How to redesign Social Media
All successful social media services end up becoming monopolies. The benefit of the network effect is so powerful that people end up using the same service that other people are using. Indeed, when a company introduces a new and successful service (think TikTok), even copycat services from established companies invariably fail to get significant traction. Social media companies know this, and to mitigate, they try to acquire the new market entrant. The result is that a tiny number of companies control the top social media apps in the U.S.A.: Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp, Google/Youtube, ByteDance/Tiktok.
These three companies control the majority of content people consume on social media in the U.S.A. A democratic society can not depend on its citizens’ information consumption on the businesses strategies of three companies. In the last five to ten years, we have seen what this situation leads to; fake news, widespread distribution of misinformation, and online harassment. The companies are facing a conflict of interest in tackling these problems. Any actions they take will upset a section of their user base, causing their business metrics to slip and thus their company value to decline. Furthermore, the companies avoid fully owning up to the problem as they are concerned about damaging their reputation, leading people to abandon their service.
Governments are at a loss for how to go about regulating social media networks. They have some tentative ideas around getting people compensated for the use of their data or creating data trusts but no real proposal is on the table. Instead, their legislative efforts are centered around privacy legislation and combatting anti-competitive behavior through fines and anti-trust lawsuits, both with mixed success. But as of yet, they have no strategy for fighting the inherent monopoly of a social media service and have no leverage to force the companies to combat widespread misinformation and online harassment.
The platforms of these social media companies have three strategic advantages:
- Incredibly large user bases.
- Massive amounts of information that they have collected about each person using the service, allowing them to tailor services for each individual while mixing in content to further their own goals
- Control of the algorithms that generate the content feeds, block content or, ban users.
To break the monopoly of these companies, we need to address the above three advantages by fundamentally redesigning how social media services work.
First of all, we need to enforce that a person using a service is in complete control and possession of all their data generated for the service. They can grant, limit or withdraw access to that data to the social media service at any time. This enhances the privacy of their data; it enables the person to modify or delete their data and block further access to the data by the service.
Second, to address the spread of misinformation and online harassment, when a person has possession of their data, they can execute an algorithm of their choice to generate their content feed or block users because they can provide the algorithm access to their data.
Finally, to enable new market entrants to have a shot at competing with existing services, a person can grant access to their existing data to the new market entrant. This makes it easier for people to join a new service because the new service quickly gains access to a large set of data. People will be less concerned about their privacy because they are now in complete control and possession of their data. By making it easier and less risky for people to join a new service, the barrier to entry for new services is much lower.
However, the catch is how to get billions of people to switch to the new technology? The only viable way to achieve this is through legislation forcing the existing social media companies to follow a roadmap for adopting the new technology. The legislation must block social media services from storing any data about the people that use their service in their data centers unless they have a regulatory requirement to store such data (ie. medical records, bank statements).
In the redesign of the social media technology stack, the data of a person is stored in a secure and private data locker. Any request from a service for access to the data in the data locker is authorized using a previously agreed upon data contract between a service and the person owning the data locker. People can operate their data locker in their home network or the public cloud. Alternatively, they can delegate the data locker’s operation to a 3rd party, for example, a data trust, such as those being investigated by organizations like the Open Data Initiative.
To get this new design in place, we need to build momentum supporting the proposed legislation. If you support this new design, follow me on Medium or Twitter or sign up to the Take Back Your Data mailing list. Additionally, we need implementations of the data locker (such as the Byoda project) to prove the technical feasibility of the design.
