A New Movement to Free Social Media From Oligarchs
Between Mark Zuckerberg’s dissolution of Meta’s fact-checking program and Elon Musk loosening hate speech and disinformation moderation on X — and making an apparent Nazi salute after President Trump’s inauguration earlier this week — the dystopian state of much of the mainstream social media landscape is driving users to seek alternative options or go offline altogether.
Amid this widespread disillusion with billionaire-controlled social networks, a group of tech entrepreneurs has launched a campaign to establish a new ecosystem that can’t be controlled by any singular person or company and puts power — and data ownership — back into the hands of users.
The Free Our Feeds initiative aims to build off of Bluesky’s core technology, the Authenticated Transfer (AT) protocol, a new shared language that computer servers use to communicate with each other. Using this technology — which is still backed by Bluesky, a private company — the campaign hopes to create a decentralized social media network free of oligarchical oversight. That’s also something Bluesky’s Chief Executive Officer Jay Graber said she supports.
Josh Kramer, head of Editorial at the nonprofit research and development lab New_Public, told Hyperallergic that Bluesky’s underlying technology presents a new opportunity to build a new social media landscape “unlike we’ve ever seen before.”
“ [Free Our Feeds] is trying to take Bluesky’s essential infrastructure and make it so that that it becomes a separate thing that is un-tamperable and un-ownable,” Kramer explained.
New_Public is led by co-directors Deepti Doshi and Eli Pariser, who are also two of the nine technical advisors, also known as “custodians,” spearheading the Free Our Feeds campaign. Over the next three years, they seek to fundraise $30 million to develop this new social media network, which would be overseen by a public-interest foundation in an effort to ensure that the AT protocol would remain open.
They intend to establish the foundation by the end of this year, after fundraising an initial goal of $4 million. So far, they have raised nearly $74,000 from about 1,400 donors and also received dozens of signatory supporters from figures including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and musician and visual artist Brian Eno. (Hyperallergic attempted to contact Eno for comment.)
While acknowledging that the Free Our Feeds initiative is not a completely foolproof plan, Kramer maintained that it would be “a significant step forward and worthwhile experiment that possibly could be leveraged to create like a whole new way of doing things.”
“There are hundreds of millions of Americans who are enthusiastic users of TikTok and facing a possible ban,” Kramer said, referencing the app’s still uncertain future under a 2024 congressional ban that called for parent company ByteDance to sell the app or otherwise see it shut down. After a brief outage over the weekend, President Donald Trump issued an executive order temporarily stalling the ban for 75 days in order to find a resolution that protects national security. In the weeks prior, however, swarms of TikTok users had flocked to a Chinese app called RedNote, driving up downloads as self-labeled US “TikTok refugees.”
TikTok’s future notwithstanding, Kramer opined that many users are “so eager to not continue the status quo of Silicon Valley and big tech social media that they’re doing anything they possibly can to avoid it.”
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