MIT Media Lab wants to build a social networking research lab

In the United States, the growing polarization of political tendencies, individual distrust of institutions is also rising, the old public opinion field is ineffective. People need a new place where individuals and institutions, and the loss of trust between the two sides can engage in the discussion and exchange of social issues, and re-establish understanding and trust. Today, the only big social networks that can take this role, such as Twitter and Facebook, are equivalent to rebuilding a public opinion field for humanity.

But since the social network itself has evolved too quickly and has not had enough tools to depict the evolutionary path of human society on the virtual social network and the issue and solution mechanism, the MIT Media Lab today released a name laboratory for Social Rogue's lab is hoping to develop a good enough technology and tools to map the evolution of social issues on social networks.

For the laboratory for Social Rogue, they are focused on three aspects:

One is to develop good enough social networking research techniques that are sufficient to perceive the views and beliefs that people express in the public atmosphere, and to monitor public events to create a closed-loop information link that forms a public will to the end of a group's behavior.

The second is to provide individuals and institutions with an open and collaborative tool that enables them to set goals together based on the tool and to promote progress at the social, cultural and political levels, in a self-organizing manner, to achieve these goals.

The third is to deploy a research platform for human-computer collaboration and to collaborate with external agencies (such as news organizations), and to conduct transparent and quantifiable research on issues that occur in real world.

Based on this big social problem research vision, laboratory for Social Rogue of the MIT Media Lab announced a 10 million dollar investment in Twitter. After the introduction of Twitter investment, they will be able to get all of Twitter's data (including all the historical data before today) for research, in addition to helping laboratory for Social Rogue's own social problem research, It can also help Twitter itself to have a deeper understanding and insight into the way users communicate on their own and on other platforms, as well as their impact on social issues, and thus better iterate over the product.

However, although the introduction of Twitter investment, laboratory for Social Rogue will certainly maintain its own independent operation and research, and hope that more open institutions willing to work with them to complete the study of social issues.