Hyper-polarization enabled by online misinformation and disinformation is a crucial global problem to solve.

Since the Trump era, I have dedicated time to research this problem. I’d love to build or help someone build an impactful venture. It is necessary to challenge conventional wisdom to build this venture.

Need for a commercially viable model.

The prevalent Silicon Valley culture of consumer products, with extensive harnessing of consumer data, is a root cause. Big Tech companies use that data to feed content intended to appeal to the worst in human beings. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg are hero-worshipped despite the moral implications of their companies.

A commercially viable venture with millions of paying users is the only option. And the toughest challenge is to develop an ethical business with a solid commercial model.

How do we achieve user-generated revenues for great content? Or have users pay for content moderation / fact-checking, which is unsexy by definition? How do we engage moderates to be our micro-influencers?

Those are the billion-dollar questions in my mind.

Think beyond the US

This is a global problem, and the solution also must be global.

The misinformation spread by tech companies has affected billions of non-Americans. Brexit has wrecked the UK, while European nationalism and anti-migrant movements are rising again. India will soon have 1 billion internet users at high speed and low cost, shaping a digital economy unlike anything the world has seen before. The potential to unleash chaos and violence through online propaganda is dangerously high in populous democracies.

An US-focussed solution is not equipped to tackle the following:

a. American tech firms may have to comply with some good laws in the future. But it does not stop them from exporting bad tech to other countries, especially poorer nations.

b.Disinformation by countries hostile to the US. For e.g., Russian interference in US elections. The Chinese Communist party has control over the most potent Gen Z tool, TikTok.

c. Data will be a weapon in the wars of the 21st century.

Look beyond tech expertise:

We need the expertise of people beyond tech in any potential solution. This thought has been reinforced by following the progress of chat GPT.

A brilliant coder may not understand their product’s broader social implications. And many public intellectuals, policymakers, journalists, political experts may not understand how tech works.

This generation has extraordinary tech talent equipped with platform capabilities to scale world-class products. But we risk feeding our biases to our systems. Our moderation must start in-house at a core team level.

It was a pleasure to read your posts and follow the work others have done. I enjoyed reading Tim Connors’ thoughts on democracy. Growing up in the 90s, I dreamt that access to information at our fingertips can promote better understanding and cooperation within communities. Millions of people like me had idealistic dreams about the power of technology. I would like to work with them.

I remain an optimist, a dreamer!

This makes me think of Dr. Haidt's platform: https://openmindplatform.org/

here are some thoughts on this from @Jeremy Burton and me. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gLRr5nalpJEX6xxXY75kboHvSnX8TQKKd2VLosHImbc/edit?usp=sharing

We have been working on exactly this.

Our app, Daily Haloha, is a simple ritual of collective reflection based on a single daily question. It's meant to be a daily empathy exercise that highlights our shared humanity, and is uplifting and illuminating to participate in.

We just launched the capability to offer our platform to communities to build engagement and belonging across their folks.

We built our daily ritual to mirror empathy development (self-awareness -> reciprocity -> perspective-taking) and also to be a container of belonging, aka the opposite of social media's extractive business model that rewards outrage, polarization, and extremism. Our principles are anonymity, no judgment, and no status. You can read more about our inspiration here.

I'd love to connect with others working in this arena, and who are interested in taking our app to the next level.

there are two parts of this, engagement and distribution,

a friend has been taking on the engagement part and has hit upon some distribution as well. this approach might be something that a bridge building tool could be based on.

As a starting point, since humans are human, the way to get engagement is to have people talk about themselves.

he drives engagement by creating surveys that ask how people think on issues where social media drives polarization but for which he (and just about anyone presumably) would assume we all have a lot more in common than the prevailing narrative would imply.

the output shows we do all have a lot in common but it’s also engaging and drives clicks.

(many approaches out there struggle to get attention, this has gone quite viral. )

his mvp was in Miami.crime in Miami Beach has went viral and social media featured it as a political issue with two opposing sides with an ugly racial undertones. The assumption here is the no matter what political party one belongs to, keeping streets safe is something most people would agree on.

https://e.pluribus.us/home/e-pluribus-us-programs/project-listen/viewpoints-miami-beach-crime/

this work is getting lots of people engaged and was even featured at the Miami city council and getting distribution via SEO.

it’s not an app yet.