Full Description
How can we build back truth online? Here's how.
How can we build back truth online? In this book, researcher Leslie F. Stebbins provides solutions for repairing our existing social media platforms and building better ones that prioritize value over profit, strengthen community ties, and promote access to trustworthy information.
Stebbins provides a road map with six paths forward to understand how platforms are designed to exploit us, how we can learn to embrace agency in our interactions with digital spaces, how to build tools to reduce harmful practices, how platform companies can prioritize the public good, how we can repair journalism, and how to strengthen curation to promote trusted content and create new, healthier digital public squares.
New, experimental models that are ethically designed to build community and promote trustworthy content are having some early successes. We know that human social networks—online and off—magnify whatever they are seeded with. They are not neutral. We also know that to repair our systems we need to repair their design.
We are being joined in the fight by some of the best and brightest minds of our current generation as they flee big tech companies in search of vocations that value integrity and public values. The problem of misinformation is not insurmountable. We can fix this.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Understand the Problem
Chapter 2. Learn to Protect Ourselves from Misinformation
Chapter 3. Teach Students to Play Offense against Misinformation
Chapter 4. Design Tools to Create Healthier Digital Communities
Chapter 5. Require Platforms to Serve the Public Interest
Chapter 6. Repair Journalism and Roll Out New Curators
Chapter 7. Build New Digital Public Squares
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
