New Atlantis 2.0: Designing Epistemically Healthy Online Conversations

This chapter investigates how online conversational environments might be designed to promote epistemic health rather than merely reduce incivility. Drawing on the authors’ empirically informed collaboration with an industry partner developing engagement platforms for publishers, it argues that prevailing industry approaches to “healthy conversation” disproportionately prioritize civility norms while neglecting epistemic norms governing truth, evidence, and inquiry. The analysis distinguishes epistemic toxicity from incivility and examines existing moderation tools, reporting systems, and fact-checking practices, showing that most rely on the identification of manifest norm violations—an approach well suited to detecting insults or harassment but ill suited to tracking misinformation or evidential deficiencies. Survey data from platform users further reveal a striking mismatch between industry priorities and user expectations: participants value epistemic quality at least as highly as civility. To explain this gap, the chapter introduces the “violation-identification problem,” according to which breaches of epistemic norms are typically non-manifest and therefore resistant to automated or surface-level detection. The discussion concludes that improving epistemic health online requires a shift away from civility-centered moderation toward design strategies modeled on high-quality offline epistemic practices, especially those foregrounding evidential standards and norms of inquiry.