Europe needs its own social media platforms to safeguard sovereignty

We have plenty of foss stuff ready to go and deployed. But we don’t want it. We want free ad supported American platforms. No one cares. It’s pretty annoying for the people that do, but alas.

The world doesn't need any more social platforms that detach people from touching grass and making real human connection, and at the same time act as a means to spread the current flavor of propaganda

I've been thinking about this some time now. But not from the aspect of sovereignty.

Assume a group builds a social network just like Twitter, but with verified users, actually verified, possibly via personal ID / passport maybe at the town hall, no alias allowed, but the legal name, people will know who you are. All publicly readable without account.

This would give politicians, companies, journalists and citizens a way to have public "conversations", near real-time news updates just like on Twitter, but without the huge amount of garbage that comes from bots and people eagerly destroying the public discourse. Illegal comments (my mistake, criminal content) lead to direct consequences, maybe also with the one of setting the account to read-only mode.

This should be the perfect time for decentralized social media platforms, and people might be increasingly open to trying them. What do you think is the biggest roadblock? Is it poor UI and app availability? Deficient UX and content discovery?

Social media is a misnomer. We should be calling them personal advertising services. The commercial part just makes the money.

Would have been useful thinking if realised some 20 years ago

Taxpayer-funded public television that's already a thing in many European countries could be a decent model. No ads and much better incentive alignment. When you pay for it you are the customer not the goods.

It seems to me, this is less a technical challenge, but more of a cost challenge. Bandwidth and storage is not free. Freemium works for private business communities (Slack, Discord, Teams, etc.), yet public communication is monetized by attention (FB, IG, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit etc.).

Has someone done work on finding viable alternatives to the attention-based business models? As long as it's free, users will switch, but costs need to be managed somehow.

There seems to be two kinds of irony here going in two ways, I feel.

The anti-globalists by their actions seem to be creating a reaction which is leading to less global collaborations. Note the title uses the word "Sovereignty". Sovereignty is becoming more important as a reaction against the anti-globalism movement by those who want to support everyone anywhere working together over thin borders between peoples. In other words, isolationism breeds an isolationist reaction. We might see a stronger European identity versus others as a reaction against America's declaration of their identity over others.

Secondly, on an environmental front, we are seeing a move towards the reduction in global trade and travel between nations, and a reduction in developing world pollution as developed nations manufacture more things closer to home. So there's an irony in that the anti-environmentalists are causing a reaction that will help the global environment!

The European Union should develop a technology sector of its own to compete with those of China and the USA, but its fragmentation makes it harder for the continent to gather the capital and the consumers to make it possible for big tech companies to be created and thrive. We'll see in the future if there is political will to change this.

The average person doesn’t care about this. The ones complaining about “influence” are the ones in power who don’t want that power threatened. Our motorcycle racing group in Spain — they’re all on Insta and WhatsApp and perfectly fine about it. They aren’t saying “we need to get off these platforms because of Brexit or whatever.” They use these platforms to talk about and coordinate among people with shared interests. X works very well in Catalonia as well — usually where people get breaking alerts and information on freeway closures, weather alerts, etc. it works great — most people don’t care about the politics.

My Mastodon server (n=1) is hosted in Frankfurt on a free VM and doing good since 2 years. Automatic updates via docker compose and crontab. I can recommend this solution.

Europe needs multiple competing social media platforms.

And to achieve that they need to realize that all the regulation they aimed at facebook can only be satisfied by entities that have facebook's money.

And thus, they're adding barriers to entry that ensure they won't have multiple competing social media platforms.

The article is using Europe and the European Union interchangeably so I’m not sure who the subject is.

If the 27 EU members than backdoor actors like Hungary are a bigger problem.

We need a EU-backed social media, paid with tax money and devoid of any predatory practices we commonly see on others.

After Boeing became big enough to become a national security risk, the EU worked together and set up Airbus.

I want the EU to recognize the Microsoft/Intel/Amazon cluster as an even bigger national security risk, get some vision, and set up a competitor. It isn't even that hard, choose some OSS tools, give a core cluster to different countries and pour money into upgrading the quality enough and deploy some hardware. Then require EU governements to use them.

So if Romania launches a wildly popular social media site, that’s good for Spanish sovereignty?

Facebook's engagement algorithms directly contributed to the Rohingya massacre in Myanmar[1]. Meta refused to take responsibility and argued that it's up to governments to regulate social media, not Meta. Then they opposed all efforts to regulate them.

People didn't care.

However, the current poop-storm the U.S. has caused is making a lot of people wake up care about precisely this sort of thing. e.g. Canadians have finally realized that being more economically engaged North-South with the U.S. than East-West with other Canadian provinces is a very dumb thing that makes Canada extremely vulnerable to a foreign power that can no longer be relied upon. Measures that have been long viewed as "good ideas" are finally being enacted.

Don't say, "Nobody cares about FOSS alternatives to American social media." They haven't, until now. Now is a unique moment in history and the perfect time to switch.

Social media platforms are online communities. Their biggest asset is not algorithms or servers, but the people using them. What is Facebook or Twitter or Reddit without the users? Nothing. Invest your time and effort in the alternatives now. This is a rare opportunity.

[1]https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

EU has almost no AI, yet is the world leader in AI .... regulation. No upstart social network would have the funds to ensure GDPR compliance and all the other rules that get added along the way. If someone has a business idea for one, they move to the US cause it's easier to start. Mistral AI is expanding to California. The solution would be less bureaucracy and regulation.

Here's the thing. You can't force people to use a social network. Literally no one cares about this stuff.

There's a reason why there are like 5 social networks while thousands of people want to "make the next Facebook."

If Meta is a threat, then ban it. People will cry and maybe then new alternatives may emerge. But you still need skilled people who'd rather work for you than accept Facebook's $400k offers. Good luck with EU funding.

The World needs decentralized internet independent from big tech

"counter disinformation, protect democratic integrity, preserve cultural diversity"

So we need a way to censor things we disagree with.

Nerds mostly lack empathy so they cant understand why distributed tech/mastodon doesnt get adopted by non technical people

Same is true for every country.

We have Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Lemmy... Let us just use what already exists and is decentralised/federated, is free as in freedom and opensource, has no rich oligarch behind it and controlling it and so on. We nned nothing new just more people using existing stuff that is already much better.

Europe needs sovereign, authentic and non selfcensoring citizens.

Yes but how?

Just put up some lemmy servers and mastodon servers. Why make it hard? We all need to go out and touch grass more anyway.

I've never seen Europe flex as much as they have over the past few weeks.

Trump has really encouraged Europe to spread their wings.

> GDPR vs the US surveillance state

Chat Control vs the US surveillance state would be a more appropriate comparison and the US surveillance state only wants access to unencrypted data, but leaves you free to encrypt.

> Economic extraction

Trumpian logic.

> Erasing Europe’s diversity

The opposite is true. I can watch shows from all over Europe in the original language on Netflix, follow journalists from all over europe on Twitter, subscribe to r/europe on reddit.

This article is just a propaganda piece.

I am getting tired of the the tropes such as this one: Europe is pro-privacy and the US is anti-privacy. This is simply not true.

It may have been true a while ago but this time has come and gone.

> While the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) enshrines privacy as a fundamental right, US platforms remain bound by laws like the CLOUD Act, which grants American authorities access to data stored anywhere in the world. In 2022, the European Data Protection Board fined Meta for transferring EU user data to US servers, citing risks of NSA surveillance. Despite the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, experts warn that European data remains vulnerable to US intelligence overreach.

The EU is currently looking at breaking EtoE so that it can unleash an AI system to detect suspicious messages and images in your chat message, emails, private conversations with loved ones and so on. That's for our own good of course. Nothing nefarious here.

> US platforms siphon billions from Europe’s digital economy. In 2022, Meta reported €4.3 billion in EU revenue but paid an effective tax rate of 8.5% through Irish loopholes—€2.5 billion less than standard EU corporate rates. Google and Apple similarly route profits through tax havens, depriving European governments of funds needed for tech innovation.

I won't deny that Meta at al are using loopholes to reduce their tax bills but saying that this money would be used to fuel tech innovation is just not credible. Most likely, this cash would be used to plug the government's deficits and build weapons.

Also whoever wrote this probably forgets that there are costs associated with that revenue. If there was such a social media platform in Europe with the same scale at Facebook, it would required 10s of thousand of people to maintain and develop.

Considering the overall cost of an employee in Europe, I am not certain that there would be much left to tax after all these costs had been paid.

> US platforms homogenize culture by privileging English-language content aligning with the worldview of the current US presidential administration and US billionaires.

That is also false, if you are on Facebook for example you can join local groups that are in your own language. Same for your News feed. On X (although I go there rarely), my feed is composed of posts in 3 different languages.

If people see mostly content in English ,it is probably because those things are more interesting than other pieces of content in their own language.

As for the worldview, would this person have a problem with the worldview that people support if this worldview was the official worldview of the EU? I think not!

> Moreover, the EU is a regulatory superpower which can use legislation to support homegrown social media platforms. For example, the EU can mandate US “gatekeeper” platforms (per the Digital Markets Act) to interconnect with European alternatives, allowing cross-platform interactions.

And here we are back to the same old thing once again. More regulations and more coercion. If the EU can't compete, no problem, we will just force every foreign company to do our bidding because we can't win without forcing them to give us a leg up. Is that the European destiny that this person is talking about?

And here is another thing that reeks of self-contraction: we should not use the US platforms but we should force the US platforms so that they may help jump-start our own platforms despite the fact that the US platforms are bad except when we need them.

This is a really disjointed post that makes very little sense in my opinion.

The article talks about manipulation from the US, but the examples are: Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American), Querdenkers (who were German), and Éric Zemmour (who is French). I mean is this seriously advocating for the censorship of protests coming from the German public?

What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.

There is Mastodon already, with the servers in the EU.

Nobody needs social media. It's a fad. There were times without it. While we didn't live in caves. Now the smombies don't even see the shadows on the wall, because they are in another thrall. Both aren't needed. Maybe a solar-storm will reset that shit. Maybe something else. One way or another, I don't bother.