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| Rethinking Social Media |
Thank you all for being here and giving me 30 minutes of your attention. I appreciate it!
I am happy to be back at VIScon after a 2 year abscence. Back in 2021 I presented the Free Software Foundation Europe's "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign, which if you're interested, you can find at the same place as the slides for this presentation. This time, however, I'll be talking about Social Media - and how and why they should be rethought.
But before we start, let me briefly introduce myself. I'm Alex. Professionally, I am a software developer. In my spare time, I, amongst other things, contribute to the activities of the FSFE as a member of the Zurich local group - which would be very happy to welcome some of you at our next meeting on the 14th of November!
The local group operates as part of the FSFE which is a "charity that empowers users to control technology". It's a non-profit and non-governmental organization. And while it is legally set up as a German association, it is truly European with volunteers in Spain, France, the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Poland. The association has been active since 2001 - and we're still going strong. If you're curious about our main activities, feel free to ask me after my presentation or simply check out our website.
But now onwards to what all of you came here for: my rant about Social Media.
I'll start with an analysis of what's wrong with the current state of social media and what got us there, before proceeding with what we can do to improve the situation.
Let me start by defining what I'll be talking about: For me, the term Social Media describes
... see content on slides ...
This definition is purposefully wide. It includes everything which is generally considered a Social Media platform, i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit, Snapchat, TikTok, but also includes e.g. Telegram, Github, or LinkedIn. Messengers with a limited reach/low maximum group size, however, fail to qualify the reach criterion.
Now, there is a caveat to this whole presentation. Despite defining Social Media so widely, it turns out I still barely use any. Nonetheless, I feel like I have something to contribute to the discussion - even if only as living proof that one can exist without having an Instagram profile.
But since you now know that I am biased you can also take it from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, who diagnosed the web with 3 main ailments back in 2019, 30 years after the invention of the web.
... see content on slides ...
While Berners-Lee was talking about the web in general, his criticism also applies to Social Media platforms - which for many people are synonymous with the Internet. There are more things to criticise about Social Media - just think about the psychological harm they do. Or the vitriol marginalized communities can experience on them. But with way too much ground to cover in my time limit already, I have to focus on the first two points Berners-Lee raised, because I consider those to be at the core of our systemic issues with Social Media.
Very recently we could observe how malicious intent materializes: In the beginning of September the US Department of Justice started seizing domains which were used by russian government sponsored actors to imitate Western news outlets. Those websites were filled with AI generated narratives to russia's benefit and Social Media platforms were then used to spread those tales, targeted specifically towards people who might be receptive to them.
On a sidenote since LLMs are also a topic at this conference: This is their prime use case. Generating bullshit at scale.
Operation Doppelganger illustrates, how Social Media are tools in the hands of enemies of the open society. How did we become vulnerable to them?
A big part of the answer to this question lies in the phenomenon of Surveillance Capitalism as analyzed and described so accurately by Shoshanna Zuboff in her excellent book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism". I seriously cannot recommend this book enough.
How does Surveillance Capitalism work in a nutshell?
Before the dotcom bubble burst and venture capital (VC) money was sustaining cash burning tech companies, the users' interactions with a web service were used to improve said service. When VCs wanted to see returns on their investments in the early 2000s, tech executives had to look for new revenue streams. And at Google they found them: by diverting some of the gathered behavioral surplus and using it as input material for predictions about our future behavior which are then sold at massive profit.
What exactly does this mean? Surveillance capitalists spy on us to gather as much data on our preferences, situation, and thoughts as possible, then run these data points through a sophisticated machinery of algorithms to predict the likelihood of you to click on an ad. This likelihood is then sold to the highest bidder - effectively creating a market for your future behavior.
Let's pretend for a second, that you're a surveillance capitalist. How would you go about maximizing profits?
Improve prediction accuracy to as close to 1 as possible by
- improving algorithm machinery
- gathering more (e.g. more time on platform) and more intimate data
- directly influencing action
to virtually guarantee behavior - that is what marketing professionals are willing to pay for after all.
How does that make you feel, that your soul is being charted, your attention (one of your most precious resources) steered, your actions influenced and future behavior auctioned off for someone else's profit? Have you ever agreed to that? Have you even been asked?
As any sane human being, you most certainly have not agreed to that. At least not in a way resembling actual consent.
In the beginning surveillance capitalists simply were brazen and just claimed human experience for themselves. But why did no one stop them subsequently? In his 35 year review on the web, Tim Berners-Lee explains why:
... see presentation ...
We can only speculate on why regulators have been so lenient with surveillance capitalists. It probably had something to do with the fact that surveillance capitalists have grown monstrously rich and powerful in the meantime: Just think of the fact that Social Media giant can influence election outcomes with their algorithms. Or lucrative post-political career prospects at surveillance capitalists. Or just the belief that economic growth is good no matter what.
And if the power dynamics on a societal level are bad, they are worse on an individual level. With extreme foresight Aldous Huxley has seen these dystopian developments coming back in 1958 and diagnosed a threat to US democracy back then already:
... see presentation ...
This explains our vulnerability to malicious actors: in exchange for money, surveillance capitalists are very willing to give anyone access to our minds and behavior.
Clearly the situation is utter shit. So what can we do?
Good news for once: There are many different things we can do to improve the Social Media situation for you - but also for everyone else! I'll describe the different steps starting from the easiest to the hardest.
Firstly, I'd argue, less time on Social Media is better Social Media. Do we have an MF DOOM fan in the audience?
... see presentation ...
Ask yourself,
- What do I need Social Media for? Do they provide me with it? Are there other ways of achieving the same?
- How much of my time and energy is used up by Social Media?
- Can I go without them for a week? For a month?
I invite you to simply try to conciously reduce your consumption of Social Media. The level of reduction depends on your preferences. It can very well be 0, but does not have to be. Observe how it affects your life.
Secondly, there is a better way to use the currently commonly used surveillance capitalist Social Media.
The POSSE approach allows you to stay in control of your content. POSSE stands for Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere and describes
... see presentation ...
This is what it looks like in practice: This is a screenshot from the FSFE's official Mastodon account (if you don't know what Mastodon is, don't worry, I'll get there in a second). As you can see toot (think tweet) contains a short summary of what a blog post published on the fsfe.org domain is about and the URL pointing to it.
Since you're a technical audience: You probably know how to use a static site generator. For what it is worth, you might even have written one in one of your classes. Even if not, you could figure it out in no time. In short, get a domain and start a blog. Apart from putting you back in control, it will give you the freedom of expression you've always hoped for. For your non-techie friends, ethical blog hosting sites abound.
Thirdly, we can start replacing existing Social Media platforms with better ones.
One precondition of better Social Media platforms is that the underlying software is free, libre and open-source. Let's see whether ETH has taught you well: How is Free Software different from proprietary one?
... see presentation ...
Why is this a prerequisite for better Social Media? Because it, again, puts us in control. This way we get transparency over the algorithms - and can change them to our needs. You find anti-features like tracking in the software? Simply remove them.
Another precondition of better Social Media is that they are decentralised. This image shows you the difference between centralised, federated and distributed network modes. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc. are representatives of centralised networks. Email, on the other hand, is federated as users on different mail servers can interact. Fully distributed systems, allow participants to communicate directly with each other, think of torrents for example.
At the danger of sounding like a broken record: Decentralisation is another mechanism of shifting power away from Social Media platforms. See what decentralisation does in case of email: Despite me not having a Google Mail account, I can still talk to people with one. Decentralisation just makes it harder to capture and mistreat participants in the network.
You might have noticed a pattern when I comes to my recommendations so far: Whether it is reduced Social Media consumption, POSSE, or insistence on FLOSS and decentralisation; all these measures shift power to you, the user. Thus, they prevent (or at least limit) abuses of power. Effectively, they put the human back into the center.
And all of these conditions are fulfilled by the Fediverse!
The Fediverse is a diverse collection of software which can run on different servers but still communicate with each other over a common protocol: ActivityPub. Mastodon - which you have seen in the FSFE POSSE screenshot already - is the most commonly known piece of software which is part of the Fediverse. But it is certainly not the only one.
Is the Fediverse perfect? By no means. Is the integration between different software pieces working flawlessly? No, not yet. Is a chronological feed the best? For some maybe yes, for others not. But nonetheless: the Fediverse is infinitely better than the surveillance capitalist alternatives.
But onwards to the hardest but also most important thing to do: reform.
Better Social Media will only come to bear if we overcome a collective action problem. I will quote Tim Berners-Lee once more:
... see presentation ...
See how he speaks of "our" ability. And how a reformed web has to serve the interests of humanity at large, not a subset of it. What is the point of some engineers devising a private, engaging, civil, FLOSS, decentralised, customizable social media platform which only a handful of people use?
So while changing one's own behavior is necessary, it is not sufficient. You as computer science graduates of the ETH actually have a few responsibilities as prospective software engineers to make better Social Media possible:
... see slides ...
I want to end by highlighting the last point. As software engineers, we tend to look at a problem and think how can we use tech to solve it. But many societal problems are not technological in nature. Take poverty as an example. Technology is a tool which will always be embedded in a specific social context. Please always reflect on the social conditions of the tech you are building and avoid one-dimensional technosolutionism.
I'll leave with you another fitting xkcd comic and thank you for your attention!