This new framing strengthens, broadens, and deepens the case for open middleware to address the dilemmas of governing discourse on social media
Human discourse is a social process. It depends on three pillars that must work together:
- Agency
- Mediation
- Reputation
Lack of attention to all three pillars and their synergy has greatly harmed current social media. Without strong support for all three pillars -- enabled by middleware for interoperation and open innovation -- social media will likely struggle to balance chaos and control.
Advocates of middleware have brought increasing attention to the need for user agency -- but without strong support for the other two pillars, there remain many issues. Agency must combine with mediation and reputation to rebuild the context of "social trust" that is being lost. By enabling attention to all three pillars, open, interoperable middleware can help to:
- Organically maximize rights to expression, impression, and association in win-win ways,
- Cut through speech governance dilemmas that lead to controversy and gridlock, and
- Support democracy and protect against chaos, authoritarianism, or tyranny of the majority.
There are also helpful supplements on my blog:
- A simple framing of social mediation processes and ecosystems.
- A vision, with examples, of how they might be reconstructed in digital form -- with branding for ease of selection.
- The initial 2023 working presentation of these ideas (with updates), including an embedded deck that goes deeper from multiple perspectives. (This includes novel ideas on how these pillars also apply to the development of AI, as will soon be summarized in a future article.)
Broader background for these pillars and why we need to attend to them is in my CIGI policy brief, New Logics for Governing Human Discourse in the Online Era.
(My thanks to the many experts who have provided encouragement and helpful feedback in individual discussion and at the April FAI/Stanford symposium on middleware -- and special thanks to Luke Thorburn for invaluable suggestions on simplifying the presentation of these ideas.)
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[Update 10/31/24:] In addition to the foundation on "social trust" by Laufer and Nissenbaum that I cited in my article, I just found an enlightening sociological perspective from Thorsten Jelinek, How Social Media and Tokenization Distort the Fabric of Human Relations.
