Jonathan Albright

The relationship between technology platforms and news publishers has endured a fraught 18 months. Even so, the external forces of civic and regulatory pressure are hastening a convergence between the two at an accelerated rate beyond what we saw when we published our first report from this study in March 2017. Journalism has played a critical part in pushing for accountability into the practices of companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, yet newsrooms are increasingly oriented toward understanding and leveraging platforms as part of finding a sustainable future.

To illuminate current attitudes about the potential impacts of online social interaction over the next decade, Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center conducted a large-scale canvassing of technology experts, scholars, corporate practitioners and government leaders. Four major themes emerged from their responses:

Things will stay bad because to troll is human; anonymity abets anti-social behavior; inequities drive at least some inflammatory dialogue; and the growing scale and complexity of internet discourse makes this difficult to defeat.
Things will stay bad because tangible and intangible economic and political incentives support trolling. Participation = power and profits.
Things will get better because technical and human solutions will arise as the online world splinters into segmented, controlled social zones with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).
Oversight and community moderation come with a cost. Some solutions could further change the nature of the internet because surveillance will rise; the state may regulate discourse; and these changes will polarize people and limit access to information and free speech.