Why is there no government-built social media? | Hacker News Reader

Why is there no government-built social media?

loeber.substack.com

31 pointsloeber90 comments

A US government run social media site would be terrible. For one, our political parties are extremely polarized, so any subjective moderation would flip with regime changes. To avoid this, it'd just become linkedin. Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.

I disagree. Government run social media has no reason to promote engaging(antagonizing) content towards you. You log in, see a post or two from your local, state, and Federal representatives and departments that no longer have to post on a dozen different private social media to disseminate public info and some post from people you have specifically chosen to follow. A chronological feed too, the site doesn't need to keep you scrolling and engaged to view ads.

Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it.

I dont agree, but thats okay. You and I don't have the same level of trust that future government employees and leadership will be objective and reasonable with their interpretation of what we post to our friends and family, I guess. I hope you're the right one here, but I cant make myself believe it.

I trust them just as much as I trust private interests.

The balance of power between the two is far from equal though. One can take your freedom, money, and life. The other can deplatform you.

Don't slippery slope me on what can happen in social media when both public and private interests do what you are worried about right now!

I'd love to see it (in a hypothetical sense slightly more than the real sense) just to see the "tyrannical moderation" case law that comes of it. If they wanted to add a bunch of "analytics" suddenly there's real government contention around online privacy.

In the long term, it seems like it has a lot of potential to be a Good Thing but it depends a lot on how it actually plays out.

Why can't this just be on their website? Not everything needs engagement from the masses.

Also building online communities is incredibly difficult and resource heavy, seeing that we can barely get enough funding for teachers to run their classrooms appropriately would this be the best use of taxpayers money?

Great idea I think we can fund teachers and provide a simple social media site for all.

Think about why this would be incredibly difficult and resource heavy? The US social media site doesn't have to try and serve video reliably while threading in ads to make a profit. Sure people can try to upload video in plain text and create their own clients to ingest it, like I said "Open up the API and let people layer their own engagements on top of it."

It's an infrastructure project, like national highway or the internet.

Exactly. Don't waste my taxes on a social media site.

Whether it would suck or not, it’s really the only place where laws the rules would be what the law actually is —-Truly free speech and a platform where people can legitimately vote and be part of the rule making process.

Having a public competitor to private enterprise only improves things like a properly funded USPS over UPS/FedEx or even banking.

> Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.

It’s noteworthy to mention that what you are describing is just what one party likes and the other does not.

The context of that description is LinkedIn, and it's an accurate way to describe interactions on LinkedIn. I get the point you're making about politics, but it's not what GP was talking about (IMO).

I agree that it’s accurate to describe LinkedIn, but the larger context is subjective moderation on a government run social media platform, so I was trying to point out that what’s safe on LinkedIn is generally considered to be good by the Democratic party.

Both parties virtue signal with safe topics, but they disagree on what counts as safe (or virtuous).

Simple examples: every public Democratic figure will support pride month and every Republican will support the 2nd Amendment, regardless of what they actually think about the issues. If they don't, their own side will eat them.

I agree with your first point, but I’m unsure about the second.

I don’t think many Democrats secretly don’t support pride month or many Republicans secretly don’t support the 2nd amendment, but then go on to publicly show support so their side doesn’t attack them.

> don’t support

There's a certain baseline level of affirmation that's sometimes required for it not to be considered that one specifically disagrees with some hot button topic that was brought up. It's what's being spoken against with the sentiment, "Not everything has to be about X."

It's less that one secretly doesn't support X, just that they're talking about Y right now as a separate issue from X. X is important, and may even be related to Y, but Y is what's being discussed. Such an assertion is often met with, "Oh, so you don't support X!?" and that comes off as hostile, regardless of actual intentions.

Because our country continues to dismantle our social apparatus in favor of the private interests. Creating a public social network is, in retrospect, quite obvious. Once, we did similar things for libraries, hospitals, schools and roads. We very feasibly could have socialized the phones lines and the internet began as a public good, though it has since been carved up. But Why? I think the answer lies in a blindspot that obscures all possibilities which are not profitable.

Because any attempt at moderation would be considered infringement on the first amendment and illegal by the US constitution. Social media is a cesspool without moderation.

That's sort of untrue; the history of radio and television in the US has a significant amount of moderation that did not run afoul of the first amendment. See for the current day: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/fcc-and-speech

Aside from that, you're highlighting a US-specific dynamic. Other nations have different legal standards on speech; e.g. Britain has quite harsh libel laws. My assumption is that certainly some nations (not all) would be in a decent position to offer a well-moderated platform that is in line with their legal standards.

Other governments exist. And none of them seem to have done this either. But the "why" is lacking. As is the capability, frankly.

I mean it already is to some; some people are pushing for social media to be reclassified as a utility, and some people are banging the drums about their rights being infringed because they can't say what they want on social media, citing free speech.

Twitter is going through that right now; it does not have free speech despite being led by a self-proclaimed free speech absolutionist. Truth Social was supposedly to escape Twitter and co's censorship, but it's one of the least tolerant platforms out there. It goes on.

Why is there no Government-Built Social Media outside of the US?

> Why is there no Government-Built Social Media outside of the US?

Closest thing I know of is this: https://social.network.europa.eu/explore

There was a plot point in Madam Secretary about how the FCC is underutilized for regulating things like social media or deepfake videos on Youtube. Obviously, that's a fictional drama where they can hand-wave solutions as needed, but I do feel like in the US, federal regulators are being underutilized, or overall don't have the teeth I would expect.

I could be misinformed, but couldn't a contractor or independent company just partner with government agencies (local, state, federal) and thus do away with the first amendment infringement issue?

IIRC, this is how some tech is exempt from FOIA requests (because the tech is "private" even though the end user is the DoD).

Allegedly they basically did that with facebook. The CIA venture arm in-q-tel[1] invested. Presumably they could do some loophole where a contractor runs a site that way but it would probably be a huge headache. Iirc there is a clause that governments cant compete directly with private enterprise, at least, the Federal gov.

[1]https://www.cbsnews.com/news/social-media-is-a-tool-of-the-c...

This does seem to be a major concern

Should we start a public petition?

EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.

What am I missing?

EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.

Willingness to participate, and purpose. Is it for fun or civic engagement?

Arguable IMO it could be argued for civic engagement and discourse and education. That’s the charter as I understand for NPR, I don’t see why a public social network couldn’t fall under that.

Misinformation on social media exists today, I don’t see why we couldn’t argue as a society that public discourse on the network couldn’t be perceived as a way to educate the public.

As far a infrastructure, just limit content type and posting limits (time gate posts on topics, or limit 1 post per day, etc.)

Companies would get public data to be trained since everything would be CC licensed. And a contract to be won for reserved services.

Government-built doesnt necessarily mean government-run or government moderated.

You could, e.g., have funding for social media "rails", as in developing fediverse platforms of various sorts as public goods on which people could build commercial, community or personal instances.

There is nothing unusual in such arrangements and the funds required are miniscule compared to other government funded infrastructures.

This would provide an enormous range of possibilities. In would not by it self "solve" the various frictions that we know plague online platforms

While at a conference last year, I got COVID. My hotel refused to extend my stay, and wanted me to take an ambulance ride to another "COVID quarantine" hotel. I had a bad fever, was far away from my home and family, and didn't know what to do.

I had deleted all my social media accounts years ago, but on a whim, I created a new Twitter account and posted @ the hotel and the conference organizers, asking for help. Within 30 minutes, my hotel stay was extended and I was able to fly home five days later.

I wanted to share this story because I wanted to bring some positive perspective to the discussion about these platforms. I don't know if a government-built social media platform is a good idea, but I think there's merit to a discussion of a "public utility".

> I think there's merit to a discussion of a "public utility".

I have thought about this a lot. Twitter brands itself as the "public square" and I've tried to figure out how that works in practice. In the United States we have public parks, why can't we have public web spaces?

There was a post in another thread about the idea of what a "public web" would look like, and I am trying to understand how it would work in practice.

There is _somewhat_ of an existing framework for this in the form of public media IMO such as the BBC and NPR - I have been debating if such institutions could start hosting Fediverse flavors to continue public discussion on topics. The infrastructure could be provided as a contract that would be bid on by tech companies on their cloud services; while the administration would be left to various semi-public institutions: PBS, NPR, BBC, your local state university, etc.

Basically, just encouraging public funded Fediverse instances, but infastructure provided by the contract awarded bids. Data on these public instances could be considered public domain; and companies wanting AI training sets could leverage these if the proper policies existed on how to utilize these data sets with public sanctions.

Social media is relatively new and has really gone mainstream within the last decade. Also, you could argue most social media are partly government-built since silicon valley was created by the government.

The real question is why we don't have a government email service? Imagine how great it would be if the post office had an email service for your official correspondence. Email is many decades old and still nothing.

Does WeChat not count? It seems like the biggest government controlled social media on the planet. Maybe the biggest social media on the planet period.

> So, why doesn’t it exist? Can nation-states simply not build software? That can’t be true.

It can be true. It's an achievement when good software is made in the private sector, it's a miracle when it's made in the public sector. Quick, name your five favorite government websites. I can name a couple decent ones, but they're all pretty simple web apps that just do the thing they're supposed to do without sucking, none of them are impressive. Now multiply the complexity, because it's a social media platform. I don't know of a government that I think could do that well, even (especially) they just did it all through contractors, which is what they'd probably do. And it would cost way more than he estimates, precisely because it's the government doing it.

And social media seems to be winner take all (or most). That is, if there is a clear leader, everyone moves to it, and all the runners up go away. If the government social platform had to compete in a marketplace against Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.? Come on man, it's not happening. A lot of people hate these platforms, and in our bubble it seems like most people hate them, but the reality is that more people distrust their government than their social media platform, rightly or wrongly.

Isn't a better question what could be gained from a government-run social media site?

The only reason this article gives is that government agencies could use it to broadcast messages to the public. But that's backwards. Government agencies want to broadcast their messages where large numbers of people might see it... Twitter happened to be such a place, but if it stops being so, they can find where the people are able to see their messages.

(Note: all these agencies have web sites, so we're talking about better/lower-friction means of communication, not the question of communicating at all.)

It seems incredibly inefficient for the government to build their own social media site for the purpose, since they'd have to somehow get large numbers of people to use it. Is it not far more efficient to just go to where large numbers of people are already going? $500 million/year is a hell of a lot to spend on something that seems to have no particular use or value.

(Not to mention the question of content moderation, which surely sinks this idea all by itself.)

Is there any government on earth owning a website that:

-is used by tens/hundreds of millions of people every day to share and view large files

-have an usable UI

-doesn't go down 3 times a week

I'll suggest USPS.com

USPS is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government. They have around 13M visits per day [1]. Their website looks modern although I'm uncertain about their uptime.

[1] https://analytics.usa.gov/postal-service

and 90% of those visits are probably a GET request with a tracking number

Depends what you consider to be large files, and admittedly its not a free for all upload, but gov.uk probably fulfils most of those requirements.

well a simple video on social media can be 100s of MB or even more than a GB, without even thinking about livestream

Something along these lines feels like a decent alternative to (but not a replacement of) social media that's privately owned and for profit, that could exist in parallel to what we have now. If we can build something on a platform whose goal isn't profit for shareholders, maybe we can avoid the inevitable enshittification.

It's also crossed my mind that the government could provide something that's one more layer of abstraction away from social media: a public cloud infrastructure, that people could use to spin up virtual servers to do whatever they want, e.g. running federated social media servers? This would absolve the government from the responsibility of moderating a social media platform, while still giving motivated people the resources for running one themselves.

Many municipalities have come up with the idea of developing their own local platforms and fora. Of course that ship had long, long sailed and they soon discovered the mechanics of the network effect.

Also, they didn't have the means and resolve to launch even a small platform. In short: only the trolls were interested.

Now what might have worked, is if at some point a government (or a couple) took over a small, but modestly successful platform (say, Twitter?) claiming that it is important enough as a commons.

Not claiming this is a good idea, but there are precedents with other "public infrastructures" (transport, energy, telcos, banks, harbours, airports, retail). So why not social media, news?

There's probably some presidents somewhere on the world that own telcos and banks, but I assume you meant "precedents".

;-) Thanks! Corrected typo

How about Minitel [1] as an example of government-built social media?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

Why would we even want that? The list of issues I see with this is not short.

There are many public consultation and petition sites.

They’re very similar to SM In that they support discussions around topic-based threads, invariably with occasional voting features.

Because nobody would want to use FedBook. People on all ends of the political spectrum have reasons to not want to share their most personal and sensitive data directly with the government. Plus, because FedBook would have to be very careful about how it moderates content in order to not infringe on users 1st Amendment rights, it would likely be a cesspool of racist and conspiratorial content.

In the UK there was an MP who set up his own app, which was recently shut down but not before it saw a bump of activity following Musk's takeover of Twitter: https://www.wsj.com/articles/twitter-migration-matt-hancock-...

Even the more static websites built by my government look and feel like garbage. There is no way they could pull off something remotely as complex UX-wise as social media. Unless they hired expensive contractors, in which case people would seriously wonder why their taxes are going into this app which they well may never use.

Similar question: why don't governments push the development / adoption of better operating systems? How much time and money would be saved around the world if people weren't stuck using microsoft junk? I know China has done some work on this, but have other governments?

Because if you have a private company that is tightly controlled and essentially acts as a projection of your state, while pretending to be independent of it, you can trick some people into thinking it's a free market. This applies well beyond social media.

My government runs a successful Single Sign-On platform.

Which is probably more important than Social Network.

Social media, not sure. I have wondered why we don't have email operated by the post office.

Also, I wonder why we don't have postal aliases so I can give someone an "address" to which they can send mail regardless of my true location.

Because there's no reason to.

Governments post on social media sites all the time. Unlike radio or television, the production costs are near zero, so there's no need to create an organization with significant staff and equipment like the BBC.

And they open with the Arab spring. I wonder if those people wanted government controlled social media.

Public services that just want a bullhorn: it's called RSS.

I feel like the author answers his own question- Government is happy to use existing platforms and avoid diverting tax dollars to compete with the private sector.

I’m china it’s basically govt built, it’s just outsourced

Eh, in China corporations are something like loosely attached branches of government.

Which is “totally” different than US corporations. The American ones also comply with government requests, supply back doors or capture the traffic at an ISP level.

Sarcasm aside, cooperation and control are on entirely different levels.

For example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/23/china-to-place-government-of...

Maybe because they already get everything they perniciously want from the existing social media companies. I don't know; just thinking out loud.

I think the government should provide every citizen with their own cloud compute instance. universal basic compute allowance.

I'd give them access to technology and the internet first; a smartphone or laptop for everyone.

honestly not a bad idea either, a universal laptop program could probably almost recoup it's cost just be obsoleting a bunch of badly negotiated or thought out school hardware/ipad programs lol.

something modular like framework laptop would work well

I am an atheist, but thanks God there is no government built social media. This is to much power in government hands.

Because of the Freedom of Information Act. People who start demanding to see posts, messages, logged in time, etc.

Would anyone trust or use a Government-Built Social Media Platform?

I wouldn't trust it. I wouldn't use it.

Would you prefer to trust a company in a foreign country that isn't beholden to your country's laws?

What if it were open-source software, e.g. like farcaster.xyz, with some level of cryptographic tamper-proof assurances?

I don't; FISA courts & Snowden's revelations have basically exposed facts that the US government agencies have open back doors to all data in the big tech companies.

Do you use corporate social media?

Slack, Teams... for sure.

But...

Many businesses actively block communication among employees, by e.g. forbidding the creation of teams in Teams. Some others have a policy to have HR or mechanical turks monitor Slack. Some others add your direct manager to every channel you are.

Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?

> Why would the government want to facilitate communication between citizens?

I have thought about this, and the only idea that would probably be useful for public support is discourse in support of education/information.

Phrased differently, social media amplified disinformation. Arguably if done correctly discourse can be done without uselessness.

In other words, I would argue that social media could be useful for example: to provide near real time updates on public concern: Wildfires, for example.

But I would argue that you don't want government supported "influencers" or, you know, tax payer money being used to post cat memes.

Problem number one: Who gets to comment on taxpayer-financed USGov social media? Citizens, immigrants, foreign nationals? And if you limit it to citizens, well you have to verify so it'd be linked to you social security, IRS, driver's license or some such. Does only the government get to see that information or is your account completely de-anonymized?

Problem number two: It'd have to be completely open-source code with transparent moderation, no behind-the-scenes games of amplifying, deamplifying, front-page access control, etc., as that's manipulation of free speech. If there were mechanisms for forming groups, you couldn't, say, ban neo-Nazi groups as that's an infringement of US free speech laws. A lot of people would protest, saying they don't want their tax dollars going to provide a platform for groups they dislike to congregate on.

Problem three: if social media is a public service like roads, electricity, water, or broadband (generally all nationalized services in more rational countries than the USA), you can't just cut people off because you don't like their views and opinions, no matter how unpleasant they are. If what they're saying or sharing is not explicitly illegal (and that's a relatively high bar, I think immediate incitement to violence is about it for speech, plus the usual video and image laws on child abuse etc.), how would you go about doing moderation or banning accounts?

I suppose a citizens/registered-immigrants-only non-anonymous government social media site running with completely transparent moderation (maybe users could democratically vote for moderators?) on a open-source platform would be somewhat interesting as people might self-moderate more, who knows?

Infrastructure bidding war for a large contract provided by major cloud providers.

Fediverse deployed instances by semi-public institutions: NPR, PBS, University of [Your State or City]. Non-profit institutions could also benefit: Wikipedia, etc.

Data retention policies as part of this legislation must be declared upfront: What data is being collected? What is the retention policy? Is a comment on this instance considered Creative Commons? Would this data be considered public domain and used to train AI models?

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that the guy we know as Mark Zuckerberg is essentially just an actor, and facebook was actually made by the CIA. Imagine it: you're a kid in highschool, already a bit of a geek with a passion for programming, some guys in suits show up and say they'll get you into harvard and guarantee you a life of fame and fortune, all you gotta do is take credit for their work and play up your social ineptitude a bit. No need to change his name or anything, all the accounts of his childhood are probably real, he's just for lack of a better word the fall guy. The government gets the most powerful tool in the world to both spy upon and manipulate people around the world, but whenever you get a message saying "facebook wants access to this data" it seems like just an eccentric capitalist who doesn't understand boundaries. Of course there's no evidence to support the theory, and you could probably say the same for anyone that has built something a lot of people wind up using, but it's still fun.

Because governments that want to exert that kind of control on the population are already totalitarian, which means they already have control over companies within their borders, including social media platforms. The government doesn't need to build it to control it.

Why should there be?

And why is there no social-media government?

As usual the tiresome histrionics around Musks management of something being it’s death knell will be proven wrong and ignored like tears in the rain.

Weibo?

You can’t expect such things to be competitive in the market from the government. Have you seen some of the websites? This works in an environment where salaries and professional pride is more aligned between private and public institutions. Read socialism.

because conservatives would cry "big government waste"

Because they don't want a repeat of HealthCare.gov

You mean its initial launch or the rescue (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-s...) ?

> Why is there no government-built social media?

There is, it's called Facebook, Youtube etc. Twitter was part of that until Musk bought it and published the Twitter Files.

Because no matter what country you are in, and what the laws are, or what the culture is, there are better more important uses of state resources. No matter how far left or right someone is on the political spectrum this is not a popular idea.

So you want to take tax money to build a social network. And it continues to cost a lot of money to operate all the time? And it doesn't generate profits? And it just creates a big headache for everyone involved? And the headache never goes away unless we shut it down? Only an incompetent and self destructive government would build this.

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