[Article] [Opinion] Do we need publicly-owned social networks to escape Silicon Valley?

No to state owned. It's too susceptible to corruption.

Definitely would want the charter to stipulate that nothing is stored for longer than a year.

Personally, I think it would be more effective to just legally mandate websites and apps default to chronological sort every time you open them. Users would still be able to opt in to the black-box alg sort, but they'd have to do it every single time.

This assumes a benign state/host. What I would want from the law is enforcing interoperability and transferability between networks - a portable identity that can be transferred in the first sign of trouble to a different provider.

State run social media only for state profiles. Let the people have their own stuff otherwise. The whole idea of the fediverse can accommodate both. The piece even gives a passing mention to mastodon.

They can be smaller, similar to the forums that have been around since the internet’s heyday, but consolidated as “spaces where we can maintain slightly more meaningful relationships.” | These projects don’t have to aspire to be the great public square where everyone gathers, because, sometimes, we just want to talk to our neighbors;

You can move to China - they already have one!

what would help is state verified identities on social media that are anonymized by the state and the media sites.

this means verified users cannot be bots or foreign nationals.

if you abuse your identity you cannot just create a new avatar and continue

identities could be stolen or sold but this would be controlled in the same way id theft/abuse has been managed digitally for quite a while now