Is Twitter a Social Heating Machine?It needs to become cooling machine

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I think that there's a lot of opportunity to turn Twitter from a social heating machine that is increasing the boiling temperature for the entire society to being more of a social cooling machine that's actually cooling down and enhancing the kind of cohesion of society. Then Elon is saying let's punish every tweet that makes a little more place of boiling versus let's turn the whole pot of water down. I think that's the whole point.

Since it’s looking more and more like Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, will probably soon have ownership of Twitter, we wanted to do a special episode about what this could mean for Twitter users and our global digital democracy as a whole.

Twitter is a very complicated place. It is routinely blocked by governments who fear its power to organize citizen protests around the world. It’s also where outrage, fear and violence get amplified by design, warping users’ views of each other and our common, connected humanity.

We’re at a fork in the road, and we know enough about humane design principles to do this better. So we thought we would do a little thought experiment: What if we applied everything we know about humane technology to Twitter, starting tomorrow? What would happen?

This is the second part in a two-part conversation about Twitter that we’ve had on Your Undivided Attention about Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter and what it could mean in the context of the need to go in a more humane direction.

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Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_