On social media, interoperability and smoking

Personally, I do not mind using three different messaging apps to stay in touch with all of my friends, but it would be great to be able to stick to my favorite app without losing any contacts.

If those messaging apps were interoperable, I could do just that. Interoperability means that services can be designed so that they remain compatible with each other, no matter which provider you choose. You would not need to worry about losing access to a service because your personal network uses a different provider. Take email as an example: No matter which email provider you choose, you can send emails to everyone else regardless of their provider because they all rely on the same protocol.

Even though both WhatsApp and Signal are using the same protocol to encrypt chat messages (namely the Signal Protocol) they are not compatible with each other as of yet. Article 7 of the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) requires some messaging apps, such as WhatsApp, to allow third-party apps to access their basic functionality*¹, which is a small step towards creating an interoperable messaging ecosystem in the EU.

Even less legislative progress has been made towards an interoperable social media ecosystem. This spring, the EU Commission announced that they are not planning to extend their interoperability obligations to social media*², despite the existence of interoperable social media infrastructure with protocols like ActivityPub*³, used by Mastodon, and AT Protocol*⁴, used by Bluesky. But, before we can take a closer look at how an interoperable social media ecosystem might look, we need to start by understanding how popular social media platforms operate at the moment.

The problem with social media

The companies running social media platforms are businesses and businesses need to make money. Their main source of income is advertisement revenue. To maximize ad revenue, these companies have found that capturing users' attention and keeping them on their platforms for extended periods of time is very effective in getting them to watch more advertisements and thus generate more ad revenue. Additionally, keeping users on their platforms for longer periods allows these companies to gather more data about their behavior. They can use this data to further personalize and optimize advertisements, tweak their recommendation algorithms, and for other purposes, such as potentially influencing elections*⁵.

However, aggressively capturing user attention and keeping people on their platforms for as long as possible does lead to issues at both the individual and the collective level. Addictive design patterns encourage phenomena like doomscrolling, which negatively impacts users' mental health, particularly among minors*⁶.

Meanwhile, the human psyche seems to drive people to engage with especially divisive content, which algorithms then promote. At the collective level, this means that these algorithms tend to favor content that can be harmful to both civil discourse and democracy itself. This is especially concerning because this kind of content is quite prevalent among right-wing populists who are already on the rise and contributing to increased levels of affective polarization around the world.

Ultimately, the leaders of these companies do not seem particularly interested in investing their profits to tackle these trends. Instead, they are actively encouraging the rise of fascism by supporting and funding Donald Trump in the U.S., among other questionable activities*⁷.

Interoperability as the solution?

How could making interoperability a requirement combat this trend? The idea is simple. Once social media is interoperable, switching platforms would be easier than ever before, as you would no longer lose your data, content, or network when migrating to a new platform. You would be able to see the same content from the same people and retain your posting history without issue.

The idea is that, once people no longer need to use current platforms to access the same content and communicate with their networks, they will switch to less harmful alternatives. Existing big platforms like Facebook, TikTok, and X might simply die off because they can no longer grow or retain enough users to be profitable. Alternatively, these platforms might need to change their designs to be less harmful to individuals to encourage users to return.

Quitting what harms you: smoking and nicotine patches

There is, however, one major problem with this assumption. We are dealing with humans here. And humans do not automatically stop doing harmful things just because easy alternatives are available. Consider smoking as an illustrative example. Smokers do not automatically quit when offered nicotine patches as a less harmful alternative (of course, there are other ways to quit smoking as well). What people need to overcome their addiction are strong incentives to do so.

Similarly, users of existing social media platforms need strong incentives to switch to less harmful and addictive alternatives. To bring the dream of a healthy and prosocial social media ecosystem to fruition, rather than letting it remain theoretical, I believe two things are especially important:

1. People need to be made aware of the harmful effects current social media platforms have on their well-being.

Not only does this require further research into the mechanisms of social media addiction and its impact on democracy, but it also refers to the importance of good science communication and the responsibility of journalists and policymakers to adequately address these concerns.

2. We need the best possible alternative(s) we can get so users want to switch because they can get a superior experience.

This means that the open social web*⁸ needs to work together in order to be able to compete against the established platforms existing today*⁹. Considering the amount of capital available to those existing platforms it will be especially hard to win this battle without working together instead of against each other.

Why do people start smoking in the first place?

Lastly, one more important point to consider is: Why do people use social media platforms when they may already be aware of their harmful effects? The comparison to smoking does come in handy here as well. Part of the answer is that drugs are fun, and so is social media, but I also believe that another part of the answer is that people want an escape from grim reality and turn off their brains just for a while*¹⁰.

This raises an important dilemma for existing and future interoperable social media platforms, such as Mastodon and Bluesky: How can they create a healthier social media landscape when users are drawn to addictive design patterns not only because they lack alternatives, but also because they want to disconnect from the surrounding world? For future alternatives to be more than just a different way to tune out the evil in the world and stay online all the time, they also need to address the root of the problem: growing resignation and pessimism about the state of the world itself*¹¹.

This means that, in order to encourage people to transition from unhealthy social media environments to healthier ones, they must feel hopeful about the world and their future. Climate psychology offers an important contribution to achieving this: collective action. An important step toward addressing anxiety towards the future is organizing and fighting for a better future with like-minded peers*¹². Thus, supporting social movements that address current global crises of ecology, inequality, and conflict may be an important step towards improving social media as well.

This shows that interoperability is only part of the solution to the current social media problem. To resolve this issue, we need to consider not only social media itself, but also the world around us.

Studying socioinformatics at RPTU in Kaiserslautern taught me how complex systems like social media are interconnected with the surrounding world and what that might mean for us as a society. If you have never heard of socioinformatics, feel free to explore and recommend it to your friends, colleagues, and family: https://www.cs.rptu.de/studium/studiengaenge/bm-si/