The Divisiveness of Facebook can be Healed.

When Zuck dropped out of college to deliver Facebook to the world, he had the naive view that community is a pure good; that an open platform would unite the world into a benign harmony. A more reflective person would have known that communities embody a Manichean dualism: yes, they offer us much comfort and support, but they also engender the worst evil of mankind: that of the xenophobic fear of the outsider.

With these stovepipes of interest we have become strangers to each other. We only see and hear confirming pieces. Instead of a community of shared knowledge and communal discussion and disagreement we have become a society of ignorance, ignorant of what our neighbors see and believe, and unwilling even to countenance the mildest disagreements. Everything we see and read confirms our ignorance and blinds us to the broadening of perspectives that Facebook in its most idealistic strivings hoped to create.

Yet, it does not need to be this way. Facebook could just as easily abandon its zeal for billions of members, offering the blandest and most uniform affirmation of our likes, by providing a universe of opinions to us. It could focus on those areas of our interest: politics, religion, commerce, sports, whatever, in response to our likes; but provide a truly diverse and entertaining cross-section of all our beliefs. It could foster communities of diversity and broadening perspectives. The technology for doing so is readily available. AI can easily compute semantic similarity.

Imagine a starry universe of knowledge. Within it there are clusters and galaxies of related topics: politics, religion, commerce, sports. Yes, they can be divided into smaller groups like individual sports teams or political parties. But the broader questions unite those component groups in interests and perspectives that are shared. One group might favor one set of interests, and another the opposing pole separated by a single “not”. But together those two groups are closer to each other than to anything else in the universe; so it is easy to find real “news” items for both groups.

Of course, these news items are not news “feed”; they are really meaty items that require chewing and digestion. A cynic might believe that Facebook members of humanity would run away from such food for thought, and Facebook’s vaunted growth would stall and collapse. That is possible, but Facebook is famous for its willingness to experiment with portions of its members to see what works. Such an experiment, offering a fuller diversity of knowledge to everyone that still fits their interests, would fittingly reward Facebook for becoming mankind’s community.

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