Online Social Networks for Meaningful Social Reform

Online social networks offer valuable tools to foster a variety of connections. In recent years, these networks have served as a hotbed for the expression of human behavior on the entire spectrum of human emotion. Online social networks have offered avenues to connect with family, friends and strangers, served as hotbeds for activism, crowdfunding and dissemination of viral information. However, these networks have also been hosts to malignant behavior manifest in many ways, including cyberbullying, hacking, trolling and fake news. This range of human behavior on online social networks is in large part, a function of the affordances on the networks. In this paper, we study the affordances on a range of current online social networks and propose a framework for the design of social networks that incorporates affordances for meaningful social reform and the mitigation of social unrest. The design of such networks has important consequences for the next generation of online social networks, since a significant share of the world population is not yet online and thus, has yet to experience the power of online social networks.