What people in the global majority need from networks

This is a new kind of post for wreckage/salvage. For years, I’ve wanted a place to break down and promote research that can help us make/build/participate in more accessible, useful, and humane networks. I’m delighted to finally be doing it here. In each of these briefs, I’ll introduce a report or paper, provide some context about the people and/or organizations behind it, and summarize the points I found especially relevant for network work.

As always, huge gratitude to the people throwing in with me to make this kind of independent culture/connective tissue work possible. I couldn't do any of the fediverse and cross-network thinking and writing I do here without the community backing that lets me set aside time for it, and it's so heartening to have that backing. (If you’d like to support this work, you can sign on here or send a one-time contribution.)

Background

What it is: “Exploring a transition to alternative social media platforms for social justice organizations in the Majority World,” research findings coming out of a series of semi-structured interviews + a review of literature on alternative social networks and the platform needs of the global majority.

Who made it: Jeff Deutch, Denisse Albornoz, and Olivia Johnson for The Engine Room, an international non-profit organization focused on enabling social justice movements "to use technology and data in safe, responsible and strategic ways, while actively mitigating the vulnerabilities created by digital systems."

Who funded it: The Engine Room’s major funders in 2023 are the Ford Foundation, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, Luminate, and Open Society Foundations. (Full funding disclosures are available here.) The report's authors all have backgrounds in human rights and/or civil society research; the Engine Room itself publishes a lot of excellent work and is unusually transparent about its processes.

Disclosures: I participated in this research as in interview subject, explaining some of the things Darius Kazmi and I encountered in our concurrent research with Fediverse server teams, and my own sense of the alternative-platform landscape—but please don't let that dissuade you from reading it, since you can always just ignore my quotes. (I’m identified as Interviewee 4 and yes, the apocalypse quote in the introduction is mine.) My summary below will focus on the parts I didn’t talk about as an informant.

Context

Earlier this year, the Engine Room conducted a substantial research project on the factors affecting Majority-World* social justice organizations' transitions to alternative social media platforms, and their findings are now available. I've been very keen to see what they learned from conversations with other people whose knowledge about Majority World network contexts goes much deeper than mine, and the report was worth the wait. In this post, I’ll point out a few things I found especially relevant to network-making, but I encourage network members and builders to read the full report—the quotes from interviewees working in global majority contexts will stay with you in ways that a summary never will, and I can only squeeze in a few here.

The research emerges from concerns about the effects of the concentration of social networks in the hands of a few mostly US-based corporations, none of which are willing or able to place the well-being of global populations over their commitment to extracting maximum profits and achieving market domination. As the report’s authors write:

While the impact of mainstream social media platforms has played a major role in digital activism around the world, civil society concerns have been growing, particularly around issues such as surveillance, censorship and privacy. Harassment and abuse are commonly reported on these platforms, while their content moderation policies and algorithmic recommendations contribute to the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories and political propaganda, all of which disproportionately affect communities on the margins of society.

(The report itself is heavily footnoted—please see the full version for sources and citations.)

The report is broken into sections examining the way Majority World social justice organizations use "mainstream social media," the way they use alternative social media, and the factors that affect their possible transitions to greater reliance on alternative social media platforms—as well as a set of recommendations for facilitating a safe and productive transition away from centralized platforms run by giant US corporations.

So what's in it for network people?

The Engine Room team found that their informants with deep experience in Majority World civil society and social justice work understand exactly what’s wrong with and dangerous about corporate mega-platforms. They also use them anyway, because as flawed as they are, they’re still the best way to reach people both inside and outside of their communities. As one interviewee explained:

What we hear in workshops is: “Listen, my community is going through a war now in Sudan,” “My community is going through a natural disaster in Syria and Turkey,” “My community is going through a genocide. I really don’t have the time to tell them about the fediverse and to migrate.”

The report’s authors write that another interviewee expressed surprise at how low a priority privacy concerns were among the activists they worked with, compared with tools for communicating quickly and widely:

We’re talking about activist movements documenting protests and human rights violations which are heavily censored by despotic and/or occupying regimes and would otherwise most likely not make it at all to mainstream media. The live feature on, for instance, Facebook or Instagram is really vital for so many activists there. And that is not something available on Mastodon and other tools on the fediverse. These features are actually really important from a journalistic and documentation point of view.

There’s also a section on the complexity of communicating without corporate platform tools when those tools are the ones optimized for low connectivity, which is an issue I’d like to see more widely understood in social internet conversations. The whole section on why activists and others working in Majority World contexts still use corporate platforms is very much worth reading. It’s what I’m going to point advocates of other networks to when I see them chiding global-majority writers and activists for using Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.

Crucially, the report doesn’t include a long section on attempting to transform corporate megaplatforms through regulatory pressure—or anything else. I found that pragmatism so refreshing. (Instead of making recommendations tech companies will ignore, the report has a section on how Majority World communities can mitigate some of the risks and dangers inherent to mega-platforms.)

Alternative networks & the global majority

The second section of the report outlines the value of alternative platforms to Majority World communities, as expressed by the interviewees, and these are worth taking notes on. Interviewees highlighted:

The possibility of building systems tailored for—and ideally co-designed with—their communities, with emphasis on user controls and security
The reality of interoperability and the potential for full account portability, though this is reduced to some extent by the patchy reality of portable identity
A lack of centralized surveillance, though this is reduced by concerns about ecosystem sustainability and the gap between real and apparent privacy
“Community-centered” governance models that give users control and decisionmaking power
The potential for building small, interconnected communities

And on the flipside, they also pointed out challenges their communities identify with using alternative platforms:

Economic barriers for community leaders and members (including data plans)
Software usability and tech literacy barriers
The fact that alt networks aren’t a 1:1 replacement for mega-platforms, and promoting them in that way results in confusion and bad experiences
Much, much smaller userbases, which sharply limit reach for activist work
The downsides of a lack of centralized moderation/trust and safety work—a sense of fewer guardrails against the open internet’s worst actors and content, including hate speech targeting Majority World communities

How to make things better

The remainder of the report synthesizes factors related to a desired future set of networks and then offers a set of recommendations for people working in the network world.

The factors/characteristics include a call for alternative platforms to be both designed "from the margins" to ensure a sturdy understanding of the needs of their most vulnerable users and designed "around the needs and capabilities of non-technical communities" to make a transition to alternative networks possible. If you've been reading my work for very long, you know that both of these points are at the heart of what I'm trying to do. They're also at the heart of most disagreements I get into with other advocates of alt networks—few of whom would publicly argue against design from the margins, but even fewer of whom actually practice it, and some of whom are markedly resistant to designing for people who lack deep technical expertise and whose networking needs are shaped by a shortage of time, attention, data, and financial resources.

On to the recommendations: The first set focuses on helping communities be as safe and healthy as possible while still relying on extractive, mainstream social platforms. In the second set, the authors lay out ways for organizations to ease the transition into the bumpy world of alternative platforms, including awareness raising and technical education.

The third set of recommendations dives into issues of immediate relevance to alternative network makers and advocates, and I think suggests a very rich set of research questions, potential projects, and ways of evaluating next moves for alternative networks:

Diversify funding: Support the development and scaling of diverse projects, with a focus on technology designed by and for communities advancing social justice agendas, such as those focused on women, LGBTQ+ communities, or human rights defenders.

Prioritize community-centered design: Support developers to carry out user research, develop more intuitive user interfaces, and ensure the needs of marginalized communities are at the center of the design process.

Address technological barriers: Support non-technical communities to use publicly available tools and open source technologies to build their own digital spaces and communities.

Address economic and environmental costs: Explore solutions to reduce the financial and environmental costs of maintaining the infrastructures required to run alternative social media platforms.

Build capacity for trust and safety work: Support capacity to conduct safety assessments (e.g. threat modeling, penetration testing, etc.) and implement effective content moderation in smaller and emerging platforms.

Strengthen local and regional support: Support the formation of regional communities of practice or institutions that promote knowledge exchange across regions, and support the participation of Majority World developers in multistakeholder forums.

I really like these, and I think they offer so many ways in or handles on the problem of building networks that are better for more people.

You can read the whole thing here in English, and the executive summary is available on the same page in English and Spanish.

Notes

(*) The term "Majority World," which the Engine Room uses in their work, descends from "Global Majority" and "Global South," "the developing world," and other attempts to refer to places and populations that have historically been colonized and underdeveloped by the ruling classes of the "Global North." Not incidentally, these are also the places and populations from which the Global North extracts both the raw materials and the crushing physical and cognitive labor that our networks and increasingly voracious software systems require. It's easier to change the terms we use than the systems they name, but reminders that most of the world's people live outside the protection of the wealthy world's fortresses seem useful to me.

The featured image is an anemometer and dial from the collection of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco, which has a superb collection of oceanographic measuring instruments, and is available via NOAA's scattered but wonderful digital collections. Photo credit, Y. Berard.

The original catalogue from which this and many other NOAA-cleared images I use are drawn is "Catalogue des appareils d'océanographie en collection au Musée océanographique de Monaco" by Christian Carpine, which appeared as an eight-part in issues 73, no. 1437; 74, no. 1438; 75, no. 1440 and 1441; 76, no. 1442, 1443, and 1444 of the Bulletin de l'Institut océanographique de Monaco, none of which are available online because they're in copyright.