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.
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