New Logics for Governing Human Discourse in the Online Era

This is just as our it is to act with yesterday’s logic.” The need is real-life communities and institutions — and thus to shift from yesterday’s mass media logic of our patterns of discourse and its governance — moderation-as-removal of harmful expression to are intertwingled in many levels and dimensions a new logic of reliance on both social mediation as a “federalist public sphere” (Newitz 202. [...] That federalism echoes the governance design paradigm that the “federalist” founders of the United States government envisioned — a theme Figure 5: Control Points for the Social that is central to the design of the internet and Mediation of Thought its early social use (Zuckerman and Rajendra- Nicolucci 2023) and pervades the author’s work Thought as a Social Process (Reisman and Riley 2022c), inc. [...] The platforms took on the role of Agents (“Middleware”) “attention agent” for us because the “firehose” of The wrong turn of online media makes the half- messages and the universe of people and groups century-old vision of new media tools that flexibly that may or may not be of potential interest became augment human thought and discourse now overwhelming. [...] the merit in introducing user-directed attention agents voluntarily — or enabling others to do that Even more compelling, the challenges of for them5 — there is emerging legislative effort to “moderation,” mediation and filtering to mandate a right of delegation to attention agents eliminate illegal content — and manage the more (Whitt 2020; 2021) in the United States, via the nuanced issues of “l. [...] This has limited the of Thought as a Social ability of social media to leverage our social associations to promote “bridging” of the divides Process that online media now seems to highlight and reinforce (Ovadya and Thorburn 2023).