As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers

As the article explains, the Internet is just a tool, and it's been aggressively used as a way to control user behavior to mostly benefit advertisers, producers, or conform behavior to governments. Even worse, political warfare is very easily imposed on today's social networks because they are designed to be echo chambers that receive outside messages from the highest bidder. However, this doesn't NEED to be the case as we can design online experiences that bring people together. The last two years I've self-funded a foundation [1] to work on on precisely this problem of using the Internet to try to unify people together. Today we have two platforms we are providing to the public and organizations. The first [2] service organizes people at physical events by maximizing the diversity of auto generated discussion groups, and we're having a fair amount of success in schools and events in the US and Austria. The other service [3] is purely an experimental free public social platform that matches people who have different viewpoints to have a timeboxed live discussion to chat about their views. I'm not sure if what we've built so far can make a big impact online, but I hope it can serve as an example of what kind of tools that could be built if the focus is squarely aimed at unifying people instead of stuffing them into echo chambers with pay-to-reach walls between groups of people. [1] Foundation: https://www.newdialogue.org/ https://www.newdialogue.org/ [2] Group diversity mixer: https://www.mixopinions.com/ https://www.mixopinions.com/ [3] Social platform: https://www.dinnertable.chat https://www.dinnertable.chat