Highly centralized sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit all play a role in how we as a society communicate today. Social media platforms are used as large-scale marketing tools and communication platforms for people across the world. These centralized sites have both benefits and drawbacks for consumers.
Some of the benefits they present are their popularity amongst consumers. Almost everyone involved with the digital world has heard of one or more of these large corporations. We are more familiar with applications like Twitter and Facebook and therefore they get used more often and by more individuals. Large brands and startup companies often use these social media platforms to target audiences and promote their products. Many of those companies that use these sites are well known brands like Nike or Subaru. I know personally I have discovered numerous different products that I like from paid advertisements and popular influencers promoting certain products on these platforms. The problem with more decentralized environments that are more publicly run is that they are less favorable for large brands and less people are likely to migrate over to those platforms because of that.
Back in 2019 when Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey was in charge, he wanted to look for more ways to work towards decentralizing Twitter. He spoke out about giving the public more freedom to control the content they were seeing and producing rather than the company itself. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, the goals for decentralization came to a halt. Many of these large companies want more control over what is and isn’t allowed to be said on their platforms. We as a society should be cautious of the limitations that are being set in place and speak out when we feel like we don’t have any say in how our media is being monitored.
Something I have done recently is stopped using Twitter (X) as a whole. Almost a fifth of Twitter users have fallen off the app since Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it to X. I don’t like the content that comes across my feed when I open the app and so I have just stopped using the platform overall instead of adhering to its new regulations.
While moving to more decentralized environments would allow us as users to have more control over our media actions, it is unlikely that the mass of digital society would take the leap. Instead of creating new platforms and urging the public to shift in its entirety, I think it would be beneficial to focus on the problem at hand, which is these centralized platforms. Lack of data portability in particular is one issue that should be addressed and made more accessible to public media users.
In the large scope of things, the owners of these centralized platforms have the final say in what we can and can’t say. While we do agree to these terms and conditions when we sign up for their platforms, we should have more control over how our media is accessed and distributed.