To fix Facebook, socialise the networks
There are strong reasons to doubt that competitive capitalism will fix social media networks
Last month, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen gave evidence about what is already known — that Facebook prioritises profits over human rights. Quality of information, humane standards and the well-being of teenage girls on Instagram are sacrificed when in conflict with profits.
Haugen joined Facebook in 2019 — when it was known the company was awful — on the premise that “Facebook has the potential to bring out the best in us”. In her testimony, she stated that Facebook needs to be made better rather than replaced.
But Big Social Media cannot be fixed within a capitalist framework. Facebook is a jewel in the US empire project, a profit-seeking corporation that colonises foreign markets.
If we want a solution to Facebook — and surveillance-based corporations like Twitter, Youtube, and Tiktok — we need to socialise the networks based on a digital democratic commons. We already have functioning prototypes like the Fediverse in place.
From the time that Big Social Media was hatched in the mid-2000s, hacktivists in the free and open source software community began developing an alternative designed to liberate users from fenced-in corporate networks like Myspace and Facebook. It sought to decentralise social media technology so that people would no longer be locked into corporate silos — so that corporations can accumulate wealth.
Big Social Media networks can retain their users in part because they do not allow their networks to interoperate. If you’re a Facebook user, you cannot befriend or follow a Twitter user, and vice versa. You have to create a separate account for each, and your interactions are contained within that network. This means for every user who joins your network, the network becomes more valuable, a phenomenon called “network effects”.
If you want to join a new network, you have to convince all your friends to come with you, and they have to convince all their friends to join them. People are not willing to do this often: nobody wants to log into 50 different social networks, each functioning on a separate island.
Decentralised social networks were developed to interoperate and prevent this kind of vendor lock-in. After a decade of development, it caught on with the rise of Mastodon.
Mastodon is a Twitter-like social network that allows users to create their own sub-networks called “instances”. Users can interact with other users of social media networks external to Mastodon, in what’s called the Fediverse, so long as those networks are using the same “protocol” (standards for interactions across networks) to talk to each other.
In time, new Fediverse networks were built, including Peertube (a Youtube clone), Pleroma (a Twitter clone), and Pixelfed (an Instagram clone). Mastodon is the most popular one with two-million registered users.
Mastodon users can join or form their own instances so they can selfmanage their user data and rules. An instance might only allow cat pictures, or be dedicated to sports or politics. Users are given names that look like email addresses: @catfan123@mastodon.cats. You can interact with others on the mastodon.social instance, but also with people at other instances, just as you can email people across Gmail, Protonmail or Yahoo).
Each instance can decide if it wants to interoperate with others. If an instance is not desirable — say, it’s loaded with extremist content — it can be banned by admins. Members can also choose to ban other instances for themselves, so they don’t have to see content posted by that network. When a right-wing social media network Gab was shut down and its users migrated to Mastodon, many users banned the Gab instance.
Mastodon has three timelines instead of one: “home”, which displays posts from the users they follow; “local”, which displays posts from the network they join (say, mastodon. dogs); and the federated timeline, which displays posts from users with which their network federates. Users can display all three time lines on their screen at once, or one at a time.
The Mastodon platform is free and open source software, which means it can be customised by software developers. Librem Social, for example, took the Mastodon code and altered it so that there are no timelines — you only see posts from people you follow.
Networks like Mastodon and Librem Social could build in algorithmic filtering, but at present they do not. Algorithmic filtering has often been used by Big Social Media networks to maximise user engagement, so that users see more ads and make money for the platform owner. Fediverse platforms do not display ads and do not seek profit, so they do not exploit users to maximise profits.
Content moderation is left to network admins and users. Many Fediverse networks require users to label controversial posts as “not safe for work” (NSFW) and remain hidden unless you click “display”. Content moderation remains a challenge.
While Fediverse offers privacy from giant centralised actors like Facebook and Twitter, users can still be surveilled by admins. This is because the technology is built to channel user activity through each network server (instance), which hosts the data and creates a record of user behaviour.
Another product called Libresocial is attempting to improve on this feature by having users host the data and transmission on their own devices, with data shared in a peerto-peer fashion. Data not meant for public sharing is encrypted; only the intended recipient can unlock private content. In time, decentralised social media could form a network of peerto-peer social networks.
The Fediverse offers a real-life example of how social media can be run as an ad-free, nonprofit, community-controlled system. It undermines the corporate, profit-seeking, Us-dominated social media. This is critical, because the world’s people — not just Americans — are subjected to the power of Big Social Media.
US intellectuals in the mainstream ignore the Fediverse and the option to socialise social media as a commons. Instead, they favour using antitrust to break up Facebook into three parts: Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp (leaving Twitter and Tiktok alone).
They also favour a limited form of interoperability that forces only the largest social networks to allow others to interoperate. This partial form will likely leave Big Social Media at an advantage, as small networks remain incentivised to interoperate with them so that their users can interact with members of the giants, but less so with the other small social networks against which they compete.
There are strong reasons to doubt that competitive capitalism will fix social media networks. To the extent that social media is privatised, it will remain problematic because the same exploitative dynamics persist: in order to maximise revenue, profits, growth and market share, a network must maximise user head count and time spent on the network. The capitalist war of competition for eyeballs is a problem, not a solution.
The notion of force-feeding people ads, which inflames consumerism that is destroying the planet, is not addressed by antitrust advocates. They do not explain why social media networks should be owned by corporations, which place profits over the public interest and concentrate wealth into the hands of a few. They do not address digital colonialism by which US tech giants prey on others.
A solution that fully socialises the networks would best serve the global public interest. To accomplish this, Big Social Media networks can be given a grace period before they are open-sourced, converted to public property, and forced to decentralise. Citizens could fund networks and content moderation services of their own choice. Researchers at universities and publicly funded technology could support the development and maintenance of networking technology.
In South Africa, universities and organisations like the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research could devote resources to developing and maintaining social media infrastructure. User access would be equitable and ad-free, while communities would have a say in how networks operate.
It’s time to consider commonsbased solutions like the Fediverse and Libresocial instead of capitalism as the organising system of social media. A different world is possible, but it will take a fundamentally different approach to get us there.
The Fediverse offers a real-life example of how social media can be run as an ad-free, nonprofit, communitycontrolled system
‘We believe that some of our own voters stayed away from the polls but … we are not looking at this as a great tragedy, we are looking at this as an opportunity to improve.’ — ANC deputy secretary general Jessie Duarte in an interview with news agency AFP about the local government elections held on 1 November