"Stop at two hops." Facebook's Integrity Team researchers found that removing the reshare button after two levels of sharing is more effective than the billions of dollars spent trying to find and remove harmful content.
“If a thing’s been shared 20 times in a row it’s 10x or more likely to contain nudity, violence, hate speech, misinformation than a thing that has not been shared at all.” — Wall Street Journal Facebook Files
"Stop at two hops." Facebook's Integrity Team researchers found that removing the reshare button after two levels of sharing is more effective than the billions of dollars spent trying to find and remove harmful content.
Two levels of sharing still allows people to share content they care about. After a post has been shared twice, a user can simply copy and paste content if they want to share it further.
Changing the reshare button puts people and safety over Facebook's profits. It's an example of more humane technology that improves the quality of our feeds while still protecting freedom of speech.
As explained in the documentary The Social Dilemma and as clarified by the Facebook Files, social media's race for "engagement" is having disastrous effects on our global society.
While changing Facebook's reshare button mechanics can have monumental positive impact on society, it's still insufficent to change the entire social media engagement economy.
So how do we precede? How do we make sense of the myriad solutions and options? What should we focus on?
A FRAMEWORK FOR CHANGE
Systems theorist Donella Meadows had a brilliant answer to that question. In 1972, she introduced a framework known as the 12 leverage points to intervene in a system, which identifies different leverage points for making change in a complex system and puts those points on a scale of increasing leverage. Inspired by her work, we developed a simplified framework of leverage points for how to intervene in the extractive tech ecosystem.
.png)
The Leverage Points Framework shows that change happens at multiple levels with different degrees of impact. Importantly, it demonstrates why pushes for immediate design tweaks at major platforms must be paired with longer-term systemic reform, like changing the fundamental business models. Generally, leverage increases from left to right on the framework as does the difficulty of implementing changes. However, change does not necessarily happen in a sequential order, but instead across all leverage points at various times. Because of this, multiple efforts at multiple points of leverage are important.
Our goal is for #OneClickSafer to lay the train tracks for future change at Facebook and all social media platforms. It's not too late. We can change the system.
And in a world where social media platforms affect billions of people every day, even a tiny amount of leverage like #OneClickSafer can change the world.
