Barack Obama Pinpointed Online Toxicity As A Major Threat To Our Future: Here’s What We Can Do

Innovation Barack Obama Pinpointed Online Toxicity As A Major Threat To Our Future: Here’s What We Can Do Roee Goldberg Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jun 14, 2022, 10:00am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Roee Goldberg is the co-founder of OpenWeb , a community platform for the world’s media houses.

getty In April, former U. S. President Barack Obama took the stage at Stanford University to deliver a keynote on the scourge of toxicity and disinformation online and its effects on our society.

Obama is not the first prominent public figure to speak out about these issues. But when a very recent former president, someone who still receives regular intelligence briefings, identifies a specific issue as a major threat to our most fundamental institutions, it should turn heads. The speech related a by-now familiar story to those in the field.

That story starts with the decline of traditional media and the rise of social platforms, with their emphasis on virality at all costs via black-box algorithms to increase time spent in their apps. It culminates with ethnic violence in Myanmar and Ethiopia, rioting at the U. S.

Capitol, widespread vaccine resistance and increased political polarization eeking into every corner of life. These are urgent problems, and anyone watching the space knows them well. But it is through technology solutions that we can imagine a better future.

As the co-founder of a company centrally concerned with changing how we talk online for the better, I can say that there’s a lot here to discuss. Obama describes himself as “pretty close to a First Amendment absolutist,” who believes that “in most instances, the answer to bad speech is good speech. ” In an age of “deplatforming,” this might be an unfashionable perspective—perhaps even a controversial one.

MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event But, as many commenters have pointed out and academic studies have shown , trying to eliminate hateful speech by removing individual actors or groups rarely has the intended effect. These studies show that when one tries to stamp out certain behavior or speech, it often reemerges elsewhere—and unfortunately, in increasingly extreme forms. Together, this makes a strong argument that we should perhaps be less concerned with what can or can’t be said online and more concerned with managing how far it spreads—what some have called “freedom of reach.

” But how? On a technical level, that means implementing tools that prioritize positive speech that contributes to a healthy community—tools that amplify good-faith engagement and disincentivize toxic actors from derailing the conversation. It is a well-established fact that positivity begets positivity online—and that negativity begets, you guessed it, more negativity. Nurturing the former is essential for improving the state of online conversation.

What managing freedom of reach does not mean, however, is using technology to enforce a single worldview or set of ideas. In fact, quite the opposite is true: The presence of opposing views is a very good thing. As Obama put it, “free, robust, sometimes antagonistic exchange of ideas produces better outcomes and a healthier society.

” Debate, even fierce debate, also increases user engagement—something all who strive to build community should take note of. But that’s not what today’s biggest social platforms do. By now, it is old news: The content-serving algorithms that supercharged their growth prioritize highly-engaging content that mirrors the worldview of the individual user, creating echo chambers that are prone to increase polarization.

But the volatile, hyper-polarized state of conversation online is in no sense the natural state of things. It is, rather, the outcome of a choice about to whom we afford freedom of reach. It is well within our power to make different choices—better ones.

It starts with platforms incentivizing quality content and continues with building online environments that let civil conversation flourish. Today, a world like that might seem like science fiction. But with the right tools and the right choices, we can absolutely make it a reality.

It’s up to us. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify? Follow me on LinkedIn .

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