🤔 Who should control social media?

Should it be a public good, a private product, or something else?

This week we have a special combo newsletter from Josh Kramer and Elle Griffin. Josh is Head of Editorial at New_ Public, a non-profit tech R&D lab working to reimagine social media, and Elle writes The Elysian, where she’s interested in the future of governance, capitalism, and humanity.

Elle and Josh will be having a live conversation on this topic on Tuesday, March 11, at 5pm EST. You can watch us on Substack’s site or on the Substack app.

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We both agree: The status quo, with these giant private companies controlling all of social media, is terrible. But if digital spaces really are public places, should the government play a part in managing them? Below, we attempt a speculative thought exercise about the future of platform ownership: Should governments control social media?

New_ Public is testing new tools for public conversation, and we’d love for you to weigh in on the question above, along with us here.

Elle:

TikTok, the platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, was deemed a national security risk by the US government. Under China’s National Intelligence Law, private data collected by the app, including our locations, could be made available to the Chinese government.

But when it came time to actually ban the app, US government officials gave an entirely different reason for banning it, saying the app was spreading “propaganda,” suppressing information, and influencing our youth. For those reasons, shouldn’t American companies like Meta and X be banned as well? Aren’t we just as propagandized there as anywhere else, even if by platforms rather than governments? Aren’t we just as exposed to whatever narrative those platforms want us to see?

If, as Trump proposed, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison purchased the American operations of TikTok instead, would we be any better off?

In rebellion, close to 3 million TikTokers willingly gave their personal data to the Chinese app RedNote instead. They called themselves “refugees,” as though they were moving from one city-state to another, choosing the authoritarian regimes under which they would live. If the threat is not national security, but propaganda, then shouldn’t we have a say in what we read and what we see? And who we give our information to? Should control over the narrative be given to individuals like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the algorithms they create? Should the government have a say on how information is disseminated on those platforms, as China does on WeChat?

In a public square, free speech is allowed so long as it doesn’t provoke violence, but in a private one like online social media platforms, those rules don’t apply and platforms can escalate and suppress speech however they want.

Should they be able to?

Or, if we believe that we should be in control of what we read and see, what would that look like instead? If we reach a tipping point in which private and public ownership of social media platforms becomes too risky, then what might democratic social media platforms look like? And would they be any better?

Josh:

Speaking for myself, I think you’re right to compare the power billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have over their social media companies, and the power China has over products like TikTok and WeChat.

As we’ve seen since the election, Mark and Elon can turn on a dime and skew Facebook, Instagram, and X towards any politician or agenda they choose. Maybe you delete your account, but then you’re cut off from friends and family that are still there because of useful stuff like local groups.

One way out might be to build alternatives, such as Bluesky and Mastodon, with open protocols, decentralized architecture, and nonprofit foundations controlling the underlying technology—anyone can build what they want on top or leave with all their data and complete social graph. (Bluesky isn’t there yet, but we’re excited about the Free Our Feeds project, which is worth checking out.)

But—and maybe this is just the neolib institutionalist in me—I think that government has a role to play as well. I want to zoom in, way in, from the giant billion-user platforms and national governments, to something as simple as a city park, or a local public library. I think it’s really important to recognize the difference between how libraries and bookstores are designed, and how valuable it is for society that our tax dollars fund the operation and administration of these non-commercial spaces.

Eli Pariser, one of New_ Public’s Co-Directors, said this at the Vatican recently:

In physical communities, we have bookstores and we have libraries, and they’re both valuable – but bookstores tend not to have meeting rooms and public computer access and lend you books, because they’re fundamentally interested in the book-buying part of you, the individual consumer, not the collective community member. Which is why libraries are so important.

And right now, on the internet, we essentially live in a world with only bookstores and no libraries. And they’re not quirky, independent bookstores: just national chains with secretive mechanisms for selling you stuff.

There’s another reason we might want to experiment with government-funded social media—democracy. We’ve become so used to top-down, centralized social media, that we forget most of our online groups are less democratic than a neighborhood garden club. There are so many ways of injecting democracy that a government-backed project could experiment with: moderation decisions made by juries, spaces with deeply-entrenched norms, open-source collaboration like we’ve seen in Taiwan, and even extending existing institutions like PubHubs does with schools and community centers in the Netherlands. And so much more!

Elle:

Yes, it’s true that public parks and libraries are run by the government, and often well! But there are also many parks and libraries that are not run well. I wish the library and park by my house were better spaces to hang out—unfortunately they are not. Private bookstores and coffee shops are often better. While it’s true that some libraries have meeting rooms or additional spaces that privately owned bookstores don’t have, in many of the cities I travel to the libraries either don’t have these spaces or don’t have enough of them. I often work from coffee shops or co-working spaces instead. In a perfect world, the government would fund public spaces and make them better, unfortunately when it doesn’t the private sector fills in the gaps.

Not to mention: Parks and libraries should be pretty easy to get right. They are public places to hang out, and that’s a pretty easy thing to provide. If each of those parks and libraries suddenly put up a soapbox with government institutions deciding who gets to get up and speak on it every day, I think there would be a lot more complaints. In fact, I think there would be so many complaints about the kinds of things people should be allowed to say on that soapbox that it would quickly escalate into a culture war, with people gridlocking it to death or governments sliding into censorship to stop certain people from getting up there and saying horrible things into the megaphone.

For this reason, I’m not convinced the government should be the one owning our social media platforms. It could, however, invest in and develop them. For instance, government institutions invested in and developed the internet, GPS technology, cybersecurity protections, and space exploration, then they provided those developments to private companies. This to me is a perfect balance. Government solutions prioritize the public good, but they are slower and bureaucratic at implementation. Private companies are quicker and more innovative at implementation, but they optimize for profit. The best results come from collaboration, such as when governments lay the groundwork for public good and private firms build something innovative on top (e.g., GPS + Google Maps, NASA + SpaceX).

If the government puts funding toward social platform development maybe they would inject more democracy into our social media platforms. For instance, you also bring up vTaiwan, which is not owned by the government but funded by private donations and grants, and run by a grassroots civic tech community. Public and private forces combine to act in the public good and create a democratic platform on which communities can engage, discuss issues, and decide for themselves what they want to see happen on their platforms.

This is where we should get public funding involved.

We can see how dangerous and radicalizing it has been to leave social platforms solely in the hands of profit-makers who benefit from outrage and division. But that doesn’t mean I think governments should buy them up and be in control of them either—that only centralizes power within the government. Perhaps the perfect balance is for governments to fund and incentivize the development of better, more democratic platforms, then allow us to run them. One obvious way to do that would be for the government to invest in non-profit social media platforms like Mastodon and the standard it runs on. It is absurd to me that this is still running on donations and thus not able to compete with privatized options.

It seems clear to me that both the private and public sector have too much power in the US. The answer then, isn’t for the government to take more of that power, the answer is for the government to fund platforms that allow us to have more power.

I agree with you that we should also increase participation in the offline world, but I think we need to fix the online world too. And there are plenty of platforms that are now illustrating better models of governing speech that the US government could afford to back. My question is: How do we make more democratic platforms the norm? How do we incentivize and proliferate pro-social models? What role should the government play in creating and funding platforms that use speech for good rather than evil?

Josh:

To push back, gently, on your imagined local soapbox that escalates into a culture war, I don’t see that as an inevitability. Through both the design of the conversational spaces, as well as the individuals empowered to steward those spaces, there are many ways to ensure that debate remains civil and public-spirited.

You’re getting at what makes this especially difficult for the United States: the First Amendment protects us from the government limiting our speech, and it’s easy to imagine how even basic moderation actions taken by government-affiliated platforms could be found unconstitutional.

I also like your points about government-backed innovation, especially public/private collaboration, which is totally in the spirit of open-sourcing. Your example of GPS is great, with the government building and operating the infrastructure and letting anyone build on top.

However, I still think the funding side of the Silicon Valley system is largely broken. The venture capital pipeline, oriented towards a lucrative exit in the form of an IPO or acquisition, too often leads to enshittification.

I agree that the answer doesn’t just have to be only public or private: there’s actually a lot in between. Front Porch Forum and Bluesky are both structured as public benefit companies. There’s also nonprofits, academic institutions, and even more creative organizational structures, like DAOs. There are also other mechanisms for funding and ownership, including private philanthropy, crowdsourcing, capped returns, and steward ownership.

Most importantly, I think we’re aligned on this: We’ve barely scratched the surface of what social media could be, and there’s so much still to be tried and scaled.

At New_Public, we’re also interested in alternative models, from helping local communities create flourishing digital spaces, to our global partnership with public service media organizations to develop prototypes for digital conversation. And we’re not alone: there’s a growing movement of builders and stewards who want the social internet to be healthier, more useful, and more fun.

Thanks so much for this great conversation.

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As a reminder: Elle and I will be having a live conversation on this topic on Tuesday, March 11, at 5pm EST. You can watch us on Substack’s site or on the Substack app.

New_ Public is seeking a Head of People and Culture.