Social media have been accused of driving Americans apart. Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is concerned that “giving everyone a voice,” as websites where everyone can share ideas do, “may fragment our shared sense of reality.” In a manifesto released last week, he offered some thoughts on how social media can restore our “common understanding.”

A 2015 Facebook study suggests that the site already shows users perspectives different from their own. Most users have Facebook friends with different political perspectives. And while the software that picks content for each user’s “News Feed” — the site’s collection of posts from a user’s friends, favorite celebrities, and other sources — favored content that people on the user’s own side of the political spectrum tended to share, at least in 2015 it didn’t favor it by much.

Mr. Zuckerberg is more worried about polarization. Because “social media is a short-form medium where resonant messages get amplified,” he wrote, sites like his can push people toward oversimplified, extreme views.

Showing opposite perspectives, he said, may not solve the problem; it can even promote polarization. So Mr. Zuckerberg is embracing the goal of showing a wide variety of views in order to “let people see where their views are on a spectrum and come to a conclusion on what they think is right.” That will presumably require adjusting how stories are prioritized on News Feed.

He thinks the Facebook community will tend to identify sources that “provide a complete range of perspectives,” and the site can promote those. That may mean op-ed pages, where editors deliberately cultivate diverse perspectives.

But providing that complete range should also mean identifying Facebook users’ perspectives in more complex terms than just “liberal” and “conservative” so that News Feed can show people the wide range of views their friends hold, through their friends’ own words on the site as well as through the published articles they share. As Mr. Zuckerberg noted, “If we connect with people about what we have in common — sports teams, TV shows, interests — it is easier to have dialogue about what we disagree on.”

First Published February 25, 2017, 5:00 a.m.