The Schoolmarm’s goal is to change the atmosphere in social media.  As the Schoolmarm’s activity expands, and as more and more users glimpse the Schoolmarm in action, all platform users’ consciousness will be raised, directly and indirectly.

Whenever an individual is invited by the Schoolmarm to take stock of what they were doing in a post, certainly it will drive some introspection.   However, the more numerous users who simply observe the Schoolmarm’s critiques of other users’ posts will also be impacted.  Without thinking much about it, many of them will start to judge the constructiveness (or lack thereof) of the political posts they subsequently see.  They’ll build a vocabulary of discussion mistake types.  Passive tolerance for polarizing posts will slowly disappear; extremists will experience decreasingly enthusiastic receptions.

It will tend to raise awareness about the differences between discussion that is honest and serious and discussion that is neither.  People of course will continue to come to the platforms for their entertainment value, but they will learn not to take most of it so seriously.

Over time, these activities may even lead to a next, higher level of consciousness about the connections between public discourse, national polarization, and functional democracy.

Improving the atmosphere in social media is certainly no panacea.  The combination of our eyeballs-driven media, industrial-scale propaganda, inequalities of opportunity, and tribal mindsets ensures that national polarization will be with us for a while.  But if we can find ways to make that polarization less extreme, it will make other changes possible.