Can AI Save Social Media?

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Social media is a cesspool — a festering, bubbling cauldron of hate, misogyny, and bile. The people who control the primary social media channels — Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — know their domains are a toxic stew and revel in the chaos they created because it makes them money. The good folks at Google, who started with the mantra “Don’t Be Evil,” are not far behind, as they have allowed YouTube to become a funnel that steers people toward right wing extremists if they follow the links suggested by their algorithms. What was once a powerful force promoting positive social interactions has become an engine of destruction, a nonstop 24/7 online road rage incident that makes General Sherman’s scorched earth policy look like a kindergarten picnic.

Digg started as an experiment in November 2004 by collaborators Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson. The original design by Dan Ries was free of advertisements. To monetize the site, the company originally used Google AdSense, but switched to MSN adCenter in 2007. The site’s main function was to let users discover, share, and recommend web content. Members of the community could submit a webpage for general consideration. Other members could vote that page up — digg — or down — bury. Although voting took place on digg.com, many websites added “digg” buttons to their pages, allowing users to vote as they browsed the web. The end product was a series of wide ranging, constantly updated lists of popular and trending content from around the Internet, aggregated by a social network.

Digg became known as the front page of the internet and went on to become a viral sensation that curated news posts and encouraged users to vote up or down on the stories. But Digg’s audience was cannibalized by Reddit and other social media platforms, and Rose told Bloomberg recently he grew tired  “putting out fires” as policing content on the internet became more difficult. He left Digg in 2011, and since then, he believes the problem has only gotten worse.

Platforms “amplify the communication or message of anyone, and that can often times be the loudest, strongest, craziest voice on the street corner,” he said. Between the hate speech and misinformation, the “good vibes” were gone, he said, something anyone who has stumbled across Elon Musk’s pro-Nazi posts on X, racist Reddit forums, or graphic content on Instagram and TikTok can relate to. Rose said was happy to stay away. But now, thanks to recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence, he has gotten in touch with his longtime business rival, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Like Rose, Ohanian has also been critical of the darkest corners of social media for years. Rose had one question for Ohanian — What if AI could clean up the filth?

Digg Reimagines Social Media

On Wednesday, March 5, 2025 Rose and Ohanian announced they had repurchased Digg. Though they do not yet have a detailed playbook for how to squash conspiracy theories and hate speech, their plan is to lean on AI to improve content moderation. The biggest social media platforms already use AI for content moderation with varying degrees of success, but Rose and Ohanian want to draw harder lines. By allowing communities to form around “racism or watching people die or revenge porn, you’re normalizing it, because it’s right alongside all the other communities,” Ohanian said. Much of what should be removed should be “pretty explicit and pretty obvious,” and yet, it still finds a home online.

Rose has surveyed Reddit’s community moderators to learn about their pain points wrangling the online discourse, insights he said that will fuel Digg’s relaunch. He wants AI to quell problematic content, leaving human moderators to drive fun conversations instead. This is what journalism used to do, before the internet demolished traditional journalistic activities. Digg says it has started internal testing, which Bloomberg’s Riley Griffin says is another way of saying they’re going to build the airplane as they fly it. It’s no accident that the duo wants more guardrails at a time when the biggest social media companies are removing them. Researchers found that hate speech rose 50% after Elon Musk purchased Twitter and renamed it X.

Musk is an example of how online communications have turned sour. He styles himself as a “free speech absolutist” but shuts down accounts on X that do not support his racist, dictatorial policies. Free speech to him means toeing the party line and saying “FUCK YOU in your face” to anyone who dares disagree with him. Some might consider that the opposite of free speech, but Musk could care less. In his world, truth is what he says it is  And in January, Meta announced it had disbanded its US fact-checking program and updated its hateful conduct policies to allow language critical of immigrants, trans people, and other marginalized groups.

Cleaning Up The Online World

Ohanian and Rose aren’t the only techies trying to rethink social media. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams is also looking for an alternative to mainstream social networks that seem to encourage performative social interactions. He’s building a more “private” network to spur in-person engagement. “What we used to call social apps really don’t do that,” Williams told Bloomberg. “That’s not how they’ve evolved. They’re media and entertainment.” His new startup is called Mozi, after a Chinese philosopher, logician, and founder of the Mohist school of thought. The new site encourages people to interact more often with family, friends and acquaintances. The app, which has no public profiles or follower counts, alerts users when they are in the same city as contacts listed in their phone and surfaces what events they might be attending.

Whether Digg or Mozi can actually compete with the behemoths that monopolize our attention remains to be seen.  Most social networks ultimately fail, Bloomberg says. But when the founders of one social media’s earliest success stories take issue with the world they helped to create, it’s worth watching what happens next.

Others are trying to rein in the hate-spewing excesses of social media. In Vermont, the Front Porch Forum serves about 40 local communities and is as close to a community-based social network as you are likely to find. Members use their real names, an idea that diminishes the tendency to say intemperate things or hide behind meaningless monikers. Readers may have noticed that at CleanTechnica, most of our comments come from people using their actual names and that seems to be an important reason why those discussions are more thoughtful with less bombast than is normal at X or Fakebook.

The issue, of course, is money. Millions of hits an hour sells advertising, and the money from advertisers has made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire. Hate, it seems, is a profitable business model, and Zuckerberg, being untethered from notions of decency or public good, is more than happy to sacrifice whatever scruples he might have once had to his insatiable quest for more wealth. Whether Digg or anyone else can survive without peddling filth for profit remains to be seen. Frankly, if Digg can pull it off, they will be the first to monetize rational discourse rather than venomous postings by bots, foreign agents, and scared little boys hiding behind aggressive screen names. We wish them every success.