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apharWe have a monopoly in each social media domain: social networking (Facebook), microblogging (Twitter), videos (Youtube).
This is bad because the monopolies control the information flow and censor it under the guise of "filtering disinformation".
Fortunately, there is a way to deal with them - distributed (AKA federated) social networks. Essentially, there are many servers (A, B, &c) and different users (X, Y, &c) on each server, and user "X@A" can "befriend" user "Y@B" and receive their content transparently, so that if user "Y@B" moves to server "C", the latter imports all Y's data from B and notifies A that X should now get their Y's feed from C instead of B.
The technology is quite mature (10+ years old).
It will essentially revert the current monopoly-dominated environment back to the world where there were hundreds of newspapers - if you don't like your server's censorship, just switch the server!
All the government has to do is to ban a single entity from managing more than, say, 100k users, if they manage content in any way whatsoever (e.g., reorder the feed or "suppress misinformation").
Since ad-based income is proportional to the number of users, only smaller, "boutique" servers will engage in censorship.
Check out Unstoppable Freedom of Speech!
This is bad because the monopolies control the information flow and censor it under the guise of "filtering disinformation".
Fortunately, there is a way to deal with them - distributed (AKA federated) social networks. Essentially, there are many servers (A, B, &c) and different users (X, Y, &c) on each server, and user "X@A" can "befriend" user "Y@B" and receive their content transparently, so that if user "Y@B" moves to server "C", the latter imports all Y's data from B and notifies A that X should now get their Y's feed from C instead of B.
The technology is quite mature (10+ years old).
It will essentially revert the current monopoly-dominated environment back to the world where there were hundreds of newspapers - if you don't like your server's censorship, just switch the server!
All the government has to do is to ban a single entity from managing more than, say, 100k users, if they manage content in any way whatsoever (e.g., reorder the feed or "suppress misinformation").
Since ad-based income is proportional to the number of users, only smaller, "boutique" servers will engage in censorship.
Check out Unstoppable Freedom of Speech!
