Are you seriously expecting private *social* media??
Or, the misguided march for privacy in that which is Not, by design…
Shoutout to my fediverse homies who know what I’m talking about here. To everyone else, yes, there are genuinely people who believe you can make a social media platform its exact opposite, that is, a private social media platform with no asterisks on the word private.
What is social media?
According to my favourite website(s) Wikipedia1 and Wiktionary2, Social media are interactive forms of media that facilitate creation and sharing of content in a many-to-many relationship with regards to the publishing of said content. The core is facilitating development of social networks by connecting your profile to other people’s profiles, either via shared interests, your contacts list, or some nebulous algorithm that puts the content it thinks you like in front of your eyeballs. The crux of the concept is the social part – that’s what distinguishes social media from print media and debatably instant messaging.
Social media is not direct messages from yourself to other trusted parties, it is not a place to divulge your deepest secrets and expect no one else to see them, and it is not something that can be private in every regard without dropping the social media moniker.
Privacy*
This ties into broader trends within privacy communities where newbies will often be very expansive about who and what they want privacy from, for questionable reasons. No, @RandomLetterSpam, it’s not possible to be private from your national government in every case. And no, you can’t dodge every big tech company at all times while still being online, that’s just absurd.
When you want to be more private, to have more privacy, you need to define private from who and what do I have to give up for privacy? You can’t just decide that you will be private from everyone and everything, and solve every issue just like that just by using Linux and open source stuff. I wish people would just… read basic guides like privsec or privacyguides. It’s not hard, I promise. Or one of the many guides for Windows so you can do your video gaming and mostly protect your privacy from random snoopy people and Microsoft to an extent.
To wrap up this section, I would like to just say the words “threat model”, just throwing it out there. Read up on it, use the methodology. Don’t get all tinfoil hat. Okay, back to fediverse stuff now…
The Fediverse; Mastodon and friends
When people see the federated platforms of the fediverse, they rightly see a different style of interaction, a lack of engagement algorithms, and no data mining by the people running the whole joint. They also see a culture of more respectful interaction and lack of prominent bullying and falsely attribute it to quirks of the platform for… some reason.
There are 3 things I often see cited as The Reason Why Fediverse Is Better Than Twitter with regards to safety are the following, in no specific order:
- The content warning system
- The lack of quote retoots/retweets
- No search function for posts
The time these all come up is whenever [big social media platform] discusses maybe joining the fediverse, or when Mastodon’s developers decide they want to make the platform more accesible to regular non-technical people. I’m going to sidestep the whole debate around whether it’s good to make the platform more accesible to non-technical people entirely because it’s besides the point, what is the point is that people are making noise over things without being fully informed about what they’re making noise about. Let’s unpack them all and see whether there’s merit to opposing changes to them.
Why are people mad?
First one, content warnings. Now, if you’ve done some digging into the literature around content warnings more broadly (and I have), the jury’s still out on whether they’re actually effective in different contexts – in some cases, the existence of content warnings can cause “anticipatory affect”, which is a fancy way of saying “people felt emotions associated just with anticipating a bad thing”3. This of course doesn’t mean we need to not have CWs every again, but I think it’d be more accurate to say that they’re more about respect for other people who might not want to see shit that they dislike or are triggered by while scrolling on their fav social media to relax than about actively preventing harm to vulnerable people generally. And in my anecdotal experience, that is the way people use them on the fediverse, as a way to show they’re respecting other people, i.e., as a cultural convention thing. So I guess ultimately, yeah content warnings being an inbuilt feature of the platform is something I can agree is good – it builds consideration for the other people who might be reading your stuff and people asking for them when they’re not present reinforces the collective obligation to respect one another.
Next up we have something I disagree is a big part of fedi’s culture/success/whatever you wanna call it – the lack of quote retoots. Because it’s just patently false. There are quote retoots in the fediverse, just not on Mastodon. So why isn’t there a twitter-like culture of quote retooting people having a silly take and burying them in harassment? I would contend that it is again a cultural thing but also partly technological. With regards to the culture, people are more than happy to reply and correct someone, but it’s more of a conversation (usually) rather than a pile-on of people telling them they’re dumb4. And replies already appear on people’s home timelines, no algorithm required as on Twitter5. So a big technological motivator of using quote retoots over just replying in most cases is not there – you don’t need to seek out a means for higher engagement and visibility because that’s just not how the site was built, regardless of whether a feature used in that way on another platform is there or not6. So yeah, people opposed to Mastodon having quote retoots are opposed to something that is already a thing and already causes zero problems elsewhere in the fediverse. If someone does have a paper or data or anything concrete that contradicts my point about qrts not actually being the primary reason for pile-ons and bullying, I would love to see it so I can amend this section. But as it stands now I have not seen anything.
And finally we arive at opting in/out of search discoverability. I’ve actually had someone tell me I’m making a comparable argument to “if you don’t want to be tracked, don’t use a mobile phone” for having the take I’m about to share here so, sheesh. Read on to find out for yourself whether I am saying that. Let’s start with explaining precisely what the feature is: some platforms (Firefish, formerly Calckey I believe) want to implement a search function that accepts keywords rather than just tags, links to posts, and links to profiles. This is seen as a bad thing because some people on other platforms do keyword searches in order to harass people who they don’t like. Currently, you can only find posts by following people who post things you like or by searching via tags, or I guess by someone linking your post off-site. Search engines don’t crawl all fedi posts by default as far as I know and search engines that respect robots.txt just ignore instances with those altogether (like my instance, for example). Now, obviously harassment is bad, no one is arguing against that. What is being argued against is the idea that lack of search will foil any malicious actors from seeking out vulnerable people to bully. Currently, if someone doesn’t want to be discoverable at all, they can either not maintain a social media presence altogether, or, only post “private” posts while keeping follows restricted to requests only. If a bully wanted to seek out vulnerable people to hurt, they could already search for posts by tags such as #Trans or #LGBT or #InsertMinorityIdentityHere. If you truly want protection from bad actors who keyword search for people to bully, making searching harder won’t achieve that in any way. The only way to guarantee that they won’t find you is to hide information that details your deepest insecurities from untrusted people, i.e., don’t post it onto social media7. If a piece of content on the internet does not require authentication to access, it will be accessed, that is simply a fact of how the world wide web works8.
What happened to “don’t share personal information online ever”?
*shakes fist at cloud* Back in my day, us kiddos got told to never put personal information into the interwebs!!9
But seriously, it feels like people have forgotten the lessons of the past and want a technological solution to a social problem, while not even really appreciating what the technological solution would even entail. As a marginalised person myself I understand the urge to protect ourselves and other vulnerable people in any way possible, but to do that we need to keep our heads on our shoulders and not fall into maldaptive suspicion that anything that looks superficially like the Bad Thing is the bad thing. Critical thinking and love for our community are far more powerful means to protect ourselves than fighting against the concept of social media and publicly-accessible webpages.
And please, stop attaching your full real name to your social media posts holy fuck.
See Bridgland, V., Jones, P., and Bellet, B’s 2022 A meta-analysis of the effects of trigger warnings, content warnings, and content notes. Yes it’s a pre-print (at time of me writing this post), but it reflects what I also found when doing a bit of a skim through the literature a year or two ago and it’s academic. ↩︎
The exception being the “dark” side of fedi that gets blocked by any reasonable instance, think poast and the other far-right cesspits – they certainly piled onto Linus Torvalds for being based as hell and repeatedly spammed the n word at him, which was very classy of them and will totally change people’s minds… ↩︎
My gf still uses Twitter so I asked her if I was remembering that behaviour correctly (and turns out I was, yay) ↩︎
Wow so many footnotes in this paragraph, but anyway I want to have a bit of a digression here. I see people sometimes complain about the lack of discoverability on fedi in contrast to the main alternative, bluesky, and I think that’s partly misguided. The fediverse as a system seems to have been built more to be the email of social media, i.e., decentralised, interoperable, federated. Engagement and analytics and making money and so on and so on aren’t really the core driver of the projects that make up fedi and people rightfully complain when anyone suggests features for that. But I think distrust of features that seem more tailored to finding people to talk to rather than finding people to monologue to like on say, YouTube or other big platforms is severely misguided. Which, hey, is kinda the point of this post! ↩︎
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting that people don’t seek support from other people. But I would hope that people can appreciate that you equally do not put your deepest secrets on a community bulletin board in a public library as you do not put your deepest secrets into a text post anywhere public on the world wide web. Furthermore, relying solely on online interaction as your support network is not healthy (see: doi 10.1080/15213269.2013.838904) and it’s not ableist to say so – please actually listen to disabled people, “going outside and touching grass” is actually good for your quality of life and is a point where disabled people get marginalised. Why else do you think accessibility is so important in public spaces? ↩︎
So I feel like I could maybe expand on this a bit but it’d ruin the flow of the article if it was in the main body. If you’re posting something on say, a Firefish instance that doesn’t let unauthenticated users view posts on the instance, public or not, but you’re followed by someone on another instance without the authentication requirement who boosts or replies to your post, your post will appear over there (federation baby!) and will still be publicly accessible. The way around this is the bitter pill of “don’t post your deepest darkest secrets on the internet”. Also, like, it’s a federated platform. Do people uh… realise what that means about posts that get federated? I’ll spell it out. You cannot guarantee deletion of a post across every single instance that holds a copy of it. Ergo, the simple solution is to not post your deepest darkest secrets onto a social media platform, regardless of how not profit driven it is. Remember E2EE y’all ↩︎
no but seriously. capitalist data slurping overrode common-sense internet safety and i will forever be bitter af about it ↩︎