The Perfect Social Media
What does it take to make a perfect social media platform?
Free Speech ¶
We first must allow true free speech. Speech should not be filtered based on political beliefs or personal agendas. However, there must be content restrictions based on what is lawful. We need an external party to be able to ban illegal content (child pornography, hate speech, racism) while accepting legal content even if it conflicts with personal biases. As much as I dislike X, I think its platform is the closest to resemble this.
Free of Charge ¶
There should be no monetary cost to participate on the platform, and no financial incentive to post certain types of content. The platform should have no barrier to entry regardless of financial status or class.
X is a poor example of this. By introducing paid verification, they allow higher class citizens to overshadow lower class citizens.
Instagram is also a poor example. They allow paid and sponsored posts to be propagated further than normal posts.
Democracy ¶
We also want democracy. We should be able to vote on what content is "good" and what content is "bad". These votes can be counted into what might be called the value of a post: a positive value signifies a good post and a negative value signifies a bad post. If a post has a net negative value, it can be hidden from user feeds or maybe even deleted entirely.
Most social media platforms only focus on what content is "good" through a liking or favoriting system. Reddit is a better example of democratic voting as it allows users to upvote and downvote posts, ultimately resulting in a post's total value called karma.
A post voting system contains a multitude of flaws, including what is known as brigading, where users join together to mass downvote posts they do not like. An example of this is Redditors grouping together to downvote all of Trump's posts so that Trump's voice is never heard.
How do we combat brigading?
Pseudonymity ¶
Our social media platform cannot have explicit identities. If users know who owns each account, brigading will continue.
We might propose anonymity as a solution where every account is completely anonymous to allow truly free discussion. However, this also has issues of its own. True anonymity means there will be no legal repercussions for misbehavior. For example, if a user cyberbullies other users or continuously posts illegal content, there is no way for any governing body to hold the user responsible for their crimes.
Instead we might consider pseudonymity[1], where each person is granted a pseudonym by a governing body to be able to use as their online presence. The governing body then keeps track of each person to pseudonym mapping. In this scenario, each user will always be guaranteed a unique pseudonym, and the governing body can charge individuals with crimes committed on the platform.
Who is the Governing Body? ¶
Who do we decide to govern the platform, and who is the governing body that grants pseudonyms?
The local government might be a logical candidate, but governments are easily corrupted or can filter speech they do not agree with.
However, a private company also contains the same flaws. A private company might dox the information of users they disagree with.
We might consider a global entity like the United Nations to moderate and control pseudonyms, but the United Nations currently does not represent all nations of the world.
We might also consider a decentralized system in which local chapters of the platform connect via peer to peer communication. In this scenario, each decentralized instance would be moderated by a local community group. Some examples of this are Bluesky and Mastodon (ActivityPub).
Conclusion ¶
These are my open thoughts on what it might take to make a perfect social media platform. There are so many platforms today that try different strategies to bring their platforms closer to perfection (X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky).
What do you think makes a perfect social media platform? Do you agree or disagree?