Pay Attention: Prevent the Tragedy of the Social Media Commons via Community-driven Governance

As our society transitions more online, social media is playing an increasingly central role in public discourses and in turn, political processes. However, abuse and pollution are prevalent in these information ecosystems, resulting in polarization, extremism and erosion of trust in governments.

We argue that Ostrom’s resource management frameworks could be a useful approach to mitigate these threats. Under this view, attention is conceptualized as a common-pool resource, and high-quality information as a public good resulting from effective stewardship of both individual and collective attention. We discuss the potential applications of analytical tools by the Ostrom Workshop to study the social media commons as a socio-ecological system (SES). As an example, we examine the importance of local organization by resource users in resolving collective action problems in online communities. However, with the exceptions of some platforms, community-driven moderation is still sorely overlooked. The paper ends with an open call for more research to be done on community moderation ¬— a promising aid to the current dominating, yet ineffective top-down approach by platforms.