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Building a More Honest Internet
Article

Building a More Honest Internet

What would social media look like if it served the public interest?

Carolyn Chun and Ethan Zuckerman
Columbia Journalism Review, 2019
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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Bold
  • Visionary
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

Ethan Zuckerman confronts the problem head on: The internet needs a new model. Now it is a decidedly mixed blessing – a commercial free-for-all in the United States, a channel for the dissemination of falsehoods and election manipulation and, in some countries, a tool of authoritarianism. Societies dealt with a similarly consequential technological innovation more than a century ago with the advent of radio. Even with the contemporary flawed internet, Zuckerman writes in the Columbia Journalism Review, there is one venue where truth usually wins out: Wikipedia. He reports that such precedents can help today's users make the internet safer, truer and better.

Take-Aways

  • The history of the development of radio suggests possible reforms that could be applicable to the internet.
  • Today’s internet model enables the spread of falsehoods and the exercise of undue influence.
  • Wikipedia provides a paradigm for a better internet. 

About the Authors

Former director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Ethan Zuckerman co-founded MediaCloud.org. He wrote Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn't, and How to Rewire It; and Mistrust: Why Losing Faith in Institutions Provides the Tools to Transform Them. His book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection won the Zocalo Book Prize. 

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