Dear Mr. Zuckerberg...
What Facebook absolutely must do
Dear Mr. Zuckerberg,
Congratulations on your inspiring story, how you built your company, the unprecedented accomplishments of your business, and thank you for the amazing connectedness that nearly 3 billion people enjoy today because of your vision.
The elephant in the room right now is that your company, Meta, and Facebook, the de facto social media platform today, has a business model that amplifies some of the worst things in human beings. Lies travel faster than facts among users of the platform. Animus and rage get people more involved and keeps them more engaged, in a way that patient, calm, rational discussion, by and large does not.
I firmly believe you and many on your team actually do give a hoot. I don’t believe all the bad publicity that reaches me. Your sponsorship of research and other humanitarian goals tell me you’re not just all about grabbing what you can in life, you want to help people.
So what is the answer? How can Meta decapitate the ugly Medusa tentacles that have used Facebook to sow more and more hatred and partisanship in the world?
I believe there’s a simple solution. Carrots and sticks, but mostly carrots. When people go into Facebook jail, they come out, many of them, recalcitrant and defiant. There are some sensitive, introspective people that might be better for having had a time out, but the ones raging the most are not those people. Carrots can be what reaches them. They automatically believe when they are told they are praiseworthy, and automatically reject the messengers who say they’ve done something that is deemed unacceptable.
Your toolbox is formidable, the Facebook red notifications alert sends dopamine surging around the world, influencing click behavior that makes your platform come alive. Instead of focusing on the negative disciplinary aspects exclusively, why not begin to use this amazing influence to reward good behavior?
Give people Ambassador awards when they talk calmly through a difficult issue with some who are raging against them. Provide recognition to those who provide evidence-based answers and comments. And don’t stop there, give them exposure, help raise their voices, let these people who are working hard to build consensus, fix what is broken and heal the divide in our nation be heard widely on your platform.
As you know, AI can be used, not just to funnel content to people based on past click behavior, but it can also be used to reward people based on the content of their posts, their ability to deescalate and build consensus across social divides. Your engineers can easily find people who have friends on both the political left and right, so there’s potential there as well.
A platform like Facebook can leave countries in a place of cooperation, or it can feed into tribalism, and partisanship, which, as you can see here in the U.S., plays out with a greater loss of democracy and a crippling of our legislative progress, which discredits democracy around the globe.
Regards,
Bradley Pliam