Imagining Professional ProSocial Design Governance Mechanisms

Note

In October 2024, GoodBot participated in ProSocial Tech Design Governance workshops in Brussels and Florence as part of its work with the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion. This policy brief emerged as GoodBot’s contributions to a draft of a “Blueprint for Prosocial Tech Design Regulation” and was incorporated into the final report.

By Renee Black - May 10 2025

Platforms are currently not subject to mandatory obligations related to the role designs and algorithms play in enabling harmful experiences for consumers and societies. Design choices, for example, might be intentionally chosen to promote platform goals such as extended use which can in turn lead to increased screen time and addiction. Prioritizing inferred over self-selected preferences can make it hard for people to exercise personal agency to escape toxic rabbit holes such as extreme dieting or extremism. 

Such features and behaviors can be governed using the ProSocial Design Governance as set out in the Blueprint on ProSocial Design. Noting that the “reactive model [of content moderation] fails to address the root causes [of harm] —the design elements and algorithms that incentivise divisive content, ProSocial Design Governance focuses "upstream" on tech design choices that steer human behaviour toward non-harmful or healthy communities.” 

Building on the Blueprint recommendations, this brief proposes that ProSocial Design be governed by a Professional Design Governance Association composed of independent Design Governance Practitioners which is responsible for establishing guidelines, protocols and duties that all Design Professionals must adhere to in assessing platform safety. Such a body would act in a similar manner to engineers whose work needs to adhere to guidance and standards set by independent bodies in safely building structures that impact on people and societies. 

A professional designation could require Professionals - whether internal staff or external auditors - to both consider and report on known risks along with proposed steps to manage those risks. It can provide leverage for staff inside companies to push back on employers who want to employ practices that are known to enable harm, and can also provide a tool for independent auditors to assess compliance with best practices. 

This designation could include a multi-level range of Design Safety Tiers that distinguish and range between prosocial and antisocial design practices, and establish differential obligations and penalties for governing design practices, such as polarization taxation.

Design governance obligations provide a complement to transparency obligations by requiring companies to document known risks, disclose interventions to mitigate risks and establish metrics that demonstrate whether and how these efforts have succeeded or failed. 

A professional designation also prevents governments or other actors in positions of power from attempting to influence and misuse design choices in a way that advances their own agendas or in pursuit of non-democratic and non-rights respecting ends. Having standards established by trusted professionals would be especially important since design changes could be difficult to detect by public and non-expert actors.

A critical factor here is that such a mechanism must not be captured by industry interest. Rather, standards must be set by professionals who are not in a conflict-of-interest position and whose primary objective is to establish mechanisms aligned with public interest. 

Citation

Black, Renee, "Imagining Professional ProSocial Design Governance" GoodBot Society. May 10 2025. https://www.goodbot.ca/tech-policy/prosocial-professionals