Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech

For advocates of the decentralized web, protocols are often viewed as a good thing – a liberating alternative to, say, platforms like Meta and Twitter. But decentralization seems to be at odds with the historical purpose of protocols, which is to simplify communication. Most people would rather have one identifiable adversary to grapple with, inste... See more

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimate

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My purpose here is to point out a logical third option, one that can and should be tested out on a platform such as Twitter. In this approach, a platform would require users to form groups through free association, and then to post only through those groups, with the group’s imprimatur. Why this simple, powerful notion could help us escape the dile... See more

Second, we must move beyond thinking of platform content moderation policies as “the solution” and prioritize rethinking design. Policy establishes guardrails and provides justification to disrupt certain information cascades, but does so reactively and, presently, based on the message substance. Although policy shapes propagation, it does so

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Naturally, social media companies will not want to give up this control. But sometimes there are technological forces that are more powerful than even the biggest companies. To me, it seems clear that an LLM-based filtering system will be a naturally democratizing force. It will naturally nudge the world towards putting more control in the hands of... See more

"Now, that vision is fraying. The social fabric of the internet is built on very specific assumptions, many of which are giving way. Licklider envisioned the internet as a patchwork of decentralized networks, with no sense of how it would work when a handful of companies wrote most of its software and managed most of its traffic. Licklider conceive... See more