Over the past two decades, social media has moved from a space of aspiration for people who study social change, to a space of profound anxiety. If we believe news headlines, social media is responsible for many of the major scourges of modern life. It is coarsening our political discourse, leading to polarization and division. It exposes vulnerable people to extremist ideology, driving them toward violence. Social media is addictive, can damage our body image and sense of self-worth.

If all this is indeed true, it’s odd that our society has not chosen to ban this dangerous new technology. In reality, social media is complicated. Professor Casey Fiesler of the University of Colorado, Boulder, has observed, “Social media is really good for people, and social media is really bad for people. Those two things can be true at the same time.” My research at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on a project called the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, suggests that we can work to shape social media into a pro-social force, not simply push back against the excesses of the form.

For people isolated and lonely, social media presents a crucial lifeline and connections to other people. It can be life-affirming and transformative for people whose gender identity, sexuality, or interests are not well supported by their local community. It has helped amplify the voices of people historically excluded from media dialogue, including people of color, queer people, and people with disabilities. In notable cases like the Arab Spring, social media has provided support for revolutionary political movements, whose participants have used online tools to expose and oppose authoritarian dictatorships.

The potentials of social media, and the distance between the real harms and potential benefits, mean a focus on improving the space is a high priority for advancing social justice broadly and the emerging field of public interest technology specifically. As this series has pointed out, many people working within public interest tech find themselves engaged in the complex work of trust and safety, trying to minimize known harms of these online spaces. Others in the field research the algorithms that increasingly shape our experience of social media platforms. Some work with regulators and legislators to design guidelines that could blunt the most damaging extremes of social media.

Pending legislation like the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA) in the European Union, seek to make social media platforms more transparent, giving users and legislators insights into the algorithms that promote some and demote other content. Proposed regulations also seek to outlaw so-called dark patterns, psychologically manipulative techniques designed to make it difficult to leave a service or designed to keep users engaged with social media platforms, in the same way that gambling machines seek to keep gamblers in the casino.

This focus on mitigating the harms of social media reflects a recognition that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube now play a central role in our public sphere. Social networks are now the spaces in which people process, unpack, interpret, discuss, and debate the events of the day and what we as a society should do in reaction to them. As such, they have taken on a key role in our democracy.

Read the full article about reimagining social media by Ethan Zuckerman at Stanford Social Innovation Review.