By Karoline Helbig, Technology & Human Rights Fellow 2025-26
The views expressed below are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy or Harvard Kennedy School. These perspectives have been presented to encourage debate on important public policy challenges.
Social Media Platforms are a central part of many people’s lives. They help to connect, rant, stay on top of current events and mindlessly kill some time doomscrolling through other people’s supposed lives. These platforms have often been called “walled gardens” – spaces designed for the users to feel good so they spend as much time there as possible (and thereby generate ad revenue), and that make it very hard to leave without considerable costs (so they’ll ideally keep generating ad revenue for eternity). If ‘everyone I know’ interacts on a certain platform – or if I have a large audience that helps me make my living - I don’t feel like I can afford to miss out or leave the platform. A further wall is created by platforms providing specific services and structures that people are getting used to and that create further switching costs when moving to another platform with other standards. Large user numbers help these platforms improve their services – for example, the precision of their recommender systems – which makes them even more attractive for users and advertisers. In effect, the more users spend time on a platform, the more attractive it gets, the more users will join and use the platform. Consequently, user numbers of already big platforms grow exponentially.
“If ‘everyone I know’ interacts on a certain platform – or if I have a large audience that helps me make my living - I don’t feel like I can afford to miss out or leave the platform.”
But if millions of people spend a lot of time on a platform that is governed by one company, this company gains a considerable influence over all of its users. It makes the rules for how content is moderated and what contents are allowed at all, and it creates the algorithms (and maybe employs the human moderators) that enforce these rules. They also provide the tools that enable forms of exchange between these millions of users. They develop these tools at a pace that apparently cannot be matched by outside regulators, even if they are inclined to do so. In consequence, nudifying tools keep nudifying kids, women and vulnerable people; platforms distribute these images and allow the harassment connected to them, and regulators scramble to come up with a solution that will only be implemented several months later.
The gardens are decaying.
Another effect of the centralised structures of the oligopolist platforms is the creation of huge datasets on their users’ behaviour. Data on what people are posting and how they are reacting to other posts on the platforms belonging to the mother company are collected, stored, combined, computed, fed to recommender systems and sometimes sold to data brokers. And even with data security protocols in place, the potential harm that can be caused by using this vast data pool in the right (read: very, very wrong) way is unthinkable – though we have been getting glimpses.
An alternative to these centralized platforms has been gaining traction, lately, especially in Europe: The Fediverse is a network of independent servers hosting mini-Social Media Platforms.
An alternative to these centralised platforms has been gaining traction, lately, especially in Europe: the Fediverse is a network of independent servers hosting mini-Social Media Platforms. Connective protocols allow individuals to connect with users and sites from any other platform that is part of the network. Rules on data collection are generally more strict; free and open source software take out the economic incentives behind the content moderation aimed at locking in the users; codes of conduct and content moderation are federalised and specific to the respective mini-platforms, and if users want to move from one federal platform to another they can just take their followers with them. It’s more like a park, with walkways connecting Zen gardens with Italian Renaissance gardens. This structure has its challenges – the cross-platform content moderation responsibilities, the development of protocols, and reliable funding, to name just a few. But the Fediverse is a landscape worth exploring.
Elena Butusova | Adobe Stock
