Why is there no government-built social media?

A US government run social media site would be terrible. For one, our political parties are extremely polarized, so any subjective moderation would flip with regime changes. To avoid this, it'd just become linkedin. Vacuous virtue-signaling 'safe' garbage.

Because our country continues to dismantle our social apparatus in favor of the private interests. Creating a public social network is, in retrospect, quite obvious. Once, we did similar things for libraries, hospitals, schools and roads. We very feasibly could have socialized the phones lines and the internet began as a public good, though it has since been carved up. But Why? I think the answer lies in a blindspot that obscures all possibilities which are not profitable.

Because any attempt at moderation would be considered infringement on the first amendment and illegal by the US constitution. Social media is a cesspool without moderation.

Should we start a public petition?<p>EDIT: This is an idea that I’ve recently been advocating for; I just don’t know where to start. We have public parks, why can’t we have public spaces? Offer a contract every few years to be bid by large corporations such as AWS, or Microsoft. Administration by semi-public entities such as universities or NPR. Make it join the Fediverse to enable sharing of content.<p>What am I missing?<p>EDIT: User submitted content would be bound by CC licensing.

Government-built doesnt necessarily mean government-run or government moderated.<p>You could, e.g., have funding for social media &quot;rails&quot;, as in developing fediverse platforms of various sorts as public goods on which people could build commercial, community or personal instances.<p>There is nothing unusual in such arrangements and the funds required are miniscule compared to other government funded infrastructures.<p>This would provide an enormous range of possibilities. In would not by it self &quot;solve&quot; the various frictions that we know plague online platforms

While at a conference last year, I got COVID. My hotel refused to extend my stay, and wanted me to take an ambulance ride to another &quot;COVID quarantine&quot; hotel. I had a bad fever, was far away from my home and family, and didn&#x27;t know what to do.<p>I had deleted all my social media accounts years ago, but on a whim, I created a new Twitter account and posted @ the hotel and the conference organizers, asking for help. Within 30 minutes, my hotel stay was extended and I was able to fly home five days later.<p>I wanted to share this story because I wanted to bring some positive perspective to the discussion about these platforms. I don&#x27;t know if a government-built social media platform is a good idea, but I think there&#x27;s merit to a discussion of a &quot;public utility&quot;.

Social media is relatively new and has really gone mainstream within the last decade. Also, you could argue most social media are partly government-built since silicon valley was created by the government.<p>The real question is why we don&#x27;t have a government email service? Imagine how great it would be if the post office had an email service for your official correspondence. Email is many decades old and still nothing.

Does WeChat not count? It seems like the biggest government controlled social media on the planet. Maybe the biggest social media on the planet period.

&gt; So, why doesn’t it exist? Can nation-states simply not build software? That can’t be true.<p>It can be true. It&#x27;s an achievement when good software is made in the private sector, it&#x27;s a miracle when it&#x27;s made in the public sector. Quick, name your five favorite government websites. I can name a couple decent ones, but they&#x27;re all pretty simple web apps that just do the thing they&#x27;re supposed to do without sucking, none of them are impressive. Now multiply the complexity, because it&#x27;s a social media platform. I don&#x27;t know of a government that I think could do that well, even (especially) they just did it all through contractors, which is what they&#x27;d probably do. And it would cost way more than he estimates, precisely because it&#x27;s the government doing it.<p>And social media seems to be winner take all (or most). That is, if there is a clear leader, everyone moves to it, and all the runners up go away. If the government social platform had to compete in a marketplace against Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc.? Come on man, it&#x27;s not happening. A lot of people hate these platforms, and in our bubble it seems like <i>most</i> people hate them, but the reality is that more people distrust their government than their social media platform, rightly or wrongly.

Isn&#x27;t a better question what could be gained from a government-run social media site?<p>The only reason this article gives is that government agencies could use it to broadcast messages to the public. But that&#x27;s backwards. Government agencies want to broadcast their messages where large numbers of people might see it... Twitter happened to be such a place, but if it stops being so, they can find where the people are able to see their messages.<p>(Note: all these agencies have web sites, so we&#x27;re talking about better&#x2F;lower-friction means of communication, not the question of communicating at all.)<p>It seems incredibly inefficient for the government to build their own social media site for the purpose, since they&#x27;d have to somehow get large numbers of people to use it. Is it not far more efficient to just go to where large numbers of people are already going? $500 million&#x2F;year is a hell of a lot to spend on something that seems to have no particular use or value.<p>(Not to mention the question of content moderation, which surely sinks this idea all by itself.)

Is there any government on earth owning a website that:<p>-is used by tens&#x2F;hundreds of millions of people every day to share and view large files<p>-have an usable UI<p>-doesn&#x27;t go down 3 times a week<p>?

Something along these lines feels like a decent alternative to (but not a replacement of) social media that&#x27;s privately owned and for profit, that could exist in parallel to what we have now. If we can build something on a platform whose goal isn&#x27;t profit for shareholders, maybe we can avoid the inevitable enshittification.<p>It&#x27;s also crossed my mind that the government could provide something that&#x27;s one more layer of abstraction away from social media: a public cloud infrastructure, that people could use to spin up virtual servers to do whatever they want, e.g. running federated social media servers? This would absolve the government from the responsibility of moderating a social media platform, while still giving motivated people the resources for running one themselves.

Many municipalities have come up with the idea of developing their own local platforms and fora. Of course that ship had long, long sailed and they soon discovered the mechanics of the network effect.<p>Also, they didn&#x27;t have the means and resolve to launch even a small platform. In short: only the trolls were interested.<p>Now what <i>might</i> have worked, is if at some point a government (or a couple) took over a small, but modestly successful platform (say, Twitter?) claiming that it is important enough as a commons.<p>Not claiming this is a good idea, but there are precedents with other &quot;public infrastructures&quot; (transport, energy, telcos, banks, harbours, airports, retail). So why not social media, news?

How about Minitel [1] as an example of government-built social media?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Minitel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Minitel</a>

Why would we even want that? The list of issues I see with this is not short.

There are many public consultation and petition sites.<p>They’re very similar to SM In that they support discussions around topic-based threads, invariably with occasional voting features.

Because nobody would want to use FedBook. People on all ends of the political spectrum have reasons to not want to share their most personal and sensitive data directly with the government. Plus, because FedBook would have to be very careful about how it moderates content in order to not infringe on users 1st Amendment rights, it would likely be a cesspool of racist and conspiratorial content.

In the UK there was an MP who set up his own app, which was recently shut down but not before it saw a bump of activity following Musk&#x27;s takeover of Twitter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;twitter-migration-matt-hancock-app-11668526462" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;twitter-migration-matt-hancock-...</a>

Even the more static websites built by my government look and feel like garbage. There is no way they could pull off something remotely as complex UX-wise as social media. Unless they hired expensive contractors, in which case people would seriously wonder why their taxes are going into this app which they well may never use.

Similar question: why don&#x27;t governments push the development &#x2F; adoption of better operating systems? How much time and money would be saved around the world if people weren&#x27;t stuck using microsoft junk? I know China has done some work on this, but have other governments?

Because if you have a private company that is tightly controlled and essentially acts as a projection of your state, while pretending to be independent of it, you can trick some people into thinking it&#x27;s a free market. This applies well beyond social media.

My government runs a successful Single Sign-On platform.<p>Which is probably more important than Social Network.

Social media, not sure. I have wondered why we don&#x27;t have email operated by the post office.<p>Also, I wonder why we don&#x27;t have postal aliases so I can give someone an &quot;address&quot; to which they can send mail regardless of my true location.

Because there&#x27;s no reason to.<p>Governments post on social media sites all the time. Unlike radio or television, the production costs are near zero, so there&#x27;s no need to create an organization with significant staff and equipment like the BBC.

And they open with the Arab spring. I wonder if those people wanted government controlled social media.<p>Public services that just want a bullhorn: it&#x27;s called RSS.

I feel like the author answers his own question- Government is happy to use existing platforms and avoid diverting tax dollars to compete with the private sector.

I’m china it’s basically govt built, it’s just outsourced

Maybe because they already get everything they perniciously want from the existing social media companies. I don&#x27;t know; just thinking out loud.

I think the government should provide every citizen with their own cloud compute instance. universal basic compute allowance.

I am an atheist, but thanks God there is no government built social media. This is to much power in government hands.

Because of the Freedom of Information Act. People who start demanding to see posts, messages, logged in time, etc.

Would anyone trust or use a Government-Built Social Media Platform?<p>I wouldn&#x27;t trust it. I wouldn&#x27;t use it.

Problem number one: Who gets to comment on taxpayer-financed USGov social media? Citizens, immigrants, foreign nationals? And if you limit it to citizens, well you have to verify so it&#x27;d be linked to you social security, IRS, driver&#x27;s license or some such. Does only the government get to see that information or is your account completely de-anonymized?<p>Problem number two: It&#x27;d have to be completely open-source code with transparent moderation, no behind-the-scenes games of amplifying, deamplifying, front-page access control, etc., as that&#x27;s manipulation of free speech. If there were mechanisms for forming groups, you couldn&#x27;t, say, ban neo-Nazi groups as that&#x27;s an infringement of US free speech laws. A lot of people would protest, saying they don&#x27;t want their tax dollars going to provide a platform for groups they dislike to congregate on.<p>Problem three: if social media is a public service like roads, electricity, water, or broadband (generally all nationalized services in more rational countries than the USA), you can&#x27;t just cut people off because you don&#x27;t like their views and opinions, no matter how unpleasant they are. If what they&#x27;re saying or sharing is not explicitly illegal (and that&#x27;s a relatively high bar, I think immediate incitement to violence is about it for speech, plus the usual video and image laws on child abuse etc.), how would you go about doing moderation or banning accounts?<p>I suppose a citizens&#x2F;registered-immigrants-only non-anonymous government social media site running with completely transparent moderation (maybe users could democratically vote for moderators?) on a open-source platform would be somewhat interesting as people might self-moderate more, who knows?

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that the guy we know as Mark Zuckerberg is essentially just an actor, and facebook was actually made by the CIA. Imagine it: you&#x27;re a kid in highschool, already a bit of a geek with a passion for programming, some guys in suits show up and say they&#x27;ll get you into harvard and guarantee you a life of fame and fortune, all you gotta do is take credit for their work and play up your social ineptitude a bit. No need to change his name or anything, all the accounts of his childhood are probably real, he&#x27;s just for lack of a better word the fall guy. The government gets the most powerful tool in the world to both spy upon and manipulate people around the world, but whenever you get a message saying &quot;facebook wants access to this data&quot; it seems like just an eccentric capitalist who doesn&#x27;t understand boundaries. Of course there&#x27;s no evidence to support the theory, and you could probably say the same for anyone that has built something a lot of people wind up using, but it&#x27;s still fun.

Because governments that want to exert that kind of control on the population are already totalitarian, which means they already have control over companies within their borders, including social media platforms. The government doesn&#x27;t need to build it to control it.

Why should there be?

And why is there no social-media government?

As usual the tiresome histrionics around Musks management of something being it’s death knell will be proven wrong and ignored like tears in the rain.

Weibo?

You can’t expect such things to be competitive in the market from the government. Have you seen some of the websites? This works in an environment where salaries and professional pride is more aligned between private and public institutions. Read socialism.

because conservatives would cry &quot;big government waste&quot;

Because they don&#x27;t want a repeat of HealthCare.gov

&gt; Why is there no government-built social media?<p>There is, it&#x27;s called Facebook, Youtube etc. Twitter was part of that until Musk bought it and published the Twitter Files.

Because no matter what country you are in, and what the laws are, or what the culture is, there are better more important uses of state resources. No matter how far left or right someone is on the political spectrum this is not a popular idea.<p>So you want to take tax money to build a social network. And it continues to cost a lot of money to operate all the time? And it doesn&#x27;t generate profits? And it just creates a big headache for everyone involved? And the headache never goes away unless we shut it down? Only an incompetent and self destructive government would build this.