How can I protect myself on social media?
Defining the problem
Facebook, founded in 2004, has grown to become the dominant social media platform with nearly 3 billion users active daily. This free and widely used service has come at a cost, much publicised and discussed in the media. The problem lies with Facebooks business model that relies on advertising revenue in order to offer the service. In 2020 it was $84.2b having grown over 20% from the previous year.
“This is what every business has always dreamt of: to have a guarantee that if it places an ad, it will be successful. That’s their [social media companies’] business. They sell certainty. In order to be successful in that business, you have to have great predictions. Great predictions begin with one imperative: you need a lot of data.”
Increasing user engagement
In order to sustain and grow these revenues, Facebook needs people to be on the platform and the key driver is user engagement. User engagement is achieved by tracking, collecting and processing your data with AI algorithms tuned to maximise your engagement with the platform. A consequence of this is that news feeds are filtered without your knowing and fake news gets propagated, because the reality is that fake news spreads 6x faster than genuine news.
“Meanwhile, you get slowly sucked in, spending more and more time on it. I began to be aware that I was believing things that…didn't exist.”
Damaging young people
It has been well publicised from leaked internal documents that the platform can damage young peoples lives as well as threaten democracy. Facebook also owns other key social media apps, Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Tiktok had started recommending weight loss videos and ‘what I eat in a day’ videos to my ‘For You’ page.”
“We can confidently say that [social media is] changing the way that teens interact with each other, with peers, with the world, and that those changes and interactions lead to changes in behaviors, changes in psychiatric and mental health.”
Mark Zuckerburg is not actually in control of Facebook's platform, the algorithms are!
There are alternatives!
The good news is that there are alternatives but the challenge is persuading people to use them when their friends, organisation or church are all on Facebook. Groups like churches, could promote healthier use of social media by using and promoting one of the alternative platforms.
Be aware though, that there are two different but somewhat overlapping problems: keeping our data private and moderating content on social media and messaging platforms. The use of AI algorithms exacerbates the problem of extremist content or fake news by promoting it where it increases user engagement. As the messaging app. Telegraph’s usage demonstrates, even with privacy and without AI, such platforms can still be used in a malign way. The more privacy orientated platforms and apps do at least give you control.
Messaging apps.
Signal is one of the most popular alternatives to WhatsApp and shares the same features but without the compromising privacy. It’s considered to be the most secure messaging services available and requires a telephone number to register that is used as an identifier. Signal has been downloaded over 100m times and has around 40m monthly active users. The organisation is a not for profit, funded by donations and a very large interest free loan from the founder.
Telegram is the main rival to WhatsApp, at least by its number of users, with around 500m monthly active users in 2021. Its operational HQ is Dubai and is legally registered in the UK. Data is stored on your device by default but you can also store it on distributed Telegraph servers. You need a phone number to use the service and messages are end to end encrypted only for “secret chats” and voice calls, but not by default. Chat messages are encrypted on the Telegram servers but they could be read by Telegram, since it handles the encryption at the server end, unlike Signal.
There have been some criticism of the encryption protocol developed by Telegraph co-founder Nikolai Durov. Telegram does log users IP address and metadata but note that this can be hidden by using a VPN (see Data Privacy tab). A desktop client is available to install on your computer (Mac OS, Windows and Linux).
The company has been funded by the founders, investments and bonds to date but may eventually turn to a “freemium” model where additional services are subscription based (see founders statement). Adverts are not served in private chats but the company is working on its own ad platform to serve non targeted ads in one to many chats where ads are already posted.
Telegram has attracted some of the same users that have dogged other platforms – far right and terrorist groups as well as the distribution of child and teenage pornography. Where there are no algorithms designed to increase user engagement, potentially fuelling these problems, content moderation is the only way to prevent extremist groups and other socially unacceptable behaviour. The debate continues as to whether such platforms should censor content or allow free speech, who should be responsible for content that breaches a particular countries ethics or values? There are no easy answers!
Wickr Me is a free messaging app that allows an anonymous user name whilst the subscription based Pro version requires an email address for the username.
Whilst offering many of the same features as other apps, like video and audio conferencing, file, photo, video and message sharing, it is differs in that all content is ephemeral – it deletes all messages and attachments after a user specified amount of time. These messages are end to end encrypted and stored on your device, not on Wickr Me servers (except for a limited time but are deleted on delivery). There are apps and desktop clients for the major platforms. Wickr Me does not collect your IP address nor user metadata (accounts are anonymous).
The Pro version has a free entry level offering that doesn’t have all the features of the subscription services. There is also an enterprise version – Wickr Enterprise, that offers a corporate grade collaboration platform. The only down side for some might be that messages do get deleted after a specified time, this could also mean that a recipient might not see a message if they don’t login until after this period of time. Wickr was aquired by Amazon Web Services in June 2021 – how this will affect the service remains to be seen.
For a more detailed review of these and other secure messaging apps see here.
Social Media Platforms
There are several, not so well known, apps and platforms that offer the same functionality as Facebook but without the data collection, AI algorithms and advertising.
MeWe (>15m users in 2020), won a Most Innovative Companies award in 2020 and their mission is: “to revolutionize social media and build a new platform to go head-to-head with Facebook and restore decency, privacy, and respect for social media users.” MeWe has a Privacy Bill of Rights, and make money on selling other services. The company has attracted some criticism for being light on content moderation, particularly miss-information from the likes of antivaxxers and other conspiracy theorists.
Yubo (>50m users in 2020), originally developed by engineers in France, is another free service that has paid for extra services, aimed at young people with an emphasis on livestreaming. “Our goal is to create a safe and fun virtual space by providing a trusted social platform for our community.” Adult members are not allowed to connect with the 13-17 year community. The app does use facial recognition technology to detect if someone is under 13 or an adult has given the wrong age. It also uses algorithms to scan livestreams for inappropriate content, if detected moderators interrupt livestreams. This won praise in a report in an Independent Inquiry into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA) in the UK in 2020 that stated: “The value of human moderation is evident from the success achieved by the social network Yubo, whose moderators interrupt livestreams to tell underage users to put their clothes on”.
Vero (>5m users in 2020) is a subscription based social media company, founded by a Lebanese billionaire, son of a former Prime Minister, that doesn’t collect data by default and shows no adds. Users can share a wide variety of content with its feed resembling Instagram’s. Fees are also made from an affiliate scheme when users but a product that they saw on the platform. Their manifesto is not however entirely clear in terms of how they might use a subscribers data: “Vero only collects the data we believe is necessary to provide users with a great experience and to ensure the security of their accounts.”
WT.Social (0.5m users in 2021) also known as WikiTribune Social, was founded in October 2019 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. It positions itself as an opposite to Facebook in terms of privacy and data usage claiming that “you- not algorithms – decide what you see”! Not surprisingly users contribute to “sub-wikis” and this helps to moderate and verify content. It is a web based service, funded by donations, but doesn’t have Android nor iOS apps.
Ello (>1m users in 2021) is an online, ad free, social media site targeted at creatives and offers itself as a “global community of artists dedicated to creative excellence”. It is similar to the Pinterest website. The company uses an affiliate model to generate revenue as well as selling branded T shirts. It is also exploring the “freemium” model to generate revenue in the future. Rather like other services in this section, it would make money from add on services and features whilst retaining a free base subscription.
Mastodon (591k users in 2021) is similar to Twitter and Tumblr, and is based on open source software (community owned and developed not proprietary). Open source software means that developers can access the code and see what it does and how it’s being used. These types of platform are usually supported through volunteer contributors (to the development) and donations . They have apps for Android and iOS.
Other open source based platforms like Friendica and Diaspora work on a decentralised basis where data is stored in different locations (“hubs” or “pods”) rather than centralised. You can choose which “hub’ you would prefer to use and you are in control of your data. The software can also be self hosted making them suitable for an organisation to set up and control data storage for their own community.