Meta’s new text-based social app Threads has quickly gained 100 million users since launching last week, which appears to be negatively impacting traffic on Twitter. According to web analytics, Twitter traffic declined 5-11% over the first two days Threads was available compared to the previous week. Threads was able to grow rapidly by allowing users to sign up with their existing Instagram accounts and bring over some of their followers. However, Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues. The fast growth of Threads may solidify its position as a real competitor to Twitter, which has over 238 million daily active users.
From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.
A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.
No reason the state can’t run their own Mastodon instance. Then they don’t have to moderate anything except the comment sections on their own pages, but everyone can consume the content as they please.
I live in a region of the US recently effected by a freak natural disaster. The US Army Core of Engineers announced at 2AM last night that they might have to release water from a dam, adding to the floodwaters in an already flooded downtown near me. On Twitter. Which you can’t view unless you create an account, and even then you might get rate limited. That’s not an acceptable availability for a public emergency announcement.
Yes, having state-run instances of federated social media would be an excellent way to both legitimize the fediverse and remove some of the control that these mega-corporations have. There’s no reason why privately- or corporate-run instances could not exist alongside these instances, and would still serve to combat potential state or corporate censorship.
The logic of what you’re saying is that the executive teams Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg would provide better leadership for the UK than the current people.
I mean it’s a low bar, but I wouldn’t go that far.
I’d say that, honestly. Comfortably so, even - if the large private providers are acting badly, at least there’s the potential of smaller private groups setting up their own.
Services directly managed by the state tend to require adherence to a government’s political preferences - where something like the idea of social media as a state-owned utility is concerned, the reality of that would inevitably trend in unfortunate directions for minorities that the government has decided to consider a problem.