We were already shouting en masse that we would turn our backs on the platforms of Big Tech, but that never really happened.
Public values are not a priority
Yet with every new controversial move by Big Tech, there seems to be a kind of collective outrage. Prominent phone number library figures from The Hague have now expressed their dissatisfaction with X: Eva Heijblom, Director-General of Digitalisation and Government Organisation at the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, noted that “citizens are not seen as citizens by these platforms, but as instruments for data collection”. Laurens Dassen, chair of the Volt faction, called X “once a village square, now a toxic place” and announced that he would be leaving the platform.
The comparison with citizens on a village square is, however, misplaced. As I wrote in Trouw in early 2023 : “ Interesting alternative social media platforms Twitter is not a village square, just as a bookstore is not a library. Twitter is a private company and pursues commercial goals, not public ones. In the above comparison, Twitter is at most the pub on the village square.”
Also read: Mohi, Mastodon, Minds… 8
The big question is why we assign a social function to a commercial platform. Why do we let Big Tech watch over democratic values? We must not caseno email list forget that we made Big Tech Big . Now it is also up to us to break this monopoly position.
Decentralized alternatives: a different future?
What if we do it differently? Platforms like Mastodon show that there is an alternative. Instead of centralizing everything under one big company, these platforms work with independent communities. Users decide for themselves which servers they want to be active on and keep control over their own data. This makes them less dependent on advertising and gives the user more freedom.