Category: Fediverse

Commercial Social Media – a public health issue.

This is a work in progress, published early, but on topic comments are welcome. Comments are moderated, and spam will not appear.

The history of Commercial Social Media has some similarities to the history of Tobacco – we are now at the stage where we are discussing whether this habit (phone addiction) is good for children, in the same way as one of the public health responses to cigarettes was to try to prevent their use by children.

Everybody does it – all my data is out there anyway

At one time smoking was common in every enclosed space, a person could not go to a bar or restaurant, get on a bus, work in an office, without being exposed to second hand smoke – so why not join the crowd, rather than being a weird non-smoker.

It is good for your health

In its earliest days tobacco was promoted as a medicinal herb, and cigarettes were part of the rations soldiers received during the First World War.

Staying in touch with others does have great mental health advantages, the problem comes when that is moderated through a third party which is deliberately designing the systems people are using to make them addictive.

It is a Free public service

In it’s early days Commercial Social Media spent large amounts of venture capital to give users the ability to create and share content with relatively little intrusive advertising, and much of that content was high quality and valuable. This gave and incentive for users to keep returning, and algorithms made content people viewed the most the highest priority – even if some of this content was misogynist or reinforced existing biases. Now that people are ‘hooked’ the quantity of advertising has increased. This could be compared to ‘The Old Dope Pedlar‘ by Tom Lehrer. ‘Doing well by doing good.‘.

Location and XMPP Internet Chat

One feature of XMPP clients which receives less attention than it deserves is the ability to send the current Location of the user, as defined in the XEP-0080: User Location feature.

If you are using, say, the Conversations client (or derivatives such as Snikket), you can attach (with the paperclip icon at the top of the screen), your current location to a message.

The recipient (or recipients for a group chat), receive a message with button to ‘Show Location’ and clicking on that will open a map showing where the sender it.

Uses

The ability to easily send an unambiguous location, without needing to know where you are yourself has many uses – some attempted to be covered by workarounds like What3words, Mapcode and other Geocoding systems.

Such systems require that your phone runs an app which can determine your location (i.e. your current latitude and longitude) and convert it to something more convenient to be send by speech, or possibly as a text message. If you already have an app which can transmit your location, and also chat, send photos and videos etc, then it is simpler to use that.

Family and Friends

When meeting up with friends in a place you do not know, it is very handy to be able to send your location quickly and easily.

Breakdown services

Many breakdown services can see the benefits to them of a App, which can send their clients location, but having an app which only does one thing, and which you hope not to use is a poor use of your phone’s resources. If they had an XMPP contact point – say ‘help@rescueservice.example.com’ – then clients could use that to provide information on where they are, as well as further information on the problem.

Reporting Potholes, Fly tipping …

There are many situations where an accurate location report would be useful, as well as the ability to send a picture. Councils could use a set of XMPP accounts, e.g. pothole@oxfordshire.gov.uk for

Tour groups

Organised tours, particularly those where not all the group members will be together all the time, could benefit from the ability for the group leader to send a message saying ‘I am here’ – at some convenient meeting point – and message to ask member to be there in half an hour. By running their own server they could create temporary (or not) client accounts for group member who do not have an account, and add everybody on that tour to a Group Chat

Where are you?

A possible XMPP extension would be a standard way to ask the client program for a location report. Depending on the source of the query this could result in

  • The user being asked if they want to send the location, or decline to send it (which would send a reply indicating this) or ignore the query
  • The device sending, declining or ignoring, depending on what it had been told to to.

Federated Social Media and Journalism

Although journalists take a keen interest in Commercial Social Media (CSM), primarily meaning Facebook (and its subsidiaries, WhatsApp, Instagram etc), and Twitter (and possibly Tik Tok, and YouTube) there are particular reasons why journalists should be wary of them, and be aware of, and use and promote Federated Social Media alternatives.

Commercial Social Media is a rival, not a friend

Traditional Media (newspapers and broadcasters) and Commercial Social Media compete for advertisers, and CSM does so more successfully, as it can deliver a more accurate profile of its readership to the advertisers, who are the people who are paying for it.

CSM does not employ any journalists, benefiting from the work of journalists paid by Traditional Media, while undermining the revenue which pays their salaries. A career as an ‘Influencer‘ is probably not what most serious journalists aspire to.

Commercial Social Media is displacing Journalism as a source of news

Newspaper revenues have plummeted, (see for example The decline of Newspaper circulation), in a vicious spiral, as their readership reduces they become less attractive as to advertisers, so the advertising revenue falls. The same applies to broadcast Television – where streaming services providing the same contents give better information to an advertiser in terms of information about viewers than they can.

Commercial Social Media will inevitably become political

As Commercial Social Media becomes more accurate in its profiling of its user base it will know more and more about the return on investment it can deliver to an advertiser from any particular user. There will come a point where the most valuable thing that many social media users can provide in return for free hosting of their posts and pictures will be their votes.

By pushing their readership towards CSM, when they use Facebook and Twitter as their means of relating to their user base, Traditional Media organisations, are indirectly encouraging this trend. This is particularly ironic as the idea of interference in democratic elections is abhorrent to most journalists in the free world. (it is interesting that the expression free world is taken to mean free as in freedom, and journalists do not confuse it with free as in free newspapers).

As a case in point, The Guardian article on ‘David Puttnam hits out at government as he quits House of Lords” has Share buttons for Facebook, Twitter (and email), but The Guardian does not have an independent social media presence of its own, despite the one of the significant points of the article being the government’s lacklustre response to the report on ‘Digital Technology and the Resurrection of Trust‘. (This 153 page report touches on many of issues of transparency and trust)

What are the alternatives

These are just suggestions which journalists may find worth investigating. Journalism being the production and distribution of reports on current events based on facts and supported with proof or evidence, the ways that information flows in today’s world seems worth studying.

The common factor in all of the following suggestions is that they are Federated, so a Traditional Media organisation can set up their own presence (or instance) in these systems and not lock their readership/viewers in. They would all be able to be used in a subscriber model, in the same way as a newspaper operating behind a paywall if this turned out to be the best business model.

They are also all Free Software, so the cost of experimenting and learning about them is low, and they are supported by enthusiastic and helpful communities. When setting up such systems it is worth considering what they should be called. For experimental purposes any domain name is suitable, but in production they should be subdomains of the main internet presence to inherit its trust – see It is good to be a tree for why improving understanding of trust is becoming increasingly important in the online world.

Diaspora

as an alternative to Facebook. I do not yet have a Diaspora account, though it looks worth investigating.

XMPP

as an alternative to WhatsApp (see Who pays for WhatsApp). This is an Internet Standard Instant Messaging protocol, with at least two good choices of server systems (the part that might be run by a newspaper) and a wide range of clients (the part the used by their readership), including web clients so readers do not need to install a particular app if they do not want to.

I am on xmpp as jlines@debian.org

As XMPP is its own protocol there is no clash in using names similar to the email addresses already in use. If for example The Guardian were to offer an XMPP service to its subscribers (a potential way to delivery added value to the subscription at low cost the the newspaper), they could use addresses of the form fred.bloggs@subscribers.theguardian.com to distinguish them from staff.

ActivityPub (Mastodon or Pleroma)

as an alternative to Twitter. This works best for content which is intended to be publicly shared, and can be boosted (a bit like being retweeted) across multiple instances.

I am on the Debian instance of pleroma as @jlines@pleroma.debian.social.

Peertube

as an alternative to YouTube. The organisation running the server pays the hosting and network bandwidth costs to host their own streaming media, but by peering with other instances allows the other instances viewers, to see the other instances content, some of it using hosting organisation’s bandwidth, and vice versa.

The Dark Side

The ability to operate a Federated Media instance to publish content using their own rules about what is permitted does mean that it can become a platform for views or content which has been blocked or banned from CSM, for example (or so I hear – I have not looked at it myself) Gab.

I do know there are some instances which are echo chambers for conspiracy theorists, but distinguishing truth from falsehood, fact from fiction and conspiracy from cover up should be the essence of journalism, and equipping the public to do the same should be part of the mission.

On the other hand, operating a Federated Media Instance in their own domain (as a subdomain of the domain where they have built up a web presence) would allow traditional journalism publishers to leverage the trust in their existing ‘brand’.

hope on the horizon

Better tools for investigating trustworthiness of information found on the internet are always interesting, and a project called EUNOMIA looked interesting. It is not yet at the stage where it is useful to the average social media user, but people with in interest in journalism, politics or sociology might benefit from being aware of it, and – in example of the way things change, its domain now points to some form of gambling site, so I have removed the link to its live demo. It is described here, and source code on Gitlab.

Who pays for WhatsApp

Although ‘free’ to use, WhatsApp needs quite substantial resources to run, not to mention that it cost Facebook over $19 billion in 2014. Facebook is not a charity, or a public service utility – it is a very profitable company, with a net income of over $18 billion in 2019.

Despite this there is no clear explanation of it’s business model. Most ‘Free’ services on the Internet are provided in exchange for advertising revenue, hence are paid for by the companies who use them as advertisement brokers. Because Facebook, and Google etc know so much about you they can, in theory, target advertising more effectively and advertisers are willing to pay a premium for this. In some ways this can be an ‘everybody wins’ scenario – the IT company knows that you like, for example foreign travel to exotic places, so show you advertisements about that, rather than, for example, about collecting miniature figurines which you would not want to know about anyway. WhatsApp, however does not show advertisements, targeted or otherwise.

None of the explanations of the WhatsApp financial model are very convincing, and businesses without a way of making money need careful scrutiny.

The Meta group parent company somehow made enough money to donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund in 2024.

Contact information is valuable in itself

Much is made of the message security of WhatsApp, and messages between users are highly secure – many experts have verified that the actual messages are private. The trade off you make in exchange for use of WhatsApp services is to give them access to your contact data – that is not only your phone number, but the phone numbers of everybody whose details you store in your phone.

Your contact data says a lot about you, do you shop expensive shops, who else uses the same hairdresser as you, are you a committed member of a political party, who is your doctor, who are your friends (and their friends, and so on). You are likely to share an income level, some hobbies and interests, political leanings etc with your contacts. In military or security circles this is known as Traffic Analysis.

Who does your contact data belong to ?

If you are in a position of responsibility, a doctor, a teacher, a politician, a social worker, a church leader, and so on, you are probably entrusted with the contact information of people who trust you, as a person, but would not necessarily want their details spread more widely, but this is the data which is being exchanged for a ‘free’ Instant Messaging service.

Potential for abuse

The Guardian Newspaper actually suggests that it’s readers contact it via WhatsApp. This provides Facebook – who can be regarded as a rival media organisation – with the the phone numbers of any of its readership who use that route. If say Fox News, or The Times managed to get hold of this information it would be regarded as a security breach, but for some reason the New Media companies seem to be treated as if they were public utilities, rather than commercial rivals (which they are if you, too, are in the business of mediating and conveying information to an audience).

Asthma UK have launched a WhatsApp chat service. Although I am sure it was not the intention of their service, knowing the contacts of the phone number they list, is a list of phone numbers of contact details of asthma sufferers.

Please note that it does not require deliberate action at WhatsApp for this to be an issue. Big Data means that, for example, people with some medical condition may share other characteristics, such as, in countries which use a medical insurance system, higher medical bills, and this will emerge the algorithm automatically without human scrutiny.

Members of Parliament are very fond of WhatsApp, being sold on the security of the signals, not realizing how revealing the membership of various WhatsApp groups can be. Their faith in its security may be misplaced – there is a Wikipedia page dedicated to Reception and criticism of WhatsApp security and privacy features which outlines some of the historical problems (some quite recent) that there have been.

I would be very happy to discover, somewhere in WhatsApps rather convoluted Privacy Policy, and terms of service, something which puts my mind at rest, but for now I prefer the standardised, federated XMPP for Instant Messaging.

What is WhatsApp anyway?

Some people might think that there has to be some magic technological advantage that WhatsApp has over other instant messengers, but it is in fact XMPP – the Standard Internet Instant Messaging system, but without the Federation which would allow its users to talk with other systems. It runs the open source ejabberd software – which also powers many XMPP systems. Further details can be found at https://undercodetesting.com/whatsapps-architecture-a-deep-dive-into-its-distributed-messaging-system/

Email: jlines@debian.org

XMPP: jlines@debian.org

Fediverse: @jlines@pleroma.debian.social