[streamofdigits]

A "public good" approach to digital social graphs is the broadest and most urgent social imperative since, I don't know, nuclear non-proliferation treaty?

It will decidedly not solve all problems associated with online digital platforms. We know for a fact that even the earliest and most innocent online forums would degenerate into flame wars. We know that filtering and struggle for the political control of news dissemination is "tech-independent": print, radio, TV etc all "solve" this in their own arbitrary and varying ways.

What facebook managed to achieve is to combine all those, together with many others (personal data collection, algorithmic profiling of people, leaking of such profiles to third parties etc) and deploy it at an unthinkable scale.