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How to Build a Not-For-Profit Facebook

Over a billion people use Facebook. Sorry, that's the predominant way we share information and communicate online; sometimes, especially for those young ones who never go outside anymore, it's the predominant way info gets shared, period. Nothing else...

Over a billion people use Facebook. Whether you like it or not, it’s clearly the predominant way we share information and communicate online; sometimes, especially for those young ones who never go outside anymore, it’s the predominant way info gets shared, period. Facebook has a monopoly on online social networking. Nothing else comes close.

Of course, the desperately profit-seeking corporation does some questionable things with that monopoly—it invades user privacy, hands personal data over to advertisers, and is disquietingly mum on its international use policies. Facebook also won’t tell us how and when it supplies users’ data to governments or authorities (unlike Twitter and Google, which keep a public tally of such requests).

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Which means that most of the internet-using world is currently relying on—we’re beyond ‘using’ now—a medium that it considers to be wholly neutral, but that doesn’t necessarily have users’ best interests in mind. We’re also beyond the point where we can consider Facebook a simple service. It’s a fixture of modern life, a tool used for organizing, for business, for popular dissent—it’s home to a massive global tribe that considers non-users “suspicious.”

Nationalize Facebook

As such, Philip N. Howard, a comms professor at the University of Washington, has a thought experiment in Slate where he argues that the whole monopolistic enterprise should be nationalized and regulated like a utility, to ensure that Facebook doesn’t violate human rights here or abroad. Predictably, the staunch free marketeers went nuts at the sight of the word “nationalize,” and a horde of commenters descended, calling Howard fascist, un-American, and worse.

Here’s one of the better-articulated rebuttals that cuts to the gist of them all:

Nationalizing FB would only destroy it, destroy all the economic value it’s created, and eliminate the source for all the data you want. The premise here is remarkable – that the fed govt would be better at privacy and data sharing than a private company

What’s remarkable to me is that someone would trust Mark Zuckerberg and a handful of Facebook execs more than a regulatory agency appointed by a democratically elected body. And there’s no reason to think that any economic value would be destroyed—the platform would still accommodate job-creating apps, and it’s not like Zuck would suddenly have to fire anyone. That, and the economic valuation of the company itself is already dubious (they’re barely profitable, the IPO was a disappointment, the value of personal data may be grossly overinflated, etc).

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So Howard has a point. The denizens of the world are putting an awful lot of faith in a for-profit corporation that’s plenty willing to confound them with maze-like privacy settings and sling their info for ad bucks. And the idea of a safer, more protected, and more user-oriented social network is an appealing one. Cory Doctorow thinks more and earlier internet privacy education could help bring one about:

Good ideas, to be sure, but perhaps too little, too late. Yet we don’t get there by nationalizing Facebook, either.

Facebook Sucks, But So Would Federal Facebook

For one thing, as Howard admits, it’s a political nonstarter—there’s a Tea Party somewhere in the Midwest that would eat alive any politician who even suggested the prospect on cable TV. For another, a federal regulatory body might be able to do a decent job of protecting user’s rights at home (given that they know more about the internet than Congress does), but making decisions on how to handle international use disputes would remain a crapshoot—do we let nations censor cultural-specific content, or does everyone have to play by our rules?

Finally, it’s hard to see how you fund Federal Facebook: it’s not like an electric utility, where the government oversees a single company’s or co-op’s sale of power to the public. Instead, Facebook has to sell ads to thousands of clients in various ways to support its service. I suppose federally overseeing that process is possible even with the new restrictions on data availability, but there’s no way the company would make close to as much income without its slippery, privacy-invading practices.

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Yet there is a genuine desire for a truly “neutral” social network; again, plenty of people think the ones they use already are. Half the reason I follow Gawker’s Max Read on Twitter is to watch him remind the masses in all caps…

TWITTER IS NOT A NEUTRAL PLATFORM

— max read (@max_read) July 31, 2012

…whenever people mistake Twitter for an unbiased, public-serving utility. It too is a for-profit corporation, of course, and it too will send you targeted ads based on the data it mines from your feed. It isn’t above censorship and selling out the user to placate the money, either.

Calling Universal Facebook

So we want a neutral social media platform that behaves like a utility, but, for good reason, people would revolt if Facebook (or Twitter) suddenly became a branch of the American government. Here’s what we do instead: Develop a globe-spanning, not-for-profit Facebook copycat that’s sanctioned by the United Nations, one that’s more in line with the ideals of, say, Wikipedia than Walmart. This even-more-utopian proposal will probably piss folks off worse than the nationalization proposition, but here goes.

First, the U.N. takes its declaration of internet freedom (the document that ordains that internet access is a human right) one step further. It declares online social networking itself a human right—which, given social media’s prominence in our lives, its indefatigably commented-upon role in so many popular uprisings, and importance to conducting mundane social affairs, isn’t much of a stretch. It’s the Declaration of Freedom to Socially Network. Or something. It outlines the ideal standard of a modern social network, and puts forth a set of guidelines that truly free social networks should meet.

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Then, there’s a call for a not-for-profit social network with the promise front and center that your data will never be abused, that you will have simple, straightforward control over what’s shared and what’s not. It’s linked to the U.N. in mission; perhaps even gives it the final say in governance. It could be a massive, donations-based project, like Wikipedia. It could be run by a charitable foundation, so as long as it meets the standards put for in the DFSN. It could even be helmed by a rotating cast of nations that meet periodically—a less economically elitist, less hierarchical, and more web-friendly G20. And that way, there’s an inclusive mechanism for addressing international social networking disputes, with the UN’s human rights standards intrinsically built in.

Then, a crack team makes the new Free Universal Facebook look good and work well. A team of uber-idealistic start-uppers ditches Silicon Valley and copies and simplifies Facebook’s utility. It’s promoted; they don’t lead with the U.N. stuff—they appeal to the privacy improvements, the simplicity of the design (no Timeline crap), the neutrality. The lack of profit-seeking. The freedom from shady corporate motives. It’s a social network for the 99%.

See, right now, everybody uses Facebook because everybody else uses Facebook. Some people think it’s inevitable that the monopoly continues to grow and hold largely on those grounds—I don’t. I think the biggest reasons that no one’s willing to switch is that no one’s been convinced that any alternative platform can both a) not also behave a greedy profit-seeking corporation and b) have a big enough prospective reach to accommodate all the friends you’ll imagine joining.

A truly neutral, internationally-spanning not-for-profit network with a whiff of idealism tossed in may scratch folks where they itch. It just might be the sort of elixir that proves poisonous to the mighty data-hocking Facebook. It might not. But it’d still be an enormously worthwhile institution to have—a social network that’s idealistic in drive, not profit-driven. One that protesters can use without fear of Facebook sharing their data with authoritarian regimes. One that’s ad-free. Even if we whittle down all the grandiosity boomed on about above, we’re still left with a perfectly interesting question: why isn’t there a useful not-for-profit social network trying something like this out already?

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