Social Uncensored

Data protection and decentralised social media are the only ways to take back control from the tech giants

Social media is arguably the most disruptive tech to emerge in the past twenty years. Having evolved from an electronic information exchange to a fully immersive virtual environment, aggregated social media boasts a user base of 4.59 billion in 2022, with that figure set to rise to almost six billion by 2027. Touching virtually every aspect of existence, from reconnecting old friends to marketing MNCs, social media has evolved to become the de facto form of interaction,  most accurately summarised by what has been dubbed the mantra of the Instagram era: "Pics or it didn't happen". More accurately described by The Guardian's Jacob Silverman, "Social broadcasts are not communications; they are records of existence and accumulating metadata," and herein lies the problem.

Behind the façade of connectivity and innovation lies a corrupted system of data breaches, content filtering for commercial and or political gain, and ruthlessly refined user experiences designed to maximise your undivided attention for profit. As famously coined in the Netflix documentary, "If you're not paying for the product, then you're the product."

In what many feel to be a closed loop, the coalescence of supposedly democratic governments, their corporate sponsors, big tech, and the liberal media have attempted to forge a self-perpetuating system of power that promotes a kinetic transfer of wealth within its ranks from the pockets of everyday consumers. As part of this machine, the social/ digital media companies of Meta, Alphabet, LinkedIn, and Twitter (pre-Musk), have been proven to be the arbiters of censorship, but worse yet, the drivers of divisiveness through identity politics, cancel culture and data theft.

Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal was arguably the first publicly acknowledged breach, where it became clear that no one had hacked the social media giant but that it was complicit in providing data for political means. As summarized by Julie Carrie Wong, "Almost every company has suffered a big data breach at this point; only Facebook has endured such an existential reckoning. That's because what happened with Cambridge Analytica was not a matter of Facebook's systems being infiltrated, but of Facebook's systems working as designed: data was amassed, data was extracted, and data was exploited."  

Today under the brand of Meta, Facebook and Instagram are not only aware of their unethical behaviour in sharing data but also that their platforms have been designed in a way that is knowingly damaging to consumers, particularly teenage girls. After sitting on the research for two years, a leak seen by the Wall Street Journal from an internal presentation stated, "We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls." A subsequent report in March 2020 stated, "Thirty-two per cent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse."

Image: Britanny Kaiser, former Cambridge Analytica director, who blew the whistle on the widespread harvesting

of personal data at Facebook

In addition to exacerbating mental health issues, the platforms have also been designed to be as addictive as possible. By utilising a "three-pronged approach", it is now considered standard for developers to adhere to the habit-forming criteria of sufficient motivation, an action, and a trigger. According to app developer Peter Mezyk, "If we open an app every day, developers are satisfied. On social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, the more time we spend on the platform, the more advertising revenue flows into the pockets of tech companies — attention is currency." As a result, many users are negatively affected through fear-of-missing-out (FOMO), a lack of focus, procrastination and wandering brain.

"They keep actually putting growth and profits above designing a platform that's predicated on the needs of its users," said Lindsey Barrett, a teaching fellow and staff attorney at Georgetown's Communications and Technology Clinic. As a particularly blatant example of this mindset, Barrett cited Facebook's insistence on using phone numbers that users provided for security reasons for non-security purposes.

A more widely and probably more threatening problem is the influence wielded in the democratic process.  For instance, the widespread use of #StopTheSteal across all social media platforms, in coordination with a concerted disinformation effort by the far right, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 US Presidential election results and contributed to the January 6th violent assault on the US capital. More recently, Mark Zuckerberg's acknowledgement that Facebook intentionally and algorithmically censored the Hunter Biden laptop story for a week to support the sitting administration. As a non-democratically elected body, social media companies possess a weaponized political propaganda tool.  Whoever controls and wields its sword has the ability to strongly influence elections and undermine the democratic process.

Meta isn't alone – less controversial yet broadly used platforms such as LinkedIn, particularly since being acquired by Microsoft in 2016, have not only increased focus on censoring or banning ideas that run against the narrative (particularly concerning the pandemic) but furthermore shown evidence of racial profiling, security breaches and ongoing cases of fraud. In December of last year, the business-focused platform censored and suspended three prominent Scottish hospitality leaders following viral posts which called out the Scottish government's Covid-19 policies. Commenting on the suspensions Stephen Montgomery, leader of the Scottish Hospitality Group (SHG), said, "When you've got three big voices in hospitality saying the exact same thing, it begs the question of why certain social media platforms are taking down our posts and locking down our accounts. Nothing I've posted is derogatory or defamatory, it's all issues relevant to the pandemic to give people information."

As acutely summarised by someone all too familiar with the consequences of speaking truth to power, Edward Snowden once said, "What disturbs me more is not the censorship itself, but how it shapes people's ideology. With dissenting information being eliminated, every website becomes a cult, where the government and leaders have to be worshipped." If you're wondering if this sounds familiar, North Korea remains a perfect example of what happens when this sort of unbridled madness is given free rein. As aptly summarized by Christopher Hitchens, "The North Korean state was born at about the same time that Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and one could almost believe that the holy father of the state, Kim Il Sung, was given a copy of the novel, and asked if he could make it work in practice."

Beyond individual censorship and character assassinations by the mainstream media (MSM), businesses attempting to re-establish free speech receive an equally warm welcome. With platforms such as Gettr, Gab, Truth Social, Rumble and Parler emerging as first-generation antidotes to cancel culture by simply providing open and transparent platforms, you'll be hard-pushed to find a MSM outlet that hasn't described at least one of these platforms as "right-wing", "conservative", or in Arwa Mahdawi's scathing critique of Kanye West's purchase of Parler, "A social network for bigots?" and a "Nazified version of Myspace that nobody used an more."

Hardly surprising then that when Elon Musk's highly publicised bid to buy Twitter for $44bn went through late last month, the liberal establishment went into meltdown. As satirically described by Isaac Schorr in The National Review, "It was the darkest day on Earth since net-neutrality repeal," before citing CBS's Norah O'Donnell, who suggested that Musk might "make Twitter a haven for disinformation and hate speech" while using the platform "to bully critics and bully reporters who have written about him or his companies."

As an entrepreneur with a Midas Touch, whose electric cars and satellite support of the Ukrainian military had positioned him as a darling of the left, it is all the more questionable that so many would object to someone who bought a global communication platform at a premium to deliver "a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence."

Highlighting the "danger that social media will splitter into far-right wing and far left-wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society in the relentless pursuit of clicks," Mr Musk wasted no time in conducting some immediate housekeeping, including the firing of chief executive Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer, Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief, Vijaya Gadde, the executive primarily seen as 'censor-in-chief' responsible for the removal of high-profile accounts including former President Donald J. Trump.

Accused of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the social media platform, the senior executives are just the beginning of a wider cull as its new management streamlines operations, with the possibility of taking the company public at a future date.

With forward-thinking investors, including Binance founder and CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, who commented, "I feel much more secure about my Twitter account now that Elon has sink'ed in there", referring to the owner's grand entrance, which involved carrying an actual sink, there is no doubt that for many, the ability to edit, and the removal of API, bot comments, and the freedom for information to flow has already been felt as a net positive.

As summarized by Piers Morgan, who incidentally enjoyed an organic lift in followers post-acquisition,  "What you've seen with Twitter is a very woke workforce who had basically been shadow-banning conservative commentators from Twitter for a long time. We've all known this. They've also been almost exclusively banning people on the right without banning people on the left for similar offenses. … But there again, [Elon Musk] is going to bring back comedy, the ability to have a laugh, to banter with people without fearing that you're going to get cancelled. And I really think this is long overdue."

Regardless of your position, many agree that such highly connected and influential platforms are too powerful for one company or individual to manage. In a digital age where most of our communication, connections, and engagement take place in the cloud, allowing either a private corporation or state the ability to 'cancel' you is not only tyrannical but highly unethical. It is for this reason that Web3 is the future. 

Operating across independently run servers, companies such as Mastodon, which use open-source software, are harder to hack, making data theft considerably more difficult. And this is just the beginning. If Web2 was all about gathering and concentrating information, Web3 is about taking back control from the current tech giants and decentralising it for the benefit and application of the people, and not for corporate profit. Ultimately, Web3 provides a new format that doesn't steal data for advertising revenues. In addition to Mastodon, other Web3 platforms such as Karma, Signal, Aether and Minds illustrate that Web3 isn't limited to social but can apply to search, messaging, and phone, ushering in a new era of digital functionality and freedom.

No matter the platform, the fourth industrial revolution is here to stay with data rising through the ranks as one of the world's most precious commodities, however, few seem to realize the risks associated with data storage, despite all the rhetoric. As information from millions of social media accounts around the globe continues to be broadcast and processed on a daily basis, the volume of available data continues to grow exponentially, doubling every few years. At our current rate, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated per day, with over 90% being created within the past decade.

“Due to the abundance of information that was once deemed irrelevant, the slow and silent application of companies to monetize big data, often without consent has been one of the largest ethnically-questionable, economic game-changers in corporate history, however, as decentralization continues to gather momentum, users are increasingly aware they are capable of monetizing their own data at their own discretion,” said Malte Christensen, chief executive officer, DAO Labs.

Polygon, the company that pledged the largest COVID relief fund, and Avalanche, the founder of The Karma System (the forerunner of Bitcoin), have faith in the decentralization of community service and reciprocal support. As a result, both Polygon and Avalanche have taken an active stance by implementing community building technologies such as social mining to aid in the automation of community building activities while allowing the community to retain control over these initiatives. These social mining centers pave the way for users to become their own data banks and distribution hubs, combining the relevant organic material of genuine users with corporations in a manner that is advantageous to both parties - similar to Tinder's matching algorithm, only for data. Why would corporations like BMW spend money on paid advertisements and marketing when millions of BMW drivers post their own content for free? This in turn creates prospects for what we now call "21st-century jobs," allowing further opportunity for remote work.

As aptly summarised by MIT Sloan Professor Sinan Aral, "social media is rewiring the central nervous system of humanity in real-time. We're now at a crossroads between its promise and its peril."

As the chickens come home to roost at some of the world's largest tech companies after years of political alignment, infringement of data protection, suppression of free speech and censorship, the self-evident requirement for decentralised platforms to provide open discussion, sincere communication and a return of individual sovereignty have never been so apparent.