What if we could keep the best of social media and combine it with the best of traditional journalism?

Social media gave us all voice, but it took away our ability to hear each other. Traditional journalism gave us facts (mostly), but it often left us as passive observers with our gaze controlled by billionaire press barons. At Clear Lines, we believe the solution isn't to go back to one or the other, but to engineer a new space where participation meets precision.

I'm old enough to remember the early days of social media. I was a grad student when Facebook launched into the world and I can still recall those fun, early days of Twitter. The genuine joy of having the company of thousands of other slightly cynical, techy-types as together we all watched the first "Leaders debate" in the 2010 general election in the UK; The endless stream of jokes and comments as we watched David Cameron and Gordon Brown fall over each other while declaring "I agree with Nick!" It really did feel like something new had arrived and it was exciting.

Those days are long gone now. But rather than dwelling on the hell-pit that Twitter/X has become, or on the role Facebook and the rest have played in somehow reanimating the zombie corpse of fascism and letting it loose across our lives, I think it's best we instead move on. Lets chalk them up as a learning exercise. Simply humanity's first attempt to understand what the internet makes possible, that was not possible before. Like modern day Thomas Edison's, we have discovered a few ways of how not to build a mass participation digital space for all of humanity to hold a discussion.

At Clear Lines we are trying something new. We're getting rid of those comment sections at the bottom of each article and replacing them with something a bit more productive and hopefully less toxic. We're using a new discussion engine called Pol.is created by a team of digital democracy researchers at MIT (with help from around the world). It's exciting stuff. You can still contribute your opinions at the end of each article in the form a statement posed to the other readers. Every reader gets to express their agreement (or disagreement) with each statement. The different bodies of opinions are then visualised and presented in real time as users vote and add statements of their own. As the conversation continues and the votes build up, we discover not just where the disagreements lie, but also where the common ground is too. And by keeping both of those things front and centre, by being as clear as we can be about where the agreement and disagreements lie, we can hopefully build a digital space where it's possible to not just dis-agree agreeably, but perhaps also learn to see the forward steps that we (mostly) all agree on.

No more being nudged in controlled directions by subtle, or not-so-subtle propaganda (looking at you Rupert Murdoch) or paralysed with rage by engagement driven ad-platforms. Just real people. Actually communicating. About things that matter.