Think of Our Physical Spaces Like Our Digital Spaces

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Exploring the ways in which online spaces can be made to mimic offline spaces in order to keep people safe. Online spaces can reflect real cities in many ways. There is ugliness that no one will treat, there is anger that people will take out on each other, among other things.

In order to keep people safe, we must think of our physical spaces like our digital spaces. In doing so the digital spaces we live in can become more constructive and friendly.

Being on social media can feel a bit like living in a new kind of city. It’s the greatest city in the world. Millions of people can do things their parents never dreamed of. They can live together, play together, learn together. The city is a marvel.

But it’s also rotten. Raw sewage runs in the streets. Every once in a while, a mass frenzy takes hold. Citizen denounces citizen. Relationships are irrevocably broken.

My job used to be to protect the city. I was a member of the Facebook Civic Integrity team. My coworkers and I researched and fixed integrity problems—abuses of the platform to spread hoaxes, hate speech, harassment, calls to violence, and so on. Over time, we became experts, thanks to all the people, hours, and data thrown at the problem. As in any community of experts, we all had at least slightly different ways of looking at the problem. For my part, I started to think like an urban planner. The city needs to be designed correctly from the beginning. It needs neighborhoods that are built so that people, societies, and democracies can thrive.

This is a different approach, one that is emerging in companies across the social media landscape: integrity design. Integrity workers like me try to defend a system from attackers who have found and learned to abuse bugs or loopholes in its rules or design. Our job is to systematically stop the online harms that users inflict on each other. We don’t (often) get into the muck of trying to make decisions about any specific post or person. Instead, we think about incentives, information ecosystems, and systems in general. Social media companies need to prioritize integrity design over content moderation, and the public needs to hold them accountable about whether they do so.


First, let’s take a step back: if social media is a new city, why is it so hard to govern? Why don’t real cities see millions of citizens fall into cults in a manner of months? How can they have conferences without (Gamergate-scale) harassment, or clubs that don’t turn people into propaganda-spewing automatons? Why don’t they have waves of Nazi recruitment? What does the physical city have that the virtual one doesn’t?


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Keywords: internet, offline species, online species

By: Mathew17

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