https://lpeproject.org/blog/social-media-authoritarianism-and-the-world-as-it-is/
The world would be better if these platforms were dismantled and their revenues shared with the people, professions, and communities whose livelihoods and public spaces they’ve worked to foreclose, and if a more localized variation on digital spaces for deliberation, discussion, and discovery could be constructed in their wake. But we’re not even close to this.
Standing in this moment, with platforms that exercise outsized control over our information ecosystem going nowhere, we need to weigh our choices and define what we’re actually fighting for. The right is fighting to take control of these platforms, while liberals and some on the left are fighting to expand vectors of platform control, without thinking hard enough about who will wield this power and who is likely to get hurt. We can’t treat these factors as “outside the scope of this paper.” We need to map and sit with the implications of this conjuncture — a complex endeavor I barely begin here. My hope in offering this analysis is to open up a larger conversation among those invested in dismantling the dangerous centralized power of the tech industry, and to do the work of mapping and thinking together.