How Facebook got it wrong, Linkedin got it right, and the new paradigm for connection

In the middle of a pandemic, global depression, and world-wide protests against racism and police brutality, 3 once-in-a-lifetime global catastrophes, Jack Dorsey, Twitter's founder and CEO, tweets "Download Signal". Why? It's a nonprofit social networking and communications app that is "open source, peer reviewed, and funded entirely by grants and donations. A refreshing model for how critical services should be built."

Refreshing is a curious word for a for-profit business leader to speak about a nonprofit. The Silicon Valley narrative had been that the two sectors would merge since for-profits are more effective at scaling innovation. COVID, economic crisis, and prejudice will not end -- if ending means going back to the way things were. Instead, we need radical behavioral change in the way we network. Network for purpose rather than just promotion to increase mutuality, generosity and social innovation.

Let's face it: social networking today is primarily either tribal or practical. What we miss from our current social networks is generous, respectful mutuality in action at the community and societal level.

Social impact-first platforms and systems like AtmaGo, Changemakers and ImpactX are emerging to create this future of connection. But old habits die hard. The most common reaction I get when discussing these systems is: "I never heard of that before, and sounds ambitious". I've learned "ambitious" is code for "you are going to fail" :-)

Form follows function

But how did we get here? For starters, historically, people form networks for advantage. All people created equal but no networks are. Talent is equally spread but opportunity is not. Stephen Jackson, a retired professional basketball player, who called George Floyd his "twin" as a term of endearment, said: "the only difference between me and Georgie, is the fact that I had more opportunities."

In dealing with a complex world, humans sort, classify and unfortunately stereotype to save time and energy. Social identity analysis shows we distinguish ourselves, join social groups, and stay there. We bond naturally but rarely bridge to other groups. 93% of Facebook “friends” know each other in real life. 

When Facebook released it's ad campaign about cleaning up its act on privacy, it still continued using the "us versus them" mantra: we found others just like us. COVID is making it more difficult thanks to the great withdrawal of opportunities that arise from the spaces we share to come together.

Our social networks are rife with anti-social behavior which people tend to blame the users. But on closer look, the purpose of social networking platforms have everything to do with user behavior. Fake news, rampant negativity, lack of privacy and accountability is a direct result of policies of those that operate the platform.

Facebook got it wrong.  Facebook proclaimed an all-in-one social network -- friends/family, professional, political, societal -- would work best. People's personal life and professional should not be separate. I know because as an early employee of Linkedin, we thought differently. And so did the Linkedin users who had no interest risking their careers.

It soon became clear that the once size fits all approach didn't work. As a result, Facebook changed missions more often than a pit crew changed tires at Le Mans.

1st mission: "to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected (too much openness led to genocide in Myanmar). 2nd mission: “build community and bring the world closer together” (leads to dangerous emotional contagion) 3rd mission: “stay connected with friends and family, to discover what's going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them” (spread disinformation about COVID faster than COVID). Future mission: CEO said: “privacy is the future” (for a small fee). 

The absence of clear purpose gave rise to negative network effects. The more people using the system, the less value it offered members. Same with Twitter. Advertising driven algorithms (people buy stuff from people like themselves) brought like-minded people together with such centrifugal force that it amplified bullying and anti-social content.  Facebook’s own research in 2018 revealed that “our algorithms exploit the human brain’s attraction to divisiveness. If left unchecked,” Facebook would feed users “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention & increase time on the platform.” It’s out of control now.  

Linkedin got it right. Professionals preferred keeping their personal and professional identity online separate. 15 years and 660M+ Linkedin members later, the ayes have it.

Identities and posts center on what colleagues, employers and future employers want to see from the get go. Research has shown that managers sort their employees into winners and losers as early as three weeks after starting to work with them. If members post professional updates that are out of bounds, others tell them to walk it back or post on FB or Twitter. Of the top 10 posts in 2nd half of 2017, 9 were business related and one was about how China built a solar farm shaped as a giant panda.

Commercial personal and professional networks share one thing in common: algorithms that stoke love for sameness, or homophily. These networks serve to reinforce and widen existing inequities. The network gap is real and growing. Linkedin research showed that individuals who graduated from top-ranked colleges and were employed at leading companies early in their careers were twice as likely to have strong networks than those who did not. Apple research indicated employee referrals are 3 times more likely to be promoted. Employee referrals make up 60% of hires and 85% of employee referrals are exactly like the referrer.

The Third Way

We can't turn back the clock. Personal and professional networks and their algorithms are here to stay. We've seen how a social network's function drives member behavior. As the "back to nature" prophet Alan York said in the movie "Biggest Little Farm", "Diversify, diversify, diversify". "There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over." We need a reset on social networking. From Brazil to Bangladesh, changemaking communities are rejecting the old paradigm of identity networks.

Instead, they are opting for a third way which is organizing differently as one co-leading community of communities dedicated to the good of the whole. This has parallels in tech and academic world, as described by Carnegie Foundation's Networked Improvement Community model to address systemic educational inequity. This work was based on ideas by Douglas Engelbart's vision of people using technology to build collaborative communities to address social problems. Community members go up together in achieving shared aims powered by improvement science.

Over the last 3 years, my team at Ashoka created a new type of advocacy system which we called "collaborative advocacy". There's no better way to grow your impact than to help others grow theirs.

We flipped the social media experience on its head. Instead of your content feed being prioritized by your connections, it is prioritized by the positive change you are bringing about. Through notifications, the system enables you to discover people different than yourself who shared your content. You can reach out to them, express gratitude for their engagement, and connect to change.

Our value proposition to members from different backgrounds, organizations and sectors to enable them to act as one for the good of the whole versus in fragmented, echo chambers. In doing so, everyone can reap the benefit of collaborative filtering and connected intelligence.

The results were remarkable. When we posted a related job on the gender equality channel, there were 58% more qualified applications.  This was the only social media system where you get rewarded for advocating on behalf of others. We found users got 5X the engagement when sharing content on behalf of other organizations than their own, which provided a win-win for both.

Even more remarkably, out of almost 10K broadcasts, reaching 25M changemakers, where members received few instructions and no rules, there wasn't a single post that went off topic or was overtly political.

In our change defined world, it's not how well connected you are that matters, what really counts is how we connect. Is it personal, practical or societal?

Whether battling a pandemic to reversing a great depression and income inequality to ending structural racism and sexism along with many other systemic injustices once and for all, it's time to forge a societal networking system of our own.

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