Building A Prosocial Media Ecosystem

The essay argues that social media should be redesigned to bridge divides, adapting the 1947 Hutchins Commission's press principles to today's platforms. Its authors, including Glen Weyl and Audrey Tang, propose three strategies: providing social context through community annotation, ranking content to surface what relevant communities share, and using data to foster cross-cutting communities. They point to Taiwan's 2014 Sunflower-era civic tech work and X's Community Notes as proof of concept. The authors contend that the core problem is that platforms hide the social context of viral content, not that it is too plentiful, so content removal is not the solution.