Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
In June, I wrote that to build trust, platforms should try a little more democracy. Instead of relying solely on their own employees, advisory councils, and oversight boards, I wrote, tech companies should involve actual users in the process. Citing the work Aviv Ovadya, a technologist who recently published a paper on what he calls “platform democracy,” I suggested that social networks could build trust by inviting average people into the policymaking process.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Meta had recently finished a series of experiments which tried to do just that. From February to April, the company gathered together three groups across five different countries to answer the question: what should Meta do about problematic…
