That hypothetical "interoperable Facebook" is the subject of a new white paper and narrated slideshow I've just launched with EFF, called "How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends."
New effort by [[Cory Doctorow]] and EFF.
"Facebook is fundamentally an advertising machine"—it hasn't been about bringing people closer together in a long time (if that was ever its real mission). And as a better advertising machine comes along—TikTok—Facebook is forced to redesign its user interaction to be more addictive just to stand still. Will a a more human-scale social network...or series of social networks...replace it?
Our goal: to encourage neighbors to conduct more mindful conversations. What if we can be proactive and intervene before the conversations spark more abusive responses? Oftentimes unkind comments beget more unkind comments. 90% of abusive comments appear in a thread with another abusive comment, and 50% of abusive comments appear in a thread with 13+ other abusive comments.* By preventing some of these comments before they happen, we can avoid the resulting negative feedback loops.
Interesting that they took a more nuanced approach to this problem. Something more heavy-handed would have added a time delay or limit on the number of comments by a particular user. Instead, they chose to model the conversations and have the app offer pop-ups based on that. Another alternative would be something like [[social credit score]].
So we've gone from worrying about government censoring the net, to worrying about platform censoring the net, to now in some cases, worrying about platforms not doing enough to censor the net, this is not how we should be running a digital public sphere.
The private social spaces don't make themselves available to research analysis, so we have this vague feeling that something is wrong with only empirical evidence that we can't really test.
We're not currently seeing a debate about "free speech". What we're actually witnessing is just a debate about who controls the norms of a social network, and who gets free promotion from that network.
The First Amendment ("free speech") guides what speech the government can control. The social networks are private companies, so the control is over who gets to say what in that private, social space. Is there an analog about who gets to say what in a bar...is it the bar owner? (The bar being an example of another public, social space.)