Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me
much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone
we’ve witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms.
Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to organize securely. Protestors seeking
to plan No Kings marches, wondered which app could be the most trusted. Inbound
international travelers have been deleting their social apps for fear that immigration officers will
search their phones. And during major disasters, like the tragic Texas floods and the LA fires,
emergency responders and volunteers find their critical updates buried by algorithms that
prioritize engagement over urgency. On a daily basis, countless online communities face
arbitrary deplatforming, surveillance, and loss of their digital spaces without recourse or
explanation.
These aren’t isolated incidents: they’re symptoms of a fundamental crisis in how we’ve allowed
our digital communities to be governed. We’ve unwittingly accepted a system where massive
corporations control the public sphere; algorithms optimize for advertising revenue rather than
human connection, and we the people have no real agency over our digital existence.
We’ve Lost Our Way
I’ve spent decades building social technologies, including working at Odeo, the company that
ultimately pivoted to become Twitter. There I was the social app’s first employee and de facto
CTO until late 2006; and have since built numerous other community organizing platforms.
I’ve watched with growing concern as our digital spaces have become increasingly toxic and
hostile to genuine community needs. The promise of social media as we defined it in the early
days—to connect and empower communities of people—has been subverted by a business
model that treats human connection as a commodity to be monetized.
Today, if you run a Facebook Group with thousands of members, you have no real authority –
your community exists at the whim of corporate policies you cannot influence. This is
fundamentally at odds with how real-world communities have always operated. Your local
gardening club, bowling league, or neighborhood association has democratic processes for
leadership and decision-making. Why should our digital communities be any different?
It’s Time For a New Social Media Bill Of Digital Rights
I believe that the time has come for a new Social Media Bill of Digital Rights. Just as the original
Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental
protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.
So what could such a Social Media Bill of Rights include?
- The right to privacy & security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear
of surveillance or exploitation. - The right to own and control your identity: People and their communities must own
their digital identities, connections and data. And, as the owner of an account, you can
exercise the right to be forgotten. - The right to choose and understand algorithms (transparency): Choosing the
algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for
engagement at the expense of community well-being. - The right to community self-governance: Crucially, communities of users need the
right to self-govern, setting their own rules for behavior which are contextually relevant
to their community. (Note: this does not preclude developer governance.) - The right to full portability – the right to exit: The freedom to port your community in
its entirety, to another app without losing your connections and content.
To determine whether these are the appropriate “Rights,” I’ve just launched a new podcast,
Revolution.Social where I invite my guests, including the likes of Jack Dorsey, Cory Doctorow,
Yoel Roth, Kara Swisher and Renee DiResta, to share their feedback and debate where we
need to head next.
Architecting For A Better Future
The good news is that the technical foundations for a better future already exist through open
protocols that work like the web itself – interconnected and controlled by no single entity.
- The Fediverse, powered by ActivityPub, enables platforms like Mastodon to create
interconnected communities free from corporate control. - Nostr provides a foundation for decentralized, encrypted communication that no one can
shut down. - BlueSky is pioneering user choice in algorithms.
- Signal demonstrates that private, secure communication is possible at scale.
Unlike the walled gardens of Meta, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), these open protocols allow
communities to connect across platforms while maintaining control of their spaces. When you
use email or browse the web, you don’t worry about which email provider or browser your
friends use – it just works. Our social spaces should function the same way.
What’s missing is the bridge between these technical capabilities and the tools communities
actually need to thrive. We need to move from closed, corporate platforms to open protocols
that communities can shape and control. This isn’t just a technical challenge – it needs to
become a social movement. We need to build systems that are co-designed with communities,
that respect their autonomy, and that enable their authentic purposes.
Evan Henshaw-Plath, known as “rabble,” is an activist and technologist passionate about building commons-based social media apps that prioritize equity and sustainability.