Commercial social media (CSM) play a vital role in support of community outreach and engagement. Despite the apparent benefits of CSM, its widespread use raises important concerns about privacy and surveillance, limits on innovation, and data residency for the organizations that increasingly rely on them. This chapter will consider these concerns in relation to an international research collaboration involving technology stewardship training. Technology stewardship is an approach adapted from the communities of practice literature intended to promote effective use of digital ICTs for engagement. The program currently focuses on using commercial social media platforms for introductory capacity building, but this chapter will suggest important reasons to assist them in exploring non-commercial alternative social media (ASM) platforms. The chapter describes how the technology stewardship model offers a pathway for communities of practice interested in adopting ASM for outreach and engagement.
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The platforms that host and inform our networked public sphere are unelected, unaccountable, and often impossible to audit or oversee. (Barabas, Narula & Zuckerman, 2017)
For many organizations, commercial social media (CSM) serves an important role as a communications channel for outreach and engagement (Young, 2018). The widespread availability of mobile devices, the advanced features and affordances, and the low cost of using CSM makes it an irresistible choice, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Moreover, it has provided real and tangible benefits to those organizations and their constituents that can be difficult to dispute.
Recent revelations around privacy and surveillance with CSM, not to mention ongoing challenges with mis/disinformation campaigns, and politically-motivated shutdowns of Facebook and other popular services, have raised awareness, if not grave concerns, about the trade-offs that we all make when deciding to use CSM. Free, of course, is never “free” in the sense that our digital labour and personal data becomes part of a commercial ecosystem with significant implications for organizations that use these channels for outreach and engagement. Some of the hidden costs of CSM includes accounts being banned or suspended due to posts that may include content that violates (or is misinterpreted as such) ever-changing rules and policies; limited control over data residency and lack of cross-platform interoperability; conformity to CSM-imposed standards for profiles and exchanges; lack of control over (or understanding of) algorithmic filtering and AI operations, as well as other privacy-related practices of CSM providers (see, for example, Barrett, 2018).
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Gehl (2018) has summarized several concerns with CSM pertaining to technology infrastructure, political economy, and cultural practices. From a technological standpoint, the tendency with CSM is toward the centralization of data flows, proprietary code and closed databases, as well as secretive algorithms that influence how and when content is displayed to users. In terms of political economy, CSMs have established their business models on monetizing the free labour provided by users within a digital ecosystem dominated mainly by Silicon Valley firms (at least in much of the world, although Chinese based CSM represent increasing competition). CSM have also fostered cultural practices that position users as willing data-driven and surveilled subjects with limited ability to influence how identity is portrayed and sociality is conducted in the online world.
Alternative social media (ASM) describes both a movement and a collection of platforms that respond to the concerns raised by CSM. In many cases, ASM are established as a mirror image of an existing CSM. For example, Diaspora and Friendica are self-hosted social networking services that provide an open-source alternative to Facebook. Twister is described as a peer-to-peer microblogging service similar to Twitter but with a decentralized architecture based on a blockchain-like protocol. Signal is a nonprofit foundation that provides an open-source alternative to WhatsApp for one-to-one or group messaging that supports cross-platform encryption.
On the one hand, these ASM projects are reminiscent of the early Internet pioneers in emphasizing end-to-end architecture and “permissionless innovation.” Early efforts by activities in first-generation community networks (e.g., makingthenetwork.org, archived on the Wayback Machine), and by researchers in the community informatics field, struggled to achieve widespread uptake of local ICT initiatives, even while the popularity of commercial social media began to skyrocket (Gurstein, 2005). However, with growing anxieties around CSM, it seems timely to revisit and reconsider a role for non-commercial alternatives. For instance, Poell & van Dijck (2015) suggest that CSM are in fact, “antithetical to community formation” because of the shift in power to emphasize data collection for advertising and the use of proprietary algorithms in moderating content. As such, the interest in ASM represents a movement that resists much of what CSM today stands for, promoting a forward-looking vision of an Internet-based public sphere perhaps best expressed by the Internet Society’s guiding principles (Internet Society, 2017):