
We need a nationalised alternative to Facebook - vincvinc
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/facebook-cambridge-analytica-bbc-nationalised-alternative-a8269066.html
======
hamstercat
I fail to see how anyone "needs" an alternative to Facebook, or Facebook
itself. This is not a judgement on those that use it, if it's giving people
value then they should continue using it, and judging from their user's
numbers it is valuable to at least a portion of the population. That being
said, it wasn't around 15 years ago and who knows how long it'll stay around.
I'm sure people will handle a world without Facebook just fine once it's out.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
The point is that marketplace will never provide the kind of solution society
wants. What people want is an easy-to-use way to stay in touch, keep up with
and communicate with their friends via the web. What people don't want is to
be targeted by advertisers/political campaigns or have their data saved and
sold. The market can only take us to the local max of 'you can keep in touch
but your data is saved/sold/used', to move to the global max of 'you can keep
in touch and your data is safe' we need a solution which isn't tied to profit
motive.

~~~
jerf
Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are
doing?

The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies
are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about
$20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can
make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via
selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.

That hardly seems a big enough problem that the only solution is to turn over
your social network to be run by Donald Trump, who, I feel I must remind many
of you, whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to
remember that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT. Or
whoever else it is you don't like, it doesn't matter to my argument, I'm just
reading the room here.

As a sidebar, if you want to get a sense of the scope of the damage that
Facebook is doing to our civilization, consider all the ways in which they
manipulate you, the things your friends posted that you wanted to see but
didn't, the torrent of ads they have PhDs working overtime to figure out how
to hit you with, enrolling you in psychological studies without your consent,
embroiling you in family or friend drama that you'd rather not be embroiled in
and potentially cutting off contact with people over it, and who knows what
fingers on what scales when it comes to what you do and do not see in the
news... for TWENTY DOLLARS. Of _revenue_ , not even profit! Talk about your
new twist on the banality of evil.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16688400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16688400)

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>Why can't this need be met by a corporation that gets paid for what they are
doing?

Because you can't serve two masters. For-profit corporations are going to side
with profit over privacy when they conflict.

>The size of the problem here is bounded by the amount of money the companies
are making invading your privacy. Simple math [1] places it at about
$20/year/user for Facebook, who are probably on the upper end of what they can
make by doing this. So to incentivize a company not to stay in business via
selling your data, that's the bar you have to leap.

That $20 isn't just for costs it's also for profit. How cheaply could Facebook
run if it didn't have to return any money to it's shareholders? That's a major
case for either a non-profit or a nationalized service.

>whenever you say "The $GOVERNMENT should...", you really ought to remember
that "Donald Trump" is a valid expansion of the term $GOVERNMENT.

Well here let's put it like this. When you leave something up to the $MARKET
you should remember that 'literally anybody' (including Donald Trump) is a
valid expansion of the term $MARKET. With government at least there is some
(admittedly meager) level of democratic accountability. How much
accountability is there in the market? I think we've seen how these privacy
violations play out with Equifax already. Richard Smith, Mark Begor, Mark
Zuckerberg these people are just interchangeable names/faces and no matter who
you swap in and out of these roles the desires of a corporation in the market
place to maintain and increase profitability will weigh on them the same. I
prefer a system where these people are directly accountable to the people ie
nationalized services, not a system where their accountability is obfuscated
and mediated by the market.

~~~
jerf
"How much accountability is there in the market?"

You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let
the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of
the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not
regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?

Neither side, on its own, is sufficient. A system where both sides are doing
their job is way better.

Mind you, I have some compassion (for lack of a better word) for the
government not regulating Facebook, on the grounds that to a first-order
approximation, nobody saw how bad this was going to be in advance. Local
commentators may vigorously object to this characterization, to which I'd
reply that the concentration of the people who did see it coming (including,
least of all, myself) is sky-high here compared to the general public.

~~~
frgtpsswrdlame
>You are proposing a black/white dichotomy where I proposed a partnership. Let
the corporations provide the services, let the government write the rules of
the playing field. Why would you trust the same government that is already not
regulating Facebook to do any better if it has to implement something itself?

I'll admit I am proposing a black/white dichotomy in this instance. I don't do
that for all markets but I do in this one. To me a free market is best when we
really want the market to race to the bottom quickly and there are few
externalities or complicating factors. This is very rare. A regulated market
is best when there are complicating factors and externalities but we still
want to engage in a race to the bottom. This is very common. Removing the
market entirely is best when we don't want to race to the bottom. This is
rare. Even though it's rare, I cannot think of a better example than Social
Media. Facebook and these other companies have utilized mostly free markets to
race to the bottom, we've made 95% of the gains already. Now Facebook is
exposing it's users to all sorts of nasty costs that society does not want to
bear in order to squeeze out profit. This is not being caused by some one-off
feature of the market, it is being caused by the _central_ feature of the
market, profit motive. The only way to fix these problems are to remove profit
motive. That means either nationalization or non-profit status.

Here's two quotes from a recent Tim Wu interview that I think speak to what
I'm trying to say here:

>They're not. But, well, that's the problem. I think there's a sort of
intrinsic problem with having for-profit entities with this business model in
this position of so much public trust because they're always at the edge
because their profitability depends on it.

>Well, if Mark Zuckerberg is telling the truth when he says, what I care about
is connecting people to their families and friends, that's a very lofty
ambition. If that's what he really wants to do, he can do it. But it doesn't
mean he'll be the most profitable company in the world. You know, utilities -
which is what Facebook is, a social utility - have never been understood as
profit centers before. [...] And there's a reason. The social sphere is a
little bit different. And maybe we need to accept that it's not a source of
major profit to be in people's personal lives.

[https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597221954/facebook-
previously...](https://www.npr.org/2018/03/27/597221954/facebook-previously-
failed-to-keep-privacy-promises-ex-ftc-adviser-says)

------
linedash
So the govt has my data instead of Facebook? No thank you - that's vastly
worse.

~~~
ams6110
Being cynical, the goverment has it anyway. Why not avoid the middleman?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Too easy to access, there is a world of difference between the police taking a
warrant to Facebook and some jobsworth in the local council browsing through
data to look for potential victims to harass.

~~~
ppod
It might already be possible for facebook employees to access your information
anyway, and if it isn't then a similar system could be set up in a govt run
agency. There are many advantages to having a democratic administration run
such a system rather than a profit-driven one --- businesses will always,
rightly, put profit before privacy. If we decide that privacy is more
important then we either have to regulate better, nationalise, or choose not
to use the service. The third option doesn't seem to be getting widespread
uptake; where young people are moving away from facebook it is not primarily
because of privacy concerns.

~~~
linedash
So you trust the govt to do right by you. What about the next govt? What if
UKIP got in power?

Honestly I think this information is actually too dangerous for anyone to have
- companies or govts. I'd like to see this kind of level of information
gathering made illegal.

~~~
ppod
I don't 'trust' them blindly, but if information gathering is necessary for
such a service to exist, then I think it's better if the service is provided
by a democratic agency than a private company. Nobody is forced to use it.

------
gramstrong
Are we really at the point of "needing" Facebook?

edit: BBC taking the "Social" part of "Social Networking" too literally.

------
brightball
I’ve always wondered about creating an equivalent to Facebook as a desktop and
mobile app, that connected to your email account. Adding a friend would just
be inputting their email address and connecting would involve a PGP exchange
in the background.

Your email would become the decrentralized, encrypted medium for exchange and
broadcast. You could use IMAP to leverage it as your datastore on multiple
devices.

You could more easily schedule message delivery and times too. The most
complicated thing about it would be setting up a simple enough onboarding
process.

It wouldn’t be efficient, but it doesn’t really need to be.

~~~
ravenstine
I've been dreaming about this a lot lately, but there's definitely some
roadblocks for the average person. They don't want to clutter up their
existing email, and they will drag their feet to getting a new email address
just for social networking. People also like the idea that they can actually
delete their posts, even if it's illusory, which they can't do to any
meaningful extent with email. With ActivityPub, I think a lot of potential
developers don't want to bother with email because it's not the future. It is
still a great idea in general, though. I would totally build it or sign up for
it if enough people I knew were willing to do it. The problem is I wouldn't
want that form of social networking just to connect with people who are smart
enough to use it.

~~~
brightball
True, but at the same time deleting a post only matters because new people can
see it that may not have initially. With this, only people who the message was
sent to would see it anyway.

If as part of the on boarding process you could provide instructions to move
those messages out of the main view and into a folder so they didn't clutter
up the rest of the email too.

It probably makes more sense as an open source project. There's not much of a
profit model for decentralized social networking where you can't inject ads
that people didn't want to see.

------
anderber
I feel like that when it comes to social media, decentralized is really the
answer. I'm not sure I could trust many big corps (maybe Wikimedia). Mastodon
and Diaspora fill these needs, perhaps what they need is better marketing and
improved UX (specially for Diaspora).

~~~
Joeboy
Does Diaspora actually provide better privacy than Facebook? It removes the
need to trust a centralized entity, but it seems to me that it largely
replaces it with the need to trust a _multitude_ of distributed entities. At
least if we're talking about stuff like clandestinely sharing data about
people's friends with third parties.

~~~
anderber
It's tricky to deal with privacy and social networks. After all, even if you
control your own Diaspora server, someone can still follow you and get your
content. Unless you block them, I suppose. In the aspect of social media,
privacy means owning your data, and both of those platforms offer the option
to do that by running your own instance. If you run your own Diaspora
instance, you can delete all your data and walk away from it. Also, you
technically don't need to allow for federation, if you don't want to.

Here's some more info on it:
[https://diasporafoundation.org/about#privacy](https://diasporafoundation.org/about#privacy)

~~~
Joeboy
Honestly this reads a bit like a PR-speak way of saying that Diaspora indeed
doesn't really provide better privacy than Facebook.

I'm on it, and I donate to (or pay for) a pod so I'm not anti-Diaspora by any
means, but it just seems incorrect to promote it as a solution to Facebook's
privacy issues.

~~~
anderber
I actually said right away how it's tricky to achieve privacy with a social
network. However, to me, owning your data is a big step towards it. I have
nothing to do with Diaspora, I'm not on it and don't donate.

Out of curiosity, what would be your ideal for good privacy on a social media
site? What aspects would it need?

~~~
Joeboy
I'm not really sure what "owning your data" means here, in practice. If you're
sharing it with other people / pods the best you can meaningfully say is that
you own a _copy_ of your data, as does anybody you share it with. In terms of
privacy, I don't really see how this is better than Facebook.

I don't have an answer to your question. Broadcasting information while also
wanting to keep it private is, as you say, a tricky problem.

------
adventured
Why wait for the corporate platforms to get around to aggressively restricting
your speech on their services, when you can go right to being limited by the
head censor.

Britain already has a rapidly growing problem with censorship and restricted
speech. This would just be a more direct way for the government to control
what you can express and see online.

The authoritarians continue their march.

Within 20 years, it'll be the rare nation that doesn't have something
equivalent to the Chinese firewall heavily controlling what their people do
online. Nations with freedom online equivalent to what existed from ~1995-2015
across most of the developed world, will be the exception.

------
throwaway84742
Just when you thought the UK couldn’t get any closer to 1984, they wheel out a
doozy like this. This is coming from the country where you can literally end
up in jail for shitposting on Twitter.

~~~
SamColes
It's an opinion piece by a single journalist.

~~~
weddpros
a journalist whose salary is paid for by advertisers, a journalist working for
a concurrent of Facebook (in terms of ad revenue), a journalist who's probably
complaining how internet 2.0 has killed his profession, how Social Media has
killed Traditional Media, etc...

Plus how could a journalist suggest a nationalised alternative that would stop
at UK's border, instead of a global one connecting people from all countries?
It's extremely short sighted and closed minded.

------
mshenfield
The utility of Facebook is it's raw messaging and information sharing
capacity. These exist in a thousand ways in different apps from Twitter to
Diaspora to Signal. People use Facebook not because of the raw utility - it is
winning a competition for people's attention that is going to be an endless
battle.

Setting some ground rules for what can and can't be collected and shared from
people is way more effective than having the government enter that rat race.

------
Jaruzel
In my view, the problem isn't the platform, it's the people using it. Until
people are widely educated to give a damn about their own personal
information, they will continue to flock to the next free Social Platform over
and over again until some scandal, that they don't really care about or
understand, now makes that platform 'uncool', and then they will all register
for the next 'cool' platform.

Over, and over, again.

------
combatentropy
The future isn't national. It's distributed.

What is Facebook but a fancy web host and RSS feed in one? First, it is a web
host. It lets everyone make a free website (their Wall). Second, it gives
everyone an RSS reader (their News Feed).

My point is, I think we already have the protocols. What the ordinary user
lacks is the software. Actually what they also lack is the hardware. Everyone,
technical or not, wants their own website. They always have. But most people
are at the mercy of some company providing a server. After all, to run a
website, you need a computer that's always on, always connected. I propose we
use the user's phone. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of that.

So what we need is an easy-to-use webserver that users install on their
phones. They don't have to build their website on their phone. It's just
hosted there. They could build it on their laptop and push it to their phone.

Then you also make a nice RSS reader that users also install, and they
subscribe to each other's websites.

Profit! I mean, not profit, happiness!

~~~
klez
While I like the idea, the problem is that bandwidth on mobile is limited and
certainly not free.

Also, this would be a battery killer.

------
waytogo
Three years ago I forced myself to reduce my FB usage.

\- At the beginning I remember it was super hard not to check FB

\- So I just stopped posting first

\- Then I realized that it significantly helped to avoid FB in the morning

\- Later, I installed the Chrome Extension Eradicator which lets the FB feed
disappear; I never used a FB mobile app

\- More and more I could stay away from FB the entire day just checking it in
the evening

\- Still for 1 or 2 years it was kind of tempting to check FB even if it was
in the evening

Now, I rarely use FB anymore, maybe once a week or even less and if I see all
the same people posting non-stop self-adulations and all the likers liking
every little thing because xy posted it, I command-w FB faster than I opened
it. I pity those posting people, too lonely, too little attention, on a
desperate hunt for some friends on a addictive Skinner Box network.

TBH it was a bit like quitting smoking: initially super, super hard and when
looking back FB's feed feels just useless.

Why do we need an alternative or FB at all?

------
Tehchops
Because when I think responsible, competent custodians of personal data, I
think federal government /s.

Secondly, the mere premise that we "need" a Facebook, or alternative, is
inherently flawed.

Probably echoing the rest of the comments in here at this point, but my 2
cents fwiw.

------
anuraj
So that the big brother watches you over instead of a corporation. Great
Idea!!!

~~~
baq
Are you saying that he doesn't do it now anyway?

------
acct1771
We need an educated populous that takes interest/supports the development and
use of decentralized alternative(s, remember competition?!) to Facebook.

If it's federated, that helps completion even further.

------
Brendinooo
Maybe I didn't read the article closely, but...what feature of Facebook makes
nationalization necessary? Do we need a FB-like platform "of, by, and for the
people" for...ads? News distribution? Sharing news? Connecting people?
Classifieds?

To me, the biggest utility of FB that would make such a project worthwhile is
the pure network aspect of it; there are very few people in my life who aren't
on Facebook.

If that's what we're looking to nationalize, does this just become a national
ID card debate for the Internet era?

~~~
bouncing
Rather than think of it as a feature that makes nationalization necessary,
think of it like the center-left of the UK would:

Facebook's current shitshow is a market failure. Market failures can be
addressed through nationalization. Ergo, Facebook should be nationalized.

It's not something I agree with, but that's the thought process distilled.

------
mistpup
If it was a public open network then maybe, I wouldn't use it to share things
between friends though or messaging. Could be based around posting of public
events like a billboard/invitation feature (the tool i use most on fb), and
maybe a twitter like status feature too. I wouldn't share images unless random
gifs and memes or anything too personal/controversial. It wouldn't be a full
network more like a public information service. There was talk of bbc doing
something like that.

------
tjwds
Worth noting that The Independent is a UK news service, not the US.

~~~
sgt101
Also worth noting that it is a shell of the old Independent that went bust and
then got auctioned off.

------
kelvin0
Nationalised? Yeah, why not just cut out the middleman (FB) and hand
everything directly to the 'government'?

------
knuththetruth
No, we need a user-owned, democratically-controlled version of Facebook, with
correspondingly enshrined “rights.”

The problem is authoritarian control. Swapping out corporate authoritarianism
with government authoritarianism solves zero problems, especially given that
they already constantly collude to entrench each other’s power.

------
kelvin0
FB is not a problem. Handing over information blindly to an entity which
centralizes and consolidates it's 'power' over you is. FB can only do as much
as we 'feed' it.

Stop feeding it. FB is simply doing what inevitably happens when power and
knowledge is concentrated into one place.

------
hashkb
We don't need an alternative to FB at all. Social Networking isn't a first
principle of society.

------
brockers
Yes, because the government has such a spectacular record for protecting
privacy and NOT spying on its citizens. Of course, Facebook cannot come into
your home with guns if they think something your doing is wrong, so
governments have that to their advantage...

------
golergka
So, all the problems we have because of Facebook's de facto monopoly status
will be solved by a government-backed monopoly. Because a faceless government
beurocracy is so much better than a corporate beurocracy.

~~~
mjburgess
Governments have democratic accountability and "company policy" requires a
public vote in parliament/congress.

A private company is a dictatorship of secrecy. Monopolistic systems are best
handled by democratic governments for this reason.

~~~
golergka
In theory.

In practice, democracy is driven by populism and histerical news cycles, while
beurocracy doesn't feel any pressure from the public whatsoever and is usually
occupied with entrenching into occupied political territory. Companies are
much more accountable to their shareholders than governments are to their
citizens.

------
beauzero
No just no. How about we just do without Facebook period.

------
thyselius
Could it be built so that the user data was encrypted / hidden / not usable
for the developers?

(And open source so we could all know for sure this was the case)

------
Tloewald
There’s this thing most countries have called the post office. I suggest it
look into providing secure email.

------
beauzero
It wouldn't be able to compete.

~~~
sp332
It doesn't have to compete. It just has to provide an alternative for people
who want to use it.

------
hacknat
Can we get some health care first?

------
josephby
Fexit

------
d1ffuz0r
Try [https://vk.com](https://vk.com), a lot of people in London using it

~~~
adventured
Based out of Russia - the nation that just attacked the British with a nerve
agent.

If you're going to make the mistake of giving that kind of information to some
entity, at least either pick your own companies or government, or an ally.

------
notafxn
Isn't Facebook already biased enough? Exactly what we need is the BBC looking
at our communications, removing what they can.

------
ohf
Why, no government-funded institutions have ever violated our privacy. What a
wonderful idea.

Propaganda, trite.

~~~
mjburgess
So if bad things happen, we may as well opt for the worse solution?

This all-or-nothing thinking is pathological. Democratic systems are better
than non-democratic systems in monopolistic cases.

------
gmmarks
Haven't the ideologues learned anything from the 20th century?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System)

