Could social media support healthy online conversations? New_ Public is working on it | Nieman Journalism Lab

Profile of New_Public, founded by Eli Pariser of Filter Bubble and Upworthy fame, and Deepti Doshi "from from Meta, where she’d spent much of her tenure leading the company’s Community Partnerships... supporting, Facebook group admins... as well as UT Austin professor Talia Stroud, who remains on the board, and their drive to stimulate "citizen-driven efforts to share civic information... [creating] a healthy digital public sphere through more fundamentally public-spirited ends.” ".

Their focus: "grassroots online spaces ... on Facebook, email, Nextdoor, Discord, WhatsApp, or some other platform ... de facto centers of connection and information on the local level... U.S. adults who often or sometimes get local news from such groups jumped from 38% in 2018, to 52% in 2024." - essentially the 'content discovery through people, people discovery through content' phenomenon I saw in my first online community over 2 decades ago.

"Last month, New_ Public announced a new “Local Lab” that will tackle “a series of research sprints and pilots”.

While currently working with existing platforms, "they’re interested in new technological infrastructure ... by connecting existing platforms, or building something entirely new." Their focus remains local, as "limited scale is a prerequisite for healthy online discourse" - it's fundamentally impossible "to do good content moderation or conversation at a scale of billions", and calling Twitter a global town square is oxymoronic: “A town square operates at a certain size, not at a global scale.”

Rather than tweaking Facebook "to make it a little bit better... [ask]: What is the information and conversational infrastructure that a democracy needs?". Then map the gap between that vision and what we have today.

A key gap: "our physical communities have public spaces ... built for, and governed by, and serve the public [whereas] our digital spaces are mostly happening in private companies... where the customers “are advertisers, not people”, so they're also piloting a Public Spaces Incubator with public media groups RTBF, SRG SRR (CH), CBC (Canada) & ZDF (DE).

"The Local Lab pilots with ... neighborhood associations, homeowner associations, town spaces ... aren’t public ... learn with them about what’s working ... codify some best practices". Many are volunteers - it really helps them just to connect them together for mutual support.

"pro-social moderation, where the moderator is actively starting a conversation... really work ... [as is] establishing norms from the outset ... [which usually involves] keeping national politics out.

AI4communities? "AI tools can take on more mundane, time-consuming tasks... verifying whether [an applicant] ... is actually a member of a given community... acting as a kind of filter to sort out comments ... flagging ... edge cases for human moderation". Example: an AI which posts friendly warnings when a post gets too edgy.

"Federation is one tool that could potentially break some of the silos and give users more control... [although] Mastodon, in particular, has a demographic silo problem. For now, decentralization “isn’t meeting people where they’re at".

They're still looking, but the focus is not yet on technical infrastructure: they first want to "determine what a public space that’s welcoming to the whole public” actually requires... addressing actual unmet needs that people have... We need to make things joyful, delightful”