Making the Case for Actionable Prosocial Design Research

In recent preliminary findings, the European Commission held that the "addictive design" of Instagram and Facebook breaches the Digital Services Act, citing harms to users' physical and mental wellbeing. The Commission says Meta should “implement design changes” to both platforms. Such changes may be overdue, but regulating harmful design is only half the equation — attention must also go toward how platforms can build prosocial design, and toward the research that shows them how.

Platforms, universities and organizations in the tech accountability field can — and should — do more to ensure that research on prosocial design informs how healthy digital spaces get built.

Academics and other researchers outside of industry produce hundreds of studies a year to investigate and inform the use of prosocial design: the design features and practices that foster healthy interactions in digital spaces. Yet that research all too infrequently influences practice. Often this is due to familiar barriers, like prosocial design being treated as a secondary 'nice to have,' but tech professionals raise a more specific concern: that much of the independent research that is produced is either not attuned to the systems and constraints of tech platforms, or doesn't address tech professionals' questions and challenges. In other words, it is not “actionable” research that has the potential to inform practice. This isn't to say all research needs to be actionable. Fundamental research has its own vital role, but for research that aims to improve how digital spaces are built, closing the gap between insight and implementation matters.

The case for closing those gaps is built around four ideas: 1) that actionable, prosocial design research is genuinely valuable because it can shape what gets built; 2) that the builders of digital spaces can't be relied on solely to produce it; 3) that independent researchers can fill the void but today lack the pathways and sufficient incentives to do so; and 4) that there are real ways to change that.

It can affect what gets built

Independent research is critical because it is often better equipped to identify useful insights. For example, practitioners participating in the writing of our recent report, “Connecting Researchers & Practitioners to Catalyze Actionable Research,” noted how independent, actionable research can “signal avenues of approach that may be more productive than the ones [companies] are already pursuing,” sparking ideas and providing empirical evidence to justify shifts in roadmaps.

Additionally, practitioners noted how decision makers inside of companies can sometimes fail to see beyond their own business objectives and that synthesized findings from external research presented as “digestible information” can lead directly to “positive outcomes for users” and, in turn, the business itself.

Independent prosocial design research can also support advocacy groups and prosocial-minded professionals working within companies by helping them build the case for the adoption of prosocial design—as well as creators building alternative platforms with prosocial goals at the foundation.

One research product that several practitioners who participated in the writing of our report agreed served as a useful model was “Shouting into the Void,” a whitepaper co-produced by Meedan and PEN America. In it, the authors investigate user reporting experiences across social media and gaming platforms. Leveraging data from interviews and focus groups, they document specific gaps in current reporting systems and describe users’ experiences of reporting. They conclude with both core platform-level and feature-level recommendations. Practitioners found this whitepaper particularly valuable in its ability to both raise awareness of a user need, grounded in research, while at the same time pointing toward possible solutions.

Industry can't be the only source of answers

Platforms can not and should not be the only ones producing research on how to build healthier digital spaces. Prosocial design research should be a public resource, but if and when it’s conducted internally by platforms, it’s rarely shared externally.

Perhaps the greatest impediment lies in the risks to industry of publicly –- or even privately — engaging in research related to prosocial design. These include both brand image as well as legal risks. Publicly working on or being associated with research aimed at creating healthier environments can draw unwanted attention to platforms by implicitly acknowledging that they are not healthy enough, if not unhealthy. The risks can even be legal if, for example, it is shown that platforms were aware of those harms.

Many of the platforms oriented toward creating healthy online environments may be more readily willing to conduct and share research and could fill the gap, but they are often smaller and/or nonprofit ventures that have the fewest resources, even though they may be the most willing to apply lessons learned from prosocial design research (for example, Vermont’s Front Porch Forum).

While we do not give platforms a pass and incentives or regulation could force the production and disclosure of prosocial design research, the current reality of the disincentive structure described above means we can’t depend on industry to produce insights on how to build for healthier outcomes.

None of this relieves platforms of their responsibilities. But given the legal risks, and the resource constraints, independent researchers may be better placed to produce research that is generalizable across platforms and fills a gap that industry, for structural reasons, cannot fill on its own.

Independent researchers can help fill the gap, but lack the incentives

Sufficient incentives must be in place to encourage researchers to generate practice-informed research. While cross-sector research collaborations would go far to foster actionable research, Menking et al. (2025) discuss how mismatches in incentives and resources across the academic, private, and nonprofit sectors impede such collaborations.

Bealieu, Breton, and Brouselle (2018) argue that academic institutions and researchers have de-emphasized civic missions, focusing on ‘publications over the public good.’ At a deeper level, practitioners and researchers may distrust each others' intentions in entering a collaboration and be skeptical of their counterparts' capacity to produce useful, relevant and rigorous insights (Levine 2024). Further, Orben and Matias (2025) note that the pace of technology outstrips that of research, resulting in traditional research timelines becoming a “bottleneck for interventions” to address harms before they proliferate and creating a challenge for "temporal validity" (Munger, 2019).

Those barriers may explain in part why, in a review of 1,288 academic research papers about topics relevant to T&S collected by the Trust & Safety Foundation, Dratver & Katsaros (2024) found only 5% were collaborations with moderators who help manage online communities, and a mere 3% were collaborations with platform partners. In our report, we make suggestions for how to catalyze independent actionable research and why we think it matters.

What needs to change?

Say you're bought into the idea that actionable research matters. Great. How do we make it happen? In our report, we outline recommendations for academics and industry to make research more actionable, which we summarize below:

For academic institutions, we suggest rewarding actionable, practice-informed research in faculty hires, reviews and promotions. We also suggest facilitating data-use and other agreements that are necessary for industry partnerships, which can otherwise slow down projects or get stuck in legal departments. Flexibility in partnerships, for example, allowing industry funding to be structured as a gift or as independent contractor funding, can also help.

Industry can help by publicly signaling when independent research informs their work and improves their ability to build healthy spaces so that academics can demonstrate that their research made a difference. Industry can also create titles, such as “research advisor,” for researchers they reach out to for advice or insight on prosocial design, and they can create more internships for social science PhD students. They can also help fund actionable research, but to avoid concerns about “grantwashing,” funding needs to safeguard independence and transparency, and should represent a sizable commitment. Lastly, industry can encourage staff to get involved by attending conferences where they can make connections with social scientists, or partner on projects with universities.

Civil society organizations, funders and individuals don't have to wait for academia or industry to make the first move. In our report, we propose several projects that go a long way toward reducing the barriers and incentivizing researchers and tech professionals to connect and catalyze actionable research including: surveying practitioners to identify pressing questions, creating a platform for practitioner feedback, co-creating research agendas and hosting researcher-practitioner convenings to workshop design solutions to common challenges, as we did with our recent PDN-Roblox convening.

Regulators can require platforms to stop building for harm, but no enforcement action can tell them what to build instead. As the Council on Technology and Social Cohesion’s Blueprint on Prosocial Tech Design Governance argues, direction has to come from civil society and research, and it will only shape what gets built if researchers, platforms, and funders get together to close the gap between insight and implementation.

Our full report goes deeper on what makes research actionable, the barriers that make this challenging, examples of research practitioners have found useful, and a fuller set of recommendations for how to get there.