Social Platform Ownership & Governance

When a platform is designed to suppress your reach while amplifying extremists, staying isn’t pragmatic. It’s masochistic.

This all fundamentally misunderstands the nature of power on these platforms. Success on social media is about building community. And you can’t build community if someone else has all the control over how that community works.

The key transformation that needs to occur is from a logic of open source development to a more complex logic of commons-based governance.

Seams can enable governance by delineating space, thereby creat-ing the separation necessary to establish legitimate rules and norms and to perform management, oversight, and enforcement. 39 Territorial bor-ders, the physical architecture of a home, anonymous grading systems, CAPTCHAs, passwords, and other authentication mechanisms serve these func... See more

I was distracted by a sudden recollection of all the instances I had heard the attributes of countries being used to describe the accomplishments of internet companies: the number of users of a streaming service being equated to the populations of sovereign nation-states, a company’s online-advertising revenue to the GDPs of several countries, all ... See more

Fuller blames this thinning on two factors. First, extreme partnership has led to “an intense focus” on specific political outcomes, rather than developing better democratic processes. Second, large private foundations and governments are putting money into their own agendas, rather than tools to empower everyday citizens.

As a simplistic starting point, the model in which public actors fund infrastructure (or the bootstrapping of infrastructure through private-sector coordination and patient capital) and private actors fund innovation in products and services on top of that infrastructure is a good one.