NOEMA: Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem

By Glen Weyl, Audrey Tang and Jacob Mchangama

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We believe, therefore, that it’s time to relearn some of the commission’s lessons and adapt them to our pluralistic, digital age.

With a deeply polarizing U.S. election fresh in our minds, the need to redesign platforms that bridge divides has never been more urgent. In a paper this essay is adapted from, we and our co-authors showed how the lessons of the Hutchins Commission can be adapted to the far more plural and digital world we live in today. There is no longer a monolithic “U.S. audience,” but we have advanced computational tools that allow us to implement the Hutchins principles across the diverse and intersecting audiences that social media reaches. We suggest three concrete strategies to achieve this:

1. Provide social context, such as by encouraging the communities among which social posts are widely accepted or divisive to annotate them. The goal here is to facilitate the production of common understandings or “meta-consensus” that undergirds the social fabric. Algorithms that cluster social networks by communities, which drive recommender systems, already track this information; we should just make it transparent to users.
2. Ranking content to surface what relevant communities have in common and ensure that all relevant communities receive a fair share of attention. This would be to address social fragmentation — algorithms that are already being harnessed in systems like X’s Community Notes could algorithmically scale the Hutchins principles in a diverse social network.
3. Harness data to facilitate the formation of cross-cutting communities and a business model under which platforms can profit from encouraging the emergence and development of such communities.

Thus, rather than amplifying content that spreads misinformation or fuels outrage, social media platforms would profit from prioritizing user-driven promotion of constructive content. Instead of relying on government mandates or the decisions of tech billionaires, platforms could integrate mechanisms that enable users to provide context, fostering greater understanding and strengthening community ties.

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