Timeouts on Twitter? Context Cards for the Canceled?

In this semester’s Social Media and Democracy class taught by Ethics Lab Postdoctoral Fellow Jason Farr, undergraduate students explored questions of truth, democracy, and politics in the age of social media. Classes involve students drawing on contemporary case studies and philosophical tools from ethics, political philosophy, and epistemology.

“It is not a course where students explore in some abstract way how to navigate questions pertaining to ethics. Instead in this course, students are grappling with a phenomenon that is happening right in front of their eyes and unfolding in real-time.” Farr said, commenting on his experience instructing the course for the semester. 

The course was structured to aid more discussions among students and for them to engage in activities with occasional “mini-lectures” to explain key philosophical concepts. 

Farr added that, “the course facilitates a lot of peer learning. Students usually are teaching one another about different social media platforms and their very unique personal experiences interacting with those platforms.”

In one of the classes this semester, students were asked to be part of a fictional task force responsible for coming up with design suggestions as part of the unit “Cancel Culture vs Digital Accountability.”

The aim of the exercise was for students to gain a nuanced ethical picture of how users’ behavior is driven by the way social media platforms are designed. Some of the questions tackled during the class were: 

1) When and how is it appropriate to hold people accountable online?

2) What are some ways that are appropriate to hold people accountable?

3) How might a design feature encourage or discourage certain forms of interpersonal engagement?

At the start of the exercise, students shared instances of social media being used in ways that were good, bad, or ethically murky. They were then split into groups to sketch an interaction that portrayed a typical social media feature along with an alternative feature that could inspire users to engage more ethically on the platform. 

One of the student groups suggested that social media platforms could provide a blurb for trending hashtags which would give context for why an individual is being “canceled.”

Another group came up with an idea for a “cool down button” that would nudge users to wait 24 hours to post if they have used charged language in their content. One of the students in the group, Carly Kabot (SFS ‘23), shared that the inspiration for a cool down button stemmed from a childhood memory.

“My grandfather always had a rule with emails he used to joke about, that you should give yourself 24 hours before responding to something that makes you angry,” said Kabot. “I started thinking about how that's exactly what we need on social media—a way to give ourselves a breather and ask if there's a more productive way to respond to content we find offensive or disagree with. Often, that might mean taking the conversation offline, but without a way to pause we rarely take the time to reflect.”