Let’s try public service for the internet

Why we need an anti-viral space for online community

It was a brutal display of force – even if it was the right thing to do.

Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon taking joint action to force right-wing extremists (including the American president) off the mainstream internet reminded us how much power these companies wield.

Just like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal effectively shut off donations to Wikileaks as punishment for exposing American secrets, these five tech giants can warp online debate – by action or by inaction. According to the latest analysis of Twitter data, misinformation about the American election dropped by 73 percent after the platform banned Donald Trump. With Twitter being his preferred tool for spreading election lies and incitement, just imagine what might have been the result had they kicked Trump out months before the election.

Now is the time to reassess what kind of power we want the big tech companies to have, and how we can create real alternatives to them. I believe one thing many nations around the world should do right now is create public service platforms for the internet, much like we have for tv and radio.

“State television” has always been a fraught subject, and it works differently in different parts of the world. Ideally, public service tv/radio is independent of influence from politicians and aims to supply impartial, relevant, thoroughly researched news and information to citizens. In the internet era, excluding social media from this idea seems ludicrously old-fashioned.

The pandemic has already changed the way we use the internet. Not only have video conferences become the new normal in the workplace, but the internet lets us deal with school, shopping and social needs while staying safe. New data shows that new groups of people – particularly the elderly – have learned to use the internet for new things during the pandemic.

However, studies from around the world show that despite increasing internet usage, our trust in it is declining. My home country, Sweden, is one of the most digitalized in the world. Every year, the Internet Foundation conducts a study called “Swedes and the internet”, to gauge development and attitudes toward the online world. Worryingly, the latest iteration of the study, released in December 2020, shows a majority of people distrusting the big tech companies and worrying about them infringing on our privacy. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of Swedes worry about our government in this way. (We’re a trusting people compared to most countries.)

The “Trust Barometer” is another yearly study published by an independent Swedish research institute, gauging the trust we put in various institutions and corporations. Its latest report, published in Februrary 2020, shows that only seven percent of Swedes trust Facebook although 80 percent use it.

This statistic points at a problem: Most people who use Facebook do so despite not trusting the company. They do not use Facebook because they like it, or because Facebook is such a great service; they do it because Facebook has a quasi-monopoly on social gathering on the internet, thanks to network effects and the winner-takes-all logic of competition in the social space.

Facebook has aggressively defended its top dog position by buying competing businesses (e.g. Whatsapp and Instagram), copying their features (e.g. Snapchat and Tiktok) and locking its users ever harder into the platform. At this point Facebook is all but impossible to compete with, not because it has a superior product or customers who love it (they don’t), but because of its scale.

Whether we like it or not, Facebook is our default arena for discussing politics, for sharing and consuming news, and for community organizing. It is where parents form groups to discuss their childrens’ school, where neighbours discuss their local community and where non-profit organizations reach their members. Anyone who opts out of feeding their life into Facebook’s algorithms also opts out of large parts of modern society.

A public service internet platform could supply digital identity, secure mail, a payment solution and a space where these different groups and organizations could meet and organize without being exploited by predatory ad networks. These are fundamental human needs in a digitalized world, and governments should act accordingly. The need for internet commons has never been more urgent than today, with trust in big tech at an all-time low and the need for online tools and forums at an all-time high.

Trusting brilliant entrepreneurs to create the best internet possible got us where we are now, with enormous platforms profiting off anxiety and disinformation, gobbling up personal data to create insidious algorithms that keep us hooked and easily manipulated. The unrest in Washington D.C. was the consequence of a deplorable political development that has been ongoing for decades, but it was exacerbated by propaganda and recruitment on major social platforms that have been profiting off these tendencies for years.

A public service platform would not instantly solve all our problems. It would not be as exciting as Youtube or as addictive as Tiktok. It would be bland, safe and predictable. Its purpose, in the end, is not competing with the digital stimulants of Silicon Valley, but filling basic needs for societies and citizens.

Yes, activists on the far left and right of the political spectrum could form groups there and discuss politics all they want. But such a space would not offer algorithmic leverage for fake news and conspiracy theories. Any speech crimes, such as incitement and threats, would be easily investigated as users would be signing in with their unique digital identities.

A project of this nature requires trust in the government’s ability to take on such a challenge without wasting tax payers’ money and without using the platform for mass surveillance of their own citizens. Few governments in the world have earned such trust. But in advanced democracies where people in general trust their governance and political system, it should not be hard to build public alternatives serving our basic online needs

The British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, once pioneered the public service concept for broadcasting. They, at least, are tentatively investigating the possibilities of public service for the internet. Who dares to take the next step?