![]() ![]() ![]() We start by taking the town square metaphor seriously-not just because town squares are not run for financial gain, but because a meaningful understanding of how public spaces work in healthy communities in the physical world can give us a great deal of insight about how to structure the digital world. And TikTok, the fastest growing social application and an increasingly important source of news around the world, is effectively controlled by the world’s most powerful autocrat, Xi Jinping, and his surveillance state. Mark Zuckerberg seems to have given up on his stated mission of building community and “bringing the world closer together” while he chases the metaverse, and is pivoting Facebook and Instagram to algorithmically surfaced TikTok-style videos. And his alliance with far-right voices (see, for example, the “three Musketeers” meme he posted suggesting common cause with Donald Trump and Kanye West), combined with his undercooked ideas about content moderation, make him an unlikely steward for the kind of cohesion and meaning-building digital “town square” democracies need. Musk is unlikely to listen-especially given the plans he announced Thursday morning to make Twitter the “most respected advertising platform in the world.” Twitter after Musk’s purchase will be loaded with debt interest alone will be billions of dollars each year. Before New_ Public he co-founded the social media startup Upworthy, wrote “The Filter Bubble,” and ran the pioneering digital citizen organization. ELI PARISER is is codirector, with Deepti Doshi, of New_ Public, a community and studio for building better digital public spaces. ![]()
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