Enlisting Students in the Fight for Healthier Online Public Spaces

There has been a sea change in how we view our broken digital public spaces. We now understand that the intentional design practices of large tech companies are amplifying misinformation and vitriol to keep us engaged and online to increase their advertising revenues. A Seattle school district recently filed suit against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok and Google claiming that they deliberately addict children to their platforms and serve up harmful content and misinformation that encourages anxiety, depression, eating disorders, cyberbullying and self-harm. Hundreds of families have also filed individual lawsuits alleging harm. Legal analysts are comparing these early cases to ones filed against Big Tobacco, and more recently, Big Pharma.

For the last four years, I have been steeped in research — across many disciplines —focusing on solutions to our information crisis. I had worried that our information crisis might be hopeless and that I was wasting my time. Instead, I found that we now have many tools and design strategies already at hand that can repair our broken online spaces without jeopardizing free speech. The Aspen Institute recently concluded that possibly the biggest lie being told about misinformation and toxic behavior online is that the crisis is uncontainable. It is not. We need to require social media platforms to change their underlying design that monetizes engagement. We need to demand that they work harder to prioritize the public good.

We need to require social media platforms to change their underlying design that monetizes engagement. We need to demand that they work harder to prioritize the public good.

Changing our social media platforms will not be easy or quick, but we must continue to push forward. At the same time, we are expanding our media literacy programs beyond teaching skills, such as evaluating sources and critical thinking. Social media spaces are designed to encourage passivity by encouraging users to hit “like” and “share.” We are now teaching students to have more agency in interacting with these spaces. Education reformers—from John Dewey to bell hooks—have pushed for education to move beyond simply the passing on of current knowledge. Education needs to help students learn to question, explore alternatives, and demand change.

What might it look like if students could learn about their digital spaces while at the same time working to improve them? What if students could help build the kinds of online worlds they themselves want to live in? What if learning could include helping reform the underlying structures that are producing these unhealthy digital worlds?

What if students could help build the kinds of online worlds they themselves want to live in?

Elementary schools are using a lesson plan to help students learn about online bullying by asking them to design their own app to prevent bullying. Students learn how these spaces can influence behavior by planning their own online social space. One of the fundamental principles of human social networks is that they magnify whatever they are seeded with. Students learn how and why current social media spaces are designed to keep people engaged and online and they create their own rules and designs for encouraging kids to treat each other better online.

Hopelab works with college students to build tech spaces that support youth emotional well-being. One recent project asked students to design prototypes for online mental health support for teens during the pandemic. Using human-centered design, they interviewed and focused on the needs of specific individuals. One group designed an app called Ketchup (“catch up”) that synced schedules between college friends so that even in different time zones they could continue to share cooking and meal times together online since they could not be together in person. Another team reported out on their project by asking their Zoom audience to go find towels and drape them over their heads and over the edges of their computer screens. This created a mini blanket fort as participants leaned into their Zoom camera and connected, felt supported, and laughed across twenty-three different locations.

By helping students develop agency in interacting with their online worlds, we can enlist them in the larger fight

Jacquelyn Whiting used a design thinking process to help high school students learn to own and develop solutions to the social media problems that they were experiencing. The students crowdsourced lists of pros and cons and then chose to focus on hate speech, wasting time and money online, and the lack of authenticity on social media. Design thinking helps students develop empathy for those experiencing a problem, look deeply at the problem, and avoid focusing too quickly on solutions. The students conducted research and then ideated potential solutions, tested these with stakeholders, and carried out an iterative design process. One group designed a space called #badday to celebrate authenticity by asking members to post about frustrations or setbacks. Another group designed a platform that charged a small fee for joining in return for an ad-free experience and the protection of private data.

Educators Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis are calling for civic media literacies that can use current or newly designed online spaces to inspire people to become active civic participants. They suggest moving beyond helping people understand how these structures work to creating new literacies that would prioritize civic intentionality to bring people together to solve social problems, create spaces that encourage meaningful engagement and positive dialog, and develop a commitment to working for the common good. What might this look like in practice? Teaching civic media literacies works best by providing opportunities to participate in issues that directly impact students. Mihailidis described a lightbulb moment for him when students in his hometown of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, came together to use social media— in all its messiness— to organize and fight to restore funding for a beloved high school librarian.

By helping students develop agency in interacting with their online worlds, we can enlist them in the larger fight to demand change in the design of our current spaces so that we can create digital spaces that better promote the public good.