Tag: Twitter

I’ve been musing about social media recently. The Supreme Court recently allowed the effective end of TikTok, owned by ByteDance, in the United States, barring its sale to a non-Chinese company. Less than a day later, TikTok was back, at least for a time.  

Of course, other media companies are busy figuring out how to poach those TikTok users, whether or not there’s a sale or other rescue.

I came across Cory Doctorow’s Billionaire-proofing the Internet. The subtitle spoke to me: “Scolding people for choosing popular services is no way to build a popular movement.”

He starts with the story of the record companies who sued users during the days of Napster, keeping the money for themselves rather than passing the proceeds to the artists they were allegedly “protecting.”

“What we didn’t agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

“Another group – call them the ‘individualists’ – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels…

“Here’s what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: ‘If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won’t be very popular.'”

Cost

“Which brings me to social media. The problem with social media is that the people we love and want to interact with are being held prisoner in walled gardens. The mechanism of their imprisonment is the ‘switching costs’ of leaving. Our friends and communities are on bad social media networks because they love each other more than they hate Musk or Zuck. Leaving a social platform can cost you contact with family members in the country you emigrated from, a support group of people who share your rare disease, the customers or audience you rely on for your livelihood, or just the other parents organizing your kid’s little league game.”

Indeed, I have been on Facebook for about a decade. I got on initially because my niece Rebecca, who lives in California, posted her activities on the site. Before that, I didn’t know what she was doing half the time as she traveled all over the country. Subsequently, I found people I knew in the world: old friends and formerly distant relatives. I joined interest groups.

“Hypothetically, you could organize all these people to leave at once, go somewhere else, and re-establish all your social connections. Practically, the ‘collective action problem’ of doing so is nearly insurmountable. This is what platform owners depend on… “

Yes, I joined BlueSky, but it’s like moving to a new school as a kid. You find your way eventually.

A solution

“There’s a way out of this, thankfully. When social media is federated, you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book, and you keep your friends, who won’t even know you switched networks unless you tell them.”

“There’s no reason social media couldn’t work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you.”

It explains a whole how-to that involves legislation and whatnot so that it won’t be easy.

Meanwhile, I want to clarify that I don’t think it’s bad if people decide to leave a site. I left Twitter not so much because I didn’t like Musk or think that X is a stupid name, as I had read that Twitter would use my information to train its AI bots.

It isn’t easy to leave some of these sites. Here’s a detailed article about how to get off Facebook, which is way more complicated than you would think. In case it’s paywalled, there are five steps from settings to finding deactivation, five more until you reach “please don’t go,” and five more after that. 

“Almost certainly, in the future, this experience will be illegal, as emerging privacy laws require experiences continue to insist that companies like Facebook and Amazon make it just as easy to leave their experiences as to sign up. In fact, the FTC has already announced a rule that likely makes what you see above illegal in the United States, though it hasn’t come into effect yet. (We’ll see if that happens under the [FOTUS]  administration, I suppose.)”