social media is contributing to all those things. It's certainly not the only contributor, but there's growing consensus that it's a major player.

[But before we make changes] we need to understand how platforms shape human behaviour. That's what prompted us to say, Okay, we need a social media platform for scientific research.

IS YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA SITE BASED ON ANY PLATFORM IN PARTICULAR, OR IS IT COMPLETELY NEW?

We're building our platform for two purposes. One is to simulate existing sites, like Twitter and Facebook. When you're exploring interventions that could decrease positive behaviour, it's dangerous to do it in the wild. So, we need a testing ground - in the world of computer science, we call it a sandbox. It's where we start to learn how to play.

But the thing that we're much more excited about is using our site to explore the possibilities for social media more systematically.

WHAT POSSIBILITIES ARE THERE?

There are many other models that we could explore. Tech leaders say the point of social media is to connect people. That's Mark Zuckerberg's stated mission for Facebook.

On the one hand, that's admirable. You can connect the world in largely positive ways - people in Ukraine can fundraise internationally, for example.