How Social Media Should be Redesigned
The mainstream social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter recently faced intensive scrutiny in the wake of the Capitol riot and the Trump bans. While many left-leaning users celebrate the bans of President Trump from all major social media platforms in the US, the bans also raise concerns about free speech and other long-term implications.
Yesterday, the CEO of Twitter admitted that the ban of Trump from his company’s platform was not something he would celebrate and that such a ban posed a dangerous precedent. Of course, most of us may agree that the ban of Trump from Twitter is needed to prevent further violence incitement, especially in the days leading to Biden’s inauguration. But such a ban, which was taken as the last resort, also indicates the failure of the current design of social media in limiting harms to the society while promoting free speech.
So how the new social media platform, like ExtentWorld, is designed to prevent such a failure?
First, let’s examine how free speech on social media can cause harm to the society. If someone posts a hateful speech or violent incitement on his/her profile, that post itself wouldn’t cause any significant harm if it’s not viewed by many people. However, the algorithms of most social media platforms are designed to spread user-generated content unlimitedly. A post by a popular user like Trump can easily reach millions of other users. Of course, if it’s a good post, then the more views the better for the society. But if it’s a bad post, the more views the greater harm it can cause to the society.
The only way that social media like Facebook and Twitter can limit such potential harm is to crack down on bad posts and then either label them or delete them. This approach, however, has a big challenge: it’s impossible to accurately distinguish between good content and bad content. There’s no well-defined notion of hate speech. You cannot train computers to recognize hate speech effectively when human ourselves cannot always tell if a post is a hate speech or not. Facebook’s AI algorithm for detecting hate speech will surely catch many good posts and label them as bad ones. And then deleting users’ posts that are controversial will likely irritate the users. They would feel like their free speech right is stripped off even though it’s on the platform of a private company.
Considering all of these issues, ExtentWorld has come up with a simple solution: it will set a view price for any post (on a public profile or public group) that becomes popular. The more popular the post is, the higher view price it will be set. For example, when a user named Trump posts some message on his public profile, the first 100 views of this post will be free. Once the post reaches 100 views, it will be automatically set a view price of 1 eCoin, which is equivalent to $0.1. Then anyone who wants to view his post will have to pay him 1 eCoin. Once the post reaches 1000 views and 10K views, its view price will be raised to 10 eCoins and 100 eCoins, respectively. A small percent of what Trump earns from the views of his post will go to ExtentWorld as a fee. This would be a happy solution to all parties. Anti-Trump users don’t have to see his presumptively hateful post because it’s hidden by the view price. Trump supporters can still view his post and donate money to him by paying for the view price. Trump shouldn’t be complaining about his free speech even though his post is hidden. And of course, ExtentWorld would be happy too!
