By Benjamin Y. Fong
The fantasy of social media as a magical tool of social connection contrasts starkly with its reality as a cesspool of vicious personal attacks and paranoid indignation.
It is tempting to attribute this yawning gap to unregulated capitalism: Facebook and Twitter have virtually no competition and are perfectly comfortable doing everything from manipulating user data to providing a platform for hate speech so long as it is in the interest of their bottom line. Perhaps taking social media out of private control would allow us finally to realize the fantasy that sustains it.
This is the animating thought behind Evan Malmgren’s recent piece, “Socialized Media,” which outlines what it might mean to rein in the excesses of the digital platform giants. Rather than artificially reintroduce competition through an antitrust campaign or regulate these services as public utilities (or even nationalize them), Malmgren argues that we ought rather to see “social media as a public commons” and hand “collective power over digital platforms to the people they connect.” In his view, the state should not act as a “final custodian” of collective data reserves but rather, given the transnational nature of these…
