ABSTRACT
Social media platforms have been both celebrated and vilified during the past ten years of political campaigning, but rather than seeing them as a boon or a bust, we must consider new design interventions to make them better allies of democratic interchange and civic culture. This chapter argues that to reduce their antidemocratic practices, we must look beyond censoring social media accounts. Instead, we must document how political information circulates within these systems and then require clear and transparent records of the political content they disseminate, who created the content in the first place, and the audiences to which the content is directed. In addition, we need interventions in both algorithm and interface design to reduce the circulation of misinformation. Even modest steps like these can augment the free, transparent flow of political information missing today.
