| If the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook incident[0] is an example of Facebook's negative affect on society it doesn't appear too far removed from its standard business model. However, With over 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook clearly provides a very useful service. I understand that Facebook being replaced by an ethical competitor is tremendously unlikely, that said, how would you do it? How would you build a Facebook replacement without a Faustian deal with surveillance capital? - Wikipedia: has built humanity's largest encyclopedia without it - signal: has built a whatsapp clone without it - mastadon: has built a twitter clone without it - peer 2 peer: has solved many distribution and scale problems - federation: has solved many single points of failure problems - GNU & FOSS: has provided many thoughtful approaches to similar problems I would love to try and keep this discussion positive and fairly technical. Please don't just: - list all the obvious obstacles - point out that this will never happen - get stuck too deeply in the 'what is ethical?' conversation. Technically, how would you approach solving this problem. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm |
Even if you could find someone who fits the bill though, each of the examples is either irrelevant to the government or too small to have a significant impact on what the government do. I strongly suspect that any ethical Facebook alternative would find it very hard to operate if it got big enough to complete with FB and still refused to sell out.