We need EU-hosted, centralized social media for the public sphere

With a couple of different threads coming together recently with the forced takeover of US TikTok by far-right authoritarians, media censorship in the US and Gleichschaltung of major media corporations, mask-off moments by Bluesky leadership, and larger trends on social media usage it is now a good time to talk about what this means.

There were some recent surveys on how most people use social media, with two large notable trends: social media use started to decline in 2022 and that the main use of social media shifted to filling spare time and following celebrities, from more meaningful activities like keeping up with friends, sharing opinions and meeting new people.

It is most likely for the best that social media use declines as a mass phenomenon. When it comes to policymakers, journalists, academics, and public intellectuals though - those who operate in the public sphere - it is very important to have a healthy information ecosystem.

How should we have public debates about policy, make connections, share the news and in the end have policymakers reach meaningful decisions? This soft underlying tissue of how the information ecosystem functions has very large effect on outcomes, good or bad. The public sphere isn't immune from being algorithmically influenced (from the convicted South Korean president who got addicted to extreme Youtube content, to the unbelievable struggles of the UK and its government with relation to the far-right there are many recent examples).

We are not in the 1990s or even in the early 2000s blog era so in-person networking, Signal groups, daily newspapers, and long-form blogposts aren't that much use here when these forms are outcompeted by algorithmically undermined social media.

Too many journalists, policymakers still use Elon Musk's X. Academia and science migrated to Bluesky, which while isn't so distorted it still is a site run by right-wing cryptocurrency believers operating in the US who actively want to change their userbase. The Bluesky CEO seems to have a meltdown every day now about transphobia or extreme free-speech beliefs or about how insufficient moderation is somehow a good thing, actually.

Meanwhile on the decentralization front Mastodon has been a massive failure to create a usable network whatsoever, and its small size is the only thing that saves it from grinding to a halt by more adversarial forms of abuse.

Successful social media is centralized. Opening up a service to uncontrollably interconnect with other services results in unavoidable, unmanageable amounts of misuse which isn't fixable by any clever technical measure.

At the end of the day a centralized service is a value statement: what do the operators of the service value and how they are maintaining those values?

This is why we need a centralized, European operated and hosted social media service with clear set of values, that clearly enforces European law and regulations.

Recently, Emmanuel Macron gave a speech that goes to the heart of this:

“We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to [American and Chinese] social networks, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies.”

Personally, I wouldn't mind if efforts to fix this would be entirely funded by the EU budget - we are talking about a public good here without the aim to directly make a profit. Any EU funds spent here would immediately show up in better policymaking, science and public access to information, a massive return on investment.