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  • WORLD VIEW

Social-media reform is flying blind

Redesigning social media to improve society requires a new platform for research.
  1. Chris Bail

    1. Chris Bail is director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and the author of Breaking the Social Media Prism: How to Make our Platforms Less Polarizing (Princeton University Press, 2021).

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As Russia continues its ruthless war in Ukraine, pundits are speculating what social-media platforms might have done years ago to undermine propaganda well before the attack. Amid accusations that social media fuels political violence — and even genocide — it is easy to forget that Facebook evolved from a site for university students to rate each other’s physical attractiveness. Instagram was founded to facilitate alcohol-based gatherings. TikTok and YouTube were built to share funny videos.

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Nature 603, 766 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-00805-0

Competing Interests

C.B. has served as an academic consultant for Twitter’s Incentives Team, which is exploring new ways to increase positive behaviour on its platform. In this capacity, he has been paid $2,675. The Polarization Lab, which he co-directs, has also received unrestricted gifts to support our research from Twitter ($50,000), Facebook ($150,000) and Google ($200,000).

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