Seize The Means of Communication!

George Peretz makes a very sensible suggestion as to how the Labour Government, and others, should respond to Musk:

[T]here is an obvious thing that government could do now and that requires no legislation and costs no money: government could simply shift all the material it currently puts out on X to another platform or platforms

He goes on to mention both BlueSky and Mastodon as obvious contenders.

I certainly agree that governments — and any organisation that values its reputation, for that matter — should be moving away from X, but simply moving to another platform amounts to a sticking-plaster solution at best.

The problem with being on someone else’s platform is that you are giving that someone else control over which messages you see and which of your messages are seen. Indeed, the EU’s Digital Services Act recognises this by identifying Very Large Online Platforms, and imposing additional requirements on them around areas such as transparency and disinformation.

Federated technologies, such as Mastodon (and many others exist) resolve the problem of ownership far more effectively by allowing you install and run your own instance. Many governments — and even the European Commission — already use these solutions, thus putting themselves in control of their own communication and ensuring that individuals can access these communications without putting themselves at the mercy of commercial priorities.

Obviously, there are both costs and challenges associated with running your own instance, but none of these are insurmountable and if organisations truly want to ensure that their communications remain free (as in speech) they really should be investing in the already existing infrastructure that allows them to do so.

Any organisation should be taking steps to protect the integrity of it’s communication. This is especially true in the case of governments, political parties and campaigners, for whom free and open discussions are essential.

#Fediverse