Too often, platforms appropriate medical language. Twitter has talked for several years about wanting to promote “healthy conversations.” But what does healthy mean online?
Content on social media platforms is indeed only one part of the ecosystem, which also includes questions around tax policy, surveillance, antitrust, company culture and so on.
One way to grapple with this problem is to draw inspiration from other concepts in public health. One potentially helpful concept is “One Health.” One Health has multiple definitions, but at its most basic it is “an approach to ensure the well being of people, animals and the environment through collaborative problem solving — locally, nationally, and globally” (this is the definition from the One Health Institute at the University of California, Davis). The One Health idea sounds similar to many Indigenous and other ways of knowing that see humans as inextricably linked to surrounding animals and environment — a new name for very old concepts.
If we continue a long-standing trend of using health concepts and language to think about the online world, what can the One Health concept contribute to platform governance?
[…]