How to save our social media by treating it like a city

Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. My job used to be to protect the city. I was a member of the Facebook Civic Integrity team. My coworkers and I researched and fixed integrity problems—abuses of the platform to spread hoaxes, hate speech, harassment, calls to violence, and so on. Over time, we became experts, thanks to all the people, hours, and data thrown at the problem. As in any community of experts, we all had at least slightly different ways of looking at the problem. For my part, I started to think like an urban planner. The city needs to be designed correctly from the beginning. It needs neighborhoods that are built so that people, societies, and democracies can thrive. This is a different approach, one that is emerging in companies across the social media landscape: integrity design. Integrity workers like me try to defend a system from attackers who have found and learned to abuse bugs or loopholes in its rules or design. Our job is to systematically stop the online harms that users inflict on each other. We don’t (often) get into the muck of trying to make decisions about any specific post or person. Instead, we think about incentives, information ecosystems, and systems in general. Social media companies need to prioritize integrity design over content moderation, and the public needs to hold them accountable about whether they do so.

[Sahar Massachi is the cofounder and executive director of the Integrity Institute, and a former civic integrity engineer at Facebook.]