A wake-up call
I was on the first day of vacation when I received a notification from Facebook that my account does not meet community guidelines and has been canceled. First I wasn’t worried a lot.I have to admit that my relationship with Facebook is something of love and hate. I spend a lot of time there catching up with my friends, and I also use it as a news source for things related to my work.
However, Facebook is dangerously addictive. It shows you a video, and if you spend just a tiny bit of time on it instead of swiping down your timeline (in my case it would be funny videos of cats and dogs and great tennis shots), the next thing you know, your timeline is filled with these videos. Seriously, I use Facebook to get news about my areas of professional interest (such as computer vision), but at times all I could see was kittens and dogs, puppies and cats, Federer, Federer, Federer… And if you click on a video you like, behold! You fall into a time hole, the next time you take your eyes off the screen is 30 minutes later, wondering what has happened.
Once, after my iPhone’s screen time app started screaming at me, I deleted the Facebook app from the phone. Unfortunately, somehow I reinstalled it a few months later. I put it on the last screen in a folder, making it harder for myself to start it, which somewhat helped, but I still spend way more time on Facebook than I want to. So my initial reaction to the account ban was like yeah it’s OK I’m gonna have a better vacation without the Facebook addiction. But then the last phrase (“we may not be able to review your appellation”) caught my attention. So the ban may be permanent. I will never see those kittens again!
We live in a dystopian reality run by robots
This got me thinking: what other things in my life depend on my Facebook account (pitiful as it sounds)? My company has a couple product pages where my customers ask questions, I won’t be able to access those, but my colleagues can. I can’t login to several websites with my Facebook account (why did I not use email for those accounts? — stupid!).
But, most importantly, I have to find other ways of talking to people I like and enjoy interacting with outside of my work. Kids pictures, solving math problems with a college friend, politics, tech discussions…There are more than a few friends that I’d have trouble reaching, as the FB account is my default connection to them. FB is not just a social network now, it has become a utility company, where your social life somewhat depends on your account. What’s also important, it is an unregulated utility company, that can cancel your account without any explanation. Surely you don’t expect this from other utility companies, like gas, water and electricity suppliers. But Facebook not only can cancel your account in theory, but often does it.
A lot of account cancellation is done by algorithms, so any — I cannot stress this enough — any account can get killed without any human supervision, no explanation and no accountability. For instance, CNN reported that between January and March 2020 FB killed 2.2B accounts! To put things in perspective, this is 7 times more than Twitter monthly active users, and about the same as the number of FB monthly active users. Assuming a false positive rate of 0.1% (a generous assumption, a lot of machine learning algorithms have higher error rates for similar problems), 2.2M accounts of real people were canceled. If you think CNN reporters just mixed up billions and millions, no, they didn’t: Youtube regularly terminates around 2M channels a quarter, nobody gets excited about it.
Other social networks can also kill accounts, making a significant impact on your life and work. If you are a media company, you depend on your Twitter account. And if you are a tech professional, you don’t exist without your Linkedin profile. They are private businesses and can kill accounts as it suits them. If you are not scared, you should be.
When I almost finished this essay, Youtube terminated my teenage daughter’s channel. She wants to be a professional piano player, and we upload videos of her recitals to a Youtube channel. She has just been selected to participate in a prestigious contest that each year selects only 16 piano players from the whole world, a pretty important step in her future career. The selection was by video (everything is remote in our age of pandemic), so if the ban had happened a month earlier, chances are she wouldn’t have been selected to participate at all, — the selection committee would have seen bad links and moved to the next candidate.
There were no warnings from Youtube, no “strikes”, just channel termination out of the blue. We sent an appeal and 24 hours later got a negative response. No specific reasons for termination were given in either communication. An escalation by a Google employee brought the account back within 1 hour (I have a strong feeling that this was the first time a living human being looked at the account and made an obvious decision that it doesn’t violate any policies).
As I found out, Youtube killed many accounts, including pretty big ones, such as from Blender and MIT. Here is a good summary https://www.maxlaumeister.com/articles/youtube-is-deleting-your-favorite-videos/ showing that censoring decisions of Youtube are almost never reversed, unless channel owners are able to gain massive community support, usually on another platform like twitter.
It feels, especially in the times of pandemic, when a lot of human interaction happens online, that we are subjects of autocracies run by hordes of robots. We know many such dystopian countries from science fiction. For example, The Matrix. Now imagine living in the Matrix where Agent Smith, instead of being solely an antivirus, is now motivated to get and then sell as much of your data as possible.
So far there is no hope that regulation, competition or internal processes push these digital countries towards democracy with transparent legal systems. Like Neo, we need to urgently take the red pill (in the old, 1999 meaning of the term) and become independent.
Breaking free from ad-driven overlords
Here are a few things you can do to become less dependent on ad-driven social networks (admittedly, following these requires more technical skills than an average consumer possesses). The infrastructure for decentralized social networks that are decoupled from ad $$ is slowly growing. There are 3 aspects of being socially present that we need to be decentralized:
- Self-hosting: a place where we can host our data. It can’t be servers that belong to ad-driven social networks. Fortunately, there are tons of companies that can help you to create your own website and host your data. Some of them are integrated with WordPress https://wordpress.org/hosting/, others like wix.com provide you a wysiwyg editor. Hosting videos is harder, but instead of sending people to Youtube consider providing a link to it on your website. Then, if your Youtube channel gets killed, you can reupload the video to another service and update the link, so that people visiting your website won’t notice a difference. Also, you can use tools like JW Player (there is a WordPress plugin) that allow you to host videos on your website and have your own customized player instead of the standard provided by Youtube. Hosting videos on a platform like Vimeo that sells ads but also gets revenue directly from hosting is probably safer than hosting on Youtube that makes money only from ads. It is important that backing up your website and moving it to a different hosting is immeasurably easier than moving your data to a new Facebook or Youtube account.
- Authentication: if you want to share data that is only for your friends eyes, your website has to know who is looking at your data. There are open standards like OpenID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID that provide a decentralized authentication protocol that allows you as a webmaster to skip implementing your own authentication, and save your friends the trouble of logging to your website each time. The list of companies that have certified as OpenID providers includes big names like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Samsung and many more.
- Social network protocol: in order to have truly social interactions on the web, you want some way of notifying others that you have new content, and a search that allows others to find you. You can’t send your friends an email each time you publish a new post on your website. There are a few standards in this area, ActivityPub developed by W3C is an example. It basically allows one to build a timeline out of accounts hosted in a decentralized fashion, given a social graph and authentication. There are even protocols like PeerTube built on top of ActivityPub and WebTorrent to build an equivalent of Youtube service, allowing to find and view videos from different hosts that implement this protocol. This means that you can host videos on your website, and somebody using PeerTube will be able to find and view them without even knowing where they are hosted!
Also, here is a list of various decentralized social network projects, features and protocols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_protocols_for_distributed_social_networking.
Some final thoughts
I am far from the idea that ad-driven social networks are the source of all evil and should be destroyed. They obviously brought a lot of good to the world. Successful business models allowed them to hire great engineers and build solutions that provided our communication during the times of pandemic. However, this model doesn’t work for increasingly many use cases, because of addictiveness and censorship. Decentralized social media may solve a part of these issues.
It is not clear how decentralized solutions may become important enough for consumers. Facebook, Twitter, Google and others have occupied most of the market, and their moats seem very hard to penetrate, if at all possible. Here is a good discussion on HN about why Peertube won’t be mainstream anytime soon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21513310. I also realize that going decentralized now is somewhat similar to using Linux in the 90s, it requires tech knowledge and skills, and takes time.
However, I believe we have to start relying less on the big social nets. This is why I am publishing this text not on my social media accounts and not on substack, but on my own website, hosted by a service that I pay for. I will still be present on social media, but will try to host increasingly more data on my website. It will take time and money, and won’t even put a dent in ad-driven companies. But the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I am going to take it, and urge you to do the same.