Substitute Facebook

The argument

The case for leaving Facebook is strengthened by the fact that leaving does not mean giving up social media altogether. Alternatives already exist, and they are built on a different principle. The first difference concerns who controls what a user sees. On platforms such as Diaspora, it is the user rather than the social media company that decides which content is shown to them. That inverts the arrangement at the root of the Cambridge Analytica episode: where a platform selects what each person sees, it needs to know a great deal about them in order to do it, and that accumulated knowledge is what has value to third parties. A platform that does not make the selection has correspondingly less reason to build the profile in the first place. The second difference is structural. Most alternative social media exploit the concept of federation: rather than running as a single service on infrastructure owned by one company, the social network is a federation of several nodes that are physically and geographically separated and independently operated. A user joins one node but can interact across the whole network. Federation has a direct consequence for censorship. Because a piece of content can be replicated on several nodes, no censorship can be exercised by a single entity. A decision by one operator affects that operator's node rather than the network, which means there is no central point at which speech can be controlled, and for the same reason no central point at which user data is pooled. Since substitutes exist that are governed differently by design rather than by policy, proponents argue, users should stop using Facebook and move to them.

Context

Facebook and its associates (such as Instagram) are a de-facto monopoly in terms of social network. Creating a competition can help

Premises

Counter-arguments

Such social network had very little diffusion since "everybody is already on the main social network". Person who pursue a specific interest, economical or political, must have their presence on Facebook.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Control over one's own feed is a design claim about particular platforms rather than a reason to leave this one, and it does not touch what the question raises: what becomes of data given to a service, which is a matter of policy and enforcement rather than of who orders the timeline. [Rejecting P2] Federation distributes hosting and makes central censorship harder; it does not make a service private, since every node has an operator. The premise also stops short of its conclusion, and the counter supplies what is missing — a social network's value depends on who is already on it, so the existence of an alternative is not by itself a substitute.