Civic Social Media Roadmap

Our current use of social media poses a number of major risks to society. Social fragmentation, polarisation and the spread of misinformation are harmful to democracy and our social resilience. The addictive effect of social media can be detrimental to our well-being. The dependence on large foreign tech companies, which consider shareholder profit more important than safeguarding public values, undermines our digital sovereignty and control over important communication channels.

Society would benefit from a landscape of civic social media where participants feel welcome, can treat each other with respect and can trust the information provided. A landscape in which social interest and public values take precedence over commercial gain. And in which privacy is guaranteed and communities themselves have control and say over the design of the online platforms they use.

We speak of civic social media, because we focus on the function of these social media in society from a policy and design perspective: facilitating communities, care, exchange and debate. In a democratic society, a healthy civil society of active citizens and social organisations plays a crucial role. Civil society is the sphere in which people organise themselves around social themes, commit themselves to the collective well-being, offer each other support and inspiration, contribute to the development of knowledge and culture, and debate both with each other and with their institutions about the future direction of society.

There are also alternative terms, such as public social media and values-driven social media, where the name emphasizes the public values that underlie them. The term digital commons emphasizes the role of the communities themselves in managing them. And there are more terms in circulation that point in the same direction with a slightly different emphasis: the need for an alternative landscape for social media, based on public values and collective well-being.

We developed an agenda or a roadmap for the development of civic social media. The document can be seen as an exploration of the path that society needs to take to realize such a landscape of civic social media. Developing it goes beyond just designing an app or a website. It also requires new business models, design strategies, professional roles, legislation and cultural changes.

Join us in developing a diverse civic social media landscape!

We made the roadmap available in a slidedeck format, so you can use the roadmap not only when working on a civic social media project yourself, but you can also easily present it to others, to convince them to join forces!