Skip to content
Citizen Infrastructure

Bridging & pro-social media

A social-media feed is built around a metric. Since roughly 2015 the metric has been engagement — time and attention — which in practice rewards whatever hooks you hardest, often outrage. Bridging swaps the metric. Instead of ranking a post by how much it provokes, you rank it by how much shared understanding it builds across communities that usually talk past each other.

You’ve already seen it work

Section titled “You’ve already seen it work”

The clearest live example is Community Notes (on X, and now echoed by YouTube and Meta). A note only appears if people who normally disagree both rate it helpful — so the algorithm is tuned for cross-group agreement, not for one side dunking on the other. That bridging logic grew out of Polis, the tool Taiwan used a decade ago.

The catch: Community Notes is bolted onto an already-viral, already-polarising post — it’s a kind of after-the-fact debunking. Pro-social media moves that bridging logic into the main feed itself, so the feed is constructive by default rather than as a patch.

What a pro-social feed looks like

Section titled “What a pro-social feed looks like”

In Tang and colleagues’ Pro-Social Media proposal, each of us belongs to several communities at once — work, family, faith, neighbourhood. A post in your feed would show which of your communities find it bridging and which find it still up for debate — the Polis picture, applied to everyday media. Some creators specialise in exactly this: making one community legible to another. And instead of advertisers bidding to strip-mine each person’s attention with a wildly different feed, the model recreates shared experience — a “Super Bowl effect” that brands and communities will pay for, much as LinkedIn deliberately curated a more cohesive feed rather than a maximally addictive one.

Why it doesn’t already dominate

Section titled “Why it doesn’t already dominate”

Everyone, across the political spectrum, says they’re tired of peak polarisation — yet the shift is slow, because of a trap. A well-known study found a US undergraduate would need to be paid roughly $60 a month to quit TikTok while everyone else stays on it, but only about $30 if everyone left together: nobody wants to be the first to step off the hamster wheel. Two strategies push against this. One is interoperability — let people carry their posts and friends between TikTok, Bluesky, and others, so they aren’t locked into one platform’s ranking. (This is the bet behind Project Liberty’s bid for TikTok’s US operations.) The other is working with the “conscience” teams inside big platforms — Google’s Jigsaw, Meta’s Community Notes group — and networking them together.

It rests on a deeper swap: from dopamine (the addictive hit of individualised feeds) back to oxytocin and serotonin — the care-based chemistry of genuine community. See also conversation networks and relational tech.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”