--- slug: social-media title: "Social Media" date: "2022-11-23T12:03:11-04:00" draft: true --- I've had these entries in [/etc/hosts][] on my personal laptop for years, but they seem germane and prescient in light of the [latest social media privacy fiasco][]: ```sh > egrep 'fb|face' /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com 127.0.0.1 facebook.com 127.0.0.1 m.facebook.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com 127.0.0.1 fbcdn.net ```   I realize this isn't a viable option for most people, but it works for me because I don't have a Facebook account. At a minimum I recommend that everyone install [uBlock Origin][]. I had a Twitter account several years ago, although I haven't touched it in a long time. It's unlikely that I will, given the recent change in ownership, content moderation deterioriration, user exodus, and [likely impending collapse][]. In general I have a fairly dim view of centralized, ad-supported social media. Social media is: * **Predatory**: Social media users' personal data and their relationships are the *product*, not the customer. The actual customers are advertisers, [data brokers][], [oppressive regimes][facebook-abortion], and other [malign interests][]. * **Inflammatory**: Ad-supported social media algorithms are tuned to prioritize engagement rather than curate interesting content (more eyeballs = more ads). Our brains are [hard-wired to react strongly][tfas] with inflammatory content or when [someone is wrong on the Internet][xkcd-386]. * **Toxic**: Fertile ground for disinformation, misinformation, harassment, abuse, and fraud. None of these observations are novel, and they're not limited to social media: > Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search > engines is advertising. **The goals of the advertising business model > do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.** For > example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for > cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver > Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions > and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. > This search result came up first because of its high importance as > judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation > importance on the web [Page, 98]. > > It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing > cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our > system returned to its paying advertisers. **For this type of reason and > historical experience with other media [Bagdikian, 83], we expect that > advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards > the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers. ... > Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide > poor quality search results. … In general, it could be argued from the > consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer > advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. > This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the > existing search engines** > > [The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Appendix > A: Advertising and Mixed Motives][google], Sergey Brin and Lawrence > Page (h/t [The Age of PageRank is Over][]). So what's the solution? My personal preference would be: * **Federated**: Distributed, no central authority, and based on open standards (like web, and email). * **Non-commercial** or at least, users are the customers rather than advertisers. * **Identity Portability**: Users should be able to migrate to a different provider and retain their post history, identity, and social network. * **Strong Encryption**: storage, transport ([TLS 1.3][]), and end-to-end for direct messages. * **Data Privacy**: The industry has repeatedly demonstrated it's inability to properly handle personal data, so this needs to be regulated by something comparable to [GDPR][], enforced by a strong federal agency with harsh fines for non-compliance. [Mastadon][] looks promising. I haven't used it, but I have read through the [ActivityPub][], [WebFinger][], [Activity Streams][] specifications. 1. scalability 2. discoverability 3. weak encryption 4. complicated specification 5. no end-to-end encryption ### Further Reading * [Weapons of Math Destruction][] * [Thinking, Fast and Slow][tfas] [/etc/hosts]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_(file) "Operating system file that maps hostnames to IP addresses." [latest social media privacy fiasco]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23471842/facebook-hr-block-taxact-taxslayer-info-sharing "Tax sites sharing tax information with Facebook" [xkcd-386]: https://xkcd.com/386/ "Somebody is wrong on the internet" [tfas]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow "Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman" [facebook-abortion]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/sneaky-ways-cops-could-access-data-to-widely-prosecute-abortions-in-the-us/ "Ars Technica: Sneaky ways cops could access data to widely prosecute abortions in the US" [data brokers]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_broker "Company that specializes in collecting personal data." [malign interests]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica#Data_scandal "Cambridge Analytica" [likely impending collapse]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/22/twitter-advertiser-exodus-musk/ "Washington Post: Advertisers are dropping Twitter. Musk can’t afford to lose any more." [weapons of math destruction]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weapons_of_Math_Destruction "Weapons of Math Destruction, by Cathy O'Neil" [google]: http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page" [the age of pagerank is over]: https://blog.kagi.com/age-pagerank-over "The Age of PageRank is Over" [ublock origin]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin "uBlock Origin: Browser extension for content filtering, including ad blocking" [gdpr]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation "General Data Protection Regulation" [tls 1.3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security#TLS_1.3 "Transport Layer Security, version 1.3" [mastadon]: https://joinmastodon.org/ "Federated social media." [activitypub]: https://activitypub.rocks/ "ActivityPub specification and implementation details." [fuck-rsa]: https://blog.trailofbits.com/2019/07/08/fuck-rsa/ "Trail of Bits: Seriously, stop using RSA" [webfinger]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc7033 "RFC7033: WebFinger specification" [activity streams]: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ "W3c Activity Streams specification"