Should we boycott Facebook because of Cambridge Analytica?

Encyclopedia of Opinion

Question: Should we boycott Facebook because of Cambridge Analytica?
Position1 of 3›: Stop using Facebook
Argument1 of 3›: Substitute Facebook

We need a new kind of social network, with a new kind of business model.

The argument

Social media (such as Diaspora) exist with a different approach where is the user not the social media decide the content shown to user. Most alternative social media exploit the concept of "federation": the social network is a federation of several nodes physically and geograpgically separated.. In this way no censorship can be exercised by a single entity since a content can be replicated on several nodes.

Context

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

Premises

[P1]Alternative social networks like Diaspora let the user, rather than the platform, decide what content they see. [P2] These alternatives use "federation"—spreading the network across many physically separate nodes—so no single entity can censor content that is replicated across nodes. [C] Therefore, because viable substitutes exist, users should stop using Facebook and switch to them.

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.