In my previous article, I’ve described in a detailed way the shortcomings of the mainstream left politicians and activists in regulating technology, its failures to challenge the status quo and the policies that must be embraced. It covered things such as advertising, surveillance capitalism, open-source, digital governance, Artificial Intelligence, and copyright reform. But some may have noticed the one piece of technology that I didn’t discuss: social media platforms.
It was done deliberately - questions regarding social media or, in fact, anything that revolves around human relationships (e.g disinformation, presence of children, dating) isn’t just a technology issue, but a societal one, and cannot be viewed as a narrow-minded or one-dimensional topic. Unfortunately, many regulators and politicians - including progressives - don’t agree with this and shift the blame for the consequences of disastrous social policies on technology innovations. While, to an extent, those accusations are not without reason, they have become an escape route to avoid taking responsibility for the inaction or on societal issues, and even borders with either censorship or paternalism.
But in the last few years, another threat became more clear. The influence of “tech bro” oligarchs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg who currently own two of the biggest social media platforms have worsened both the quality of social media from technological perspective and the damaging impact on a society.
Altogether, it has contributed to the increasing polarisation of a society, mental health crisis, spreading of disinformation (especially when the social media owner is one of major sources), and increased risk of censorship. Those issues must be tackled holistically.
Childish politicians regulating children in social media
Out of many technological advancements, I firmly believe social media have become one of the most groundbreaking and revolutionary in recent history. They have made it possible for people to find like-minded individuals with shared interests and create fantastic communities. I think many of us will admit there is at least one person whom they have met in social media and eventually it blossomed to a strong friendship - sometimes, even love and marriage.
The beauty of social media is that it is open for people of all nationalities, ethnicities, and ages - including children. That has also become, in a way, a nightmare: because people have started spending too much time there, it has replaced face-to-face interactions, and social media themselves have made a transformation to force people to spend more time there. According to a DataReportal survey, nowadays people spend overall around 2 and ½ hours daily on social media worldwide, equating to ⅓ of total time spent online. Gallup’s research targeting the United States revealed that teenagers spend almost 5 hours on social media. And considering the rise of disinformation and “enshittification” of social media themselves, as well as sharp decline in children and teenagers’ mental health, many activists and politicians started arguing for enforcing the rules on platforms to either restrict children or severely limit the type of content they are allowed to see. Some even propose a full smartphone ban for children under 16 years of age.
There are multiple flaws with such rhetoric.
For a start, those propositions are not different from the crackdowns China is doing while in reality they are known for enforcing strict censorship with this pretext. We don’t need to go further than with the author of the KOSA bill (Kids Online Safety Act) in the United States, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who openly admitted it’s essentially a censorship bill. Vietnam’s recent law requiring Facebook and TikTok to verify age of users, store such data and provide to authorities on request has also been decried as a hidden measure to crack down on dissidents and critics of authorities, as well as mimicking Chinese totalitarian policy.
Senators Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, and Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, are pushing sweeping online protections for children. Photo: Oliver Contreras / The New York Times
It is evident that any age verification measures would require submission of your ID documents to a platform, which in itself is a major invasion of privacy. Some supporters of those measures counter that this data will stay safe - in theory that’s how it is supposed to work, but practice begs to differ. In 2024, the Australian Labor government first piloted, then passed a law that forbids children under 16 to use social media. And when the trial scheme was launched, the third-party service Australian government used suffered a hack that leaked around 1 million customer records. That wasn’t the only incident: same year, 404 Media reported that ID verification services for X/Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, Paypal, Uber etc. had its login credentials exposed for more than a year, allowing access to thousands of IDs uploaded by unsuspected users to verify their age. Worse of all, it appeared those credentials were harvested by malware in December 2022 unbeknown to the service itself. This demonstrates how collecting more and more data about individuals when it is completely unnecessary will not make people safe - on the contrary, it does the opposite. Yet again, politicians don’t learn from others’ mistakes or experience in authoritarian countries: recently, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez (considered as a universal role model to stop the far-right), addressing in Davos, urged to end anonymity in social media by linking social media accounts to the European Digital ID wallets. His reasoning is all over the place: making strawman analogies with other services such as posting letters, and justifying it as combating harassment, misinformation and cyber bullying. In reality, this is an authoritarian policy that countries like China did and keep doing; on top of that, people like Sanchez don’t realise that if at some point the right-wing opposition comes into power (in fact, in Spain it’s a possibility considering left-wing coalition’s decline in polling), such types of legislations will be utilised by right-wingers for their own benefit, e.g silencing LGBTQ+ content - as indirectly confirmed by American senators.
As an alternative, some countries have passed or are considering to pass into law measures to force platforms into taking down proactively content that a regulator would consider as harmful. The British Online Safety Act, for example, does exactly that - and while it was passed under Conservative government, Labour has happily taken the mantle and bolstered how Britain will be “the safest place in the world”, thinking that it will take the big tech into account. Except it does exactly the opposite: big tech will be able to comply with the law due to much bigger financial and human resources to implement required provisions and therefore get more powerful, while small independent communities will be forced to, at best, either move to other platforms instead of self-hosting or, at worst, to shut down entirely. Again, this isn’t a hypothetical - it already started with British cycling forum LFGSS announcing that they will shut down and move to Discord, as well as forum hosting service with 275,000 monthly users and Sunderland football club fan forum.
Another issue that is criminally underlooked when talking about children and social media is the correlation with social policies.
We cannot blame social media for the gradual cuts in social services to a point where some organisations say may need a bailout (European countries have also followed such a trend, by the way). We cannot blame social media for the fact that, according to British National Literacy Trust research, only 1 in 5 children aged 8-18 say they read at least something during spare time in 2024, while American National Endowment for Arts also detected since 2012 the 13 percent decline of 13-year-olds reading “almost-every-day” and increase in book bans, and European Union’s survey also signalled decrease in reading among some EU countries. We cannot blame social media for the decline of social infrastructure such as libraries and cuts to education spending up to a point when schools may start crumbling. But for politicians, resolving those issues are either too hard or too complex, therefore they do the easiest thing and make social media a scapegoat that can be used to take the blame for everything.
People read in the Rose Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Photo: Mark Lennihan / AP
Instead, we need a complex approach that will promote the importance of education and increase the engagement in social activities amongst children, therefore creating an alternative to social media that will be approachable and enjoyable for teenagers. We need to invest in social infrastructure, creating and supporting libraries, local clubs of interest, sports infrastructure, and education. Most importantly, parents should also take responsibility and spend more time with their children, keeping them busy so that they don’t waste time on watching TikToks and reading X/Twitter far-right content.
This is not to say social media can be damaging and harmful not just for youth, but for adults as well. They can surely be, but so can toxic friendships and relationships. Or kitchen appliances - if you don’t know how to use them. The answer isn’t to take away or isolate appliances from a child, or take him away from social interactions, but to provide tech education on social media literacy, apply critical thinking to the content to be consumed (e.g recognise clickbait headlines), responsibly engage in discussions as if one would offline, and learn the underlying principles of their operations. Unlike traditional media such as journals or newspapers, most of the social media platforms provide tailored content to read or watch based on what you have already read and expressed interest in, and that should also be something to reflect on for an individual.
Our parents have taught us literacy and social skills outside of the “virtual” world, and the same needs to be done within it.
Danger of tech oligarchs as social media owners
But it’s not just politicians who are on the path to destroy social media platforms as we knew them and what they were intended for.
As innovative and helpful major social media platforms have become in our lives, the ownership of those platforms have been in the hands of unaccountable billionaires. Concentration of such power within their hands has always had a threat of when such a billionaire can flex his power and decision-making regarding the social media policy as one individual wants. And nothing illustrates this point as clearly as Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover in 2022, followed by a road to the Trump/Harris presidential election in 2024.
It exposed two major issues.
First was his complete lack of understanding and manipulation about moderation policies. His whole actions compared to his statements before and even during the ownership of X/Twitter is riddled with contradictions. He complained about the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop being briefly taken down from Twitter in 2020 as an example how only liberals suppress free speech and that it’s a violation of 1st Amendment, yet in two years since taking over Twitter he took down tweets regarding Ted Cruz’s fundraising notes; began throttling tweets that contained links to other sources he views as competitive; after openly embracing Donald Trump, he has made platform-level changes to boost his and other conservatives’ accounts. He also calls himself a free speech absolutist that will clash with governments against their attempts to suppress it, yet he does this only with governments he doesn’t like. While he did engage with Brazil’s requests to block certain content, at the same time was silencing Erdogan’s critics on X/Twitter during Türkiye’s presidential election in 2023 (unsurprisingly, later on two men have met and Erdogan asked Musk to build a Tesla factory in Turkiye) and helped Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi censor any critical posts against him several times (again, to no surprise, Musk admitted he’s a big fan of Indian PM).
While those actions are somewhat expected from a sad little man like him, the second part is more damaging and worrisome. Becoming Donald Trump’s advisor completely untied his hands: he started promoting far-right parties and politicians in other countries. In just several months, he went full-on against the traffic light coalition in Germany and posted a completely wild article about Alternative for Germany being “the only party that can save Germany” and “the last spark of hope”, as well as having a live chat with the chairwoman of AfD. No wonder he already did Nazi salutes, of course: it completely fits intentions, views and actions he’s taking.
But Musk’s biggest target has become Labour’s government in the United Kingdom - and particularly Keir Starmer.
First wake-up call happened not even after a month since the Labour Party’s win in the 2024 general election. A heinous knife attack took place at Southport, resulted in deaths of three children and eight more being injured, and almost immediately the blame was shifted on a supposedly “illegal Muslim immigrant” that was spread on X/Twitter platform by far-right nationalist Tommy Robinson and his National Defence League - which turned out to be false as he was born in UK and not a Muslim. However, Musk doubled down on this spread of disinformation, fueling the flames of riots.
Then, in December 2024 Elon Musk and Nigel Farage (known to be a friend of Donald Trump and whose far-right Reform UK party have won 5 seats - including Farage himself) have met in Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, after which Musk touted the idea of donating $100 million to his party, which will outperform any other party’s finances.
Nick Candy, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in front of Ralph Wolfe Cowan’s Trump portrait The Visionary. Photograph: Stuart Mitchell/PA
Even in spite of the recent fallout between Musk and Farage over whether Tommy Robinson should be welcomed in Reform UK (Musk is a fan of Robinson while Farage rules him out, in response Musk said Farage should not be the leader of a party, following with resignations of several councillors from the Reform UK party in agreement with Musk), Elon has continued stoking up disinformation against Starmer and his government. He then switched into the Rochdale grooming gangs and child sexual abuse by accusing Starmer of cover-up (who was at that time the Director of Public Prosecutions) that he is personally complicit in this by blocking prosecutions and that he, along with Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls Jess Phillips, belong to prison. While it is true that local police officers and councillors inexcusably failed to protect victims (which Starmer admitted himself during his tenure as DPP), the grooming gang leader is still at large, and that some sentences were less harsh than they should have been, it was Starmer who directed to change the official policy in response to those failings, and the prosecutions of dozens of grooming gang members took place. As for Jess Phillips, who has been at the forefront of campaigns against domestic violence and violence against women, several grooming gang survivors stood up in her defence against Musk’s lies.
The cherry on top is Financial Times report that Musk is investigating the possibilities to oust Starmer as Prime Minister even before the next election by doing everything to destabilise it and giving support to the parties and politicians closely aligned to Musk’s views.
It must be called for what it is, plain and simple. Empowered by his status, wealth, and associates, Musk is literally trying to interfere in elections and domestic policies of other countries - especially considering he’s now a government employee. Even if at some point Trump and Musk fall out (and I’m sure they will because those two egos will not co-exist for a long time), I’m sure he won’t stop. He can believe all he wants that Western civilisation is in danger, but the truth is this: Musk is himself a danger to civilisation. With the rumours of buying out US operations of TikTok and potentially owning two of the biggest social media platforms that promote disinformation (and being a source of it too), the situation is more dangerous than people realise.
Ironically, Trump’s win and Musk’s increased influence has not only made shifts across politics, but even forced another tech oligarch to rapidly make changes in moderation politics, specifically Mark Zuckerberg. Even before Trump’s second win, Facebook has previously been exposed in censoring pro-Ukrainian posts and banning users, contributing to genocide in Myanmar against Rohingya people, and stifling even peaceful pro-Palestinian posts.
Zuckerberg has been generally known for being spineless and blatantly lying with attempts to rewrite history just so he can be friendly with whoever is in power now. This time though, he went maximally pro-Trump and announced several changes into moderation policies of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads under Musk's playbook of “having more free speech”, mimicking Musk’s changes to X/Twitter. Aside from that, the announcement included the appointment of Trump’s close ally Dana White into the board of directors. Unsurprisingly (at least for me), almost immediately after those changes Platformer News media reported that Meta has accepted new guidelines on transgender people that are straight up vile and dehumanising, followed by censoring the “democrat” hashtag. The harshest condemnation came from the California attorney Mark Lemley who represented Meta in a copyright-case: he dropped Meta as his client and openly called their shift a “Neo-Nazi madness”. Even TikTok has started sucking up to Trump: search for “Trump rigged election” has been heavily censored inside the United States.
There we have it: the tech oligarchy coalition cozying up to the President of the United States so that they can be in his good graces.
Three Arrows of social media: support federated platforms against centralised (Meta, Twitter, TikTok)
Some propose to combat the rise of tech oligarchs who own social media platforms by forcing them to delete or restrict access to a content that is legal offline but the government unilaterally considers bad (such definition is called “legal but harmful” in UK, for example), and if they refuse to comply, block their platforms.
These propositions are counter-productive. It will only strengthen tech oligarchs’ attempts to portray themselves in public image as “free speech saviors”, which they are not. Moreover, as I’ve already pointed out in the case of Musk, he will absolutely love fighting with certain governments, especially if they’re ideologically different from his right-wing authoritarian point of view. Of course, there are circumstances when such blockings are justifiable - particularly when there are credible hostile threats to national security. For example, the case of Ukraine blocking russian services (Yandex, VK, Mail.ru etc.) - although, again, they can be bypassed. Another example is Taiwan officials issuing a directive to its employees to not use the RedNote app (Chinese Communist Party-owned proprietary platform to where reactionary TikTok users, being angry with the entire debacle on TikTok ban in US, switched - only to find out that RedNote is censoring content worse than TikTok or any Western platforms ever did) due to security risks. Yet those are the cases where two democracies are in a war against powerful, hostile, vile and horrific dictatorships.
A protest by TikTok fans against the proposed app ban, USA, 2024. Photo: news.sky
In the case of Musk, Zuckerberg and ByteDance (TikTok owners), as much as we despise them for all the right reasons, there is a better solution that provides sustainability and independence from the influence of them or their future clones. And we should approach it from two fronts.
First is boycotting those platforms completely (as, for example, German trade unions and universities are doing right now) or at least partially because lack of engagement and traffic on their platforms will hit them exactly where it hurts. Making an example of X/Twitter: aside from losing its users, advertisers’ boycotts made Musk fuming, and after two years of his ownership the ad revenue slumped down 24%. He even tried to sue advertisers for boycotting despite the fact that choosing whether to advertise on X/Twitter or not is itself an expression of free speech. (I’m not joking, he claimed it’s illegal to not advertise on his platform!)
Secondly, we should build and/or participate in social media platforms that are not owned by billionaires and can be resilient against the usurpation of power. This approach is outlined by veteran journalist and creator of “Streisand effect” definition Mike Masnick in his paper “Protocols, Not Platforms” that outlines the necessity to decentralise modern day Internet by building platforms around the internet protocols instead of making “walled gardens” that are current centralised social media.
In practice such protocols for social media platforms do exist: ActivityPub and ATProto, and they are known to be used in two social media platforms that position themselves as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter - Mastodon and Bluesky.
Mastodon is an open-source federated social network which consists of hundreds of servers, each with its own moderation and policy rules, that connect with each other over ActivityPub protocol. It doesn’t have any ads, and trending feed is filled only with new posts that gained traction - also, recommendation algorithms are working solely based on your interactions (in turn, Mastodon relies on active usage of hashtags for posts discovery). Those servers can be run for the group of people united by geographical location, political views or hobbies. For example, there are Ukrainian projects dComms.ua and UA Fediland that promotes and hosts servers for decentralised platforms for Ukrainians - including Mastodon; there are also some standalone Ukrainian-focused servers such as twiukraine.com. Mastodon’s huge advantage is allowing you to migrate your account from server to server without losing any of previous posts or following and followers’ accounts. Most importantly, it is supported by crowdfunding and public grants, making it immune from venture capital’s requirements to make profits.
Bluesky is another version of decentralised social media which feels more of a Twitter before Musk’s takeover for its users. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because it is developed by ex-Twitter employees. It also has the element of decentralisation similarly to Mastodon, the element of algorithms are present - albeit in a different way compared to Twitter and Facebook. While Twitter and Facebook’s algorithms are overly centralised and based on metrics, Bluesky allows you to create your own personal feeds based on specific topics or interests. But in comparison to Mastodon, it is slightly more centralised, and similarly to X/Twitter or Facebook, it relies on external funding from venture capital and investors - although the campaign “Free Our Feeds” aims to be a solution. Bluesky has become a “new home” for people who were either unaware of Mastodon or those who consider it complicated to use from a user experience perspective (which server to sign up? which servers are de-federated? what are the differences in moderation policies?).
***
I will not insist on which platform you should choose: everyone has different preferences in user experience, or the social media model. While I have some serious criticisms regarding Bluesky, I believe they're still a very solid alternative for not tech-savvy people who grow weary of Twitter; its audience is also bigger than the combined Fediverse network. Whatever you choose, it is evident that keeping status-quo won’t do any good. Several European governments have begun to understand that.
Back in 2022, even before Musk’s full takeover of X/Twitter, the European Commission created its own Mastodon server and accounts, as well as Dutch and German governments. They even announced official bug bounties for open-source projects, including Mastodon. In the UK, after Southport riots and Musk’s rhetoric, the Labour government and its MPs have been quick enough to realise the importance of decentralised social media and have also started migrating out of X/Twitter to Bluesky, with the government even creating its official accounts there.
This leads to my final point.
Sadly, even with recent events, huge portions of progressive activists, journalists and politicians continue to stay in X/Twitter and/or Facebook. I usually hear two reasons why they’re staying:
1. “We should not abandon the platform because there needs to be a dissent voice that will persuade people”.
2. “We have too much of an audience there, and abandoning it feels unfair to them - also, building it back will take time”.
First argument is utterly naive and detached from reality because this is akin to accepting rules where the opponent created rules against you and can, at any point, change them to his liking. Musk and Zuckerberg have completely thrown away any pretext of impartiality of free speech and will promote those opinions and accounts they think fit; hypothetically speaking, even if one wants to stay to counter their speech on their platform, it will be drown in a sea of speech that both of them want to promote.
Second argument, though, is more understandable - especially when an account is followed by several thousands of users. Rebuilding your audience in a new, unknown environment will always take time - even if it’s hundreds of people.
I know this from my own experience because I had an account with hundreds of followers on Twitter. When Musk was rumored to start the acquisition process in April 2022, I immediately created an account on Mastodon to prepare the ground for moving there in case the platform will be completely acquired by Elon. During that “transition” phase, I have mostly duplicated my posts on both platforms, but because at that time I wasn’t familiar enough with major differences between Mastodon and Twitter, I didn’t get enough traction on Mastodon. Only after reading more about its features and understanding how it works, it began to work. As a result, in 2 years I built up new connections, met and followed interesting people there that I hadn’t seen on X/Twitter, and my numbers are bigger than anything even pre-Musk Twitter had.
I’ve seen people from this new “wave” of moving away from centralised social media repeating the same mistakes I made. This should be a lesson: to build up your audience in completely different social media platforms - especially with different design and features - you need to create it from scratch rather than utilising the same approach used in other social media platforms. Otherwise, you will be left frustrated by them.
Another argument to add here is the number of followers can be deceitful compared to the engagement numbers. For example, Katharine Hayhoe, well-known climate change professor, have done some metrics to compare the engagement statistics across 7 social media platforms which revealed several interesting points about platform-specific interactions. Also, several media news such as New York Times, Boston Globe, Guardian and others also registered the radical difference between ratio of followers/interactions and much higher numbers of interactions compared to centralised platforms.
In a way, it is not a coincidence that I'm writing an article on this exact topic here, in Commons. My hope is that, aside from each and every one of you who read the article to this point, the editorial team will consider my arguments for at least shifting away from Twitter & Facebook and building the audiences in decentralised social media.
Social media can and should belong to societies. Not to tech oligarchs who follow their own goals, and without ridiculous tech policy regulations that destroy the core purpose of social media.
