Can Social Media Be Saved?

But these efforts don’t touch the underlying problems, and in fact could make it harder for start-ups to compete with the giants.

If we’re really serious about changing how social networks operate, far more radical interventions are required. Here are three possible ways to rescue social media from the market-based pressures that got us here.

Give Power to the People

In their book “New Power,” which comes out next week, Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms write about the struggle between centralized, top-down institutions, which represent “old power,” and decentralized, bottom-up movements, which represent “new power.”

Facebook, they write, is an example of a new power institution that serves old power interests. It harvests the creative output of billions of people and turns it into a giant, centralized enterprise, with most users sharing none of the economic value they create and getting no say in the platform’s governance.

Instead, the authors ask, what if a social network was truly run by its users?

“If you’re contributing economic value to something of this much social consequence, you should share in the value you’re creating,” Mr. Heimans told me.

Nathan Schneider, a professor of media studies at the University of Colorado, had a similar idea in 2016, when he proposed that Twitter users band together to buy the platform from its shareholders and convert it into a user-run collective, similar to the way a local credit union is run. People who made valuable contributions to the network, such as employees and power users, would receive bigger stakes and more voting power. And users would have a seat at the table for major decisions about the platform’s operations.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that Mark Zuckerberg, who has fought hard to keep control of Facebook, will ever convert the company into a user-owned and run collective. But Mr. Schneider believes that giving more control to responsible users could help restore trust in the network, and signal the kind of values Mr. Zuckerberg says he wants Facebook to represent.

“He could show that he takes democracy seriously enough to start with his own baby,” Mr. Schneider said.

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Create a Social Federation

Another radical approach would be to make social networks work more like email — so that independent apps could seamlessly work together with one another, across a common protocol.

Instead of one big Facebook, a federated social network would look like clusters of independent nodes — Mombook and Athletebook and Gamerbook — all of which could be plugged into the umbrella network when it made sense. Rather than requiring a one-size-fits-all set of policies that apply to billions of users, these nodes could be designed to reflect users’ priorities. (A network for privacy hawks and one for open-sharing maximalists could have different data-retention rules, and a network for L.G.B.T. users and one for evangelical pastors could have different hate speech rules.) If a node became too toxic, it could be removed without shutting down the entire network.

“Email is the most resilient social network on the internet,” Mr. Schneider said, “and the thing that allows it to adapt is that it’s an open protocol, and people build apps on top of it, and we evolve how we use it.”

Versions of this kind of network already exist. Mastodon, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, has gotten more than a million registered users since its debut in 2016. And various social networks based on the blockchain — the ledger system that underlies virtual currencies like Bitcoin — have sprung up in recent months.

To be sure, decentralized networks have their own problems. They’re messy to administer, and they can still be gamed by bad actors. They can also fall prey to the same kind of privacy issues that Facebook is being criticized for. (In fact, part of the reason users are angry at Facebook right now is that the company’s data infrastructure was too open, and made it overly simple for third-party app developers to take user information outside Facebook.)

None of this is a panacea. But experimenting with more decentralized models could give social media users a sense that platforms represented their interests, rather than those of a faceless corporation.

Put Expiration Dates on Social Graphs

A single friend of mine once remarked that the major difference among dating apps like OKCupid, Tinder and Bumble wasn’t the way they were designed or the companies behind them — it was how long they had existed.

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New apps, she said, were more likely to attract interesting and smart people who were actually looking for dates. Older apps, by contrast, were eventually overrun with creeps and predators, no matter how well built they were.

A similar theory might apply to social networks. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat all had plenty of issues in their early years, but they were by and large cleaner, with fewer types of exploitation and malicious behavior. Today, the enormous size and influence of these platforms have made them irresistible honey pots for bad actors, and many of our “social graphs” — Facebook’s term for the webs of digital connections we create — are clogged with years’ worth of clutter.

In a blog post last year, the venture capitalist Hunter Walk proposed an interesting idea: a legally mandated “start over” button that, when pressed, would allow users of social networks to delete all their data, clear out their feeds and friend lists, and begin with a fresh account.

I’d go even further, and suggest that social networks give their users an automatic “self-cleaning” option, which would regularly clear their profiles of apps they no longer used, friendships and followers they no longer interacted with, and data they no longer needed to store. If these tools were enabled, users would need to take affirmative action if they didn’t want their information to disappear after a certain number of months or years.

Making social graphs temporary, rather than preserving them forever by default, would undoubtedly be bad for most social networks’ business models. But it could create new and healthy norms around privacy and data hygiene, and it would keep problems from piling up as networks get older and more crowded. It might even recapture some of the magic of the original social networks, when things were fresh and fascinating, and not quite so scary.

Correction: March 29, 2018

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of registered users on Mastodon. It is more than a million, not more than 140,000.

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Sessions rebuffs GOP calls for second special counsel to probe FBI

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rebuffed — at least for now — a call from Republican leaders to appoint a second special counsel to look into the FBI’s handling of its most high-profile probes and announced that he has asked the U.S. attorney in Utah to spearhead a broad review.

Sessions made the revelation in a letter to three key GOP leaders in the House and Senate who have called on him to appoint a second special counsel, noting that Justice Department regulations call for such appointments only in “extraordinary circumstances” and that he would need to conclude “the public interest would be served by removing a large degree of responsibility for the matter from the Department of Justice.”

He asserted that the department previously has tackled high-profile and resource-intensive probes and revealed he had named U.S. Attorney John Huber to lead a review of the topics that the legislators had requested he explore. Those topics include aspects of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and several matters related to Hillary Clinton and her family’s foundation.

“I am confident that Mr. Huber’s review will include a full, complete, and objective evaluation of these matters in a manner that is consistent with the law and the facts,” Sessions wrote. “I receive regular updates from Mr. Huber and upon the conclusion of his review, will receive his recommendations as to whether any matters not currently under investigation require further resources, or whether any merit the appointment of a Special Counsel.”

Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., and House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., — each of whom has called on him to appoint a second special counsel.

The lawmakers have raised numerous concerns — including the handling of the Clinton email investigation, alleged wrongdoing by the Clinton Foundation, the sale of a uranium company to Russia and what some conservatives view as inappropriate surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Democrats view their concerns as unfounded and part of a possible ploy to distract from the work of special counsel Robert Mueller III, whom Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed to look into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election.