Several weeks ago African Stream joined the growing list of content creators banned on social media platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads), on crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe, and even on payment- processing platforms like Stripe and Paypal. Stripe and all the major social media platforms except X have banned African Stream.
This is no surprise because corporations are ultimately not going to facilitate serious anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist narratives beyond the point of managed dissent. It seems naive that some of us may have imagined otherwise, however briefly. I asked Media Alliance Executive Director and privacy expert Tracy Rosenberg whether any social media platform can evade corporate control.
ANN GARRISON: Social media, especially X, formerly Twitter, have become the public square, so much so that President Joe Biden even announced his decision to step down on X. However, X and all the rest of the major platforms are owned by billionaires and huge corporations, who will never allow them to be used to organize revolutionary change, as is evidenced by African Stream’s removal from most major platforms. Is there any way out?
TRACY ROSENBERG: If people genuinely feel that they don’t want their public square mediated by billionaires and corporations, there’s no choice other than a distributed ownership model like Mastodon.
AG: Mastodon has a tiny installed user base of only 8 million, with 1.4 million active monthly, compared to Twitter, which has, according to some sources, as many as 600 million active users. Estimates of Twitter’s user base actually vary widely, but they’re all well into the hundreds of millions.
TR: It’s true that Mastodon’s user base is tiny compared to Twitter’s or that of the other big networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. However, I’m a little sanguine about the actual numbers on those networks. On Twitter, it is abundantly clear that the platform is overrun with bots, burner accounts, and garbage posters. Sometimes we focus on numbers instead of meaningful engagement.
I honestly get more significant feedback and engagement nowadays on Mastodon even though I have only about one-third of the follower count there than I have on Twitter. A lot of my Twitter posts don’t get shown to many people, despite my follower count, and many of the replies I do get are antagonistic garbage. So we need to think about this in ways that are not just quantity, but also quality. On Mastodon I have far fewer followers but I’ve had far more meaningful interactions with other users.
AG: Twitter audience is also largely for sale in that you can pay to promote posts up to whatever your budget will allow, right?
TR: Yes, and this generally isn’t true on a distributed ownership model.
AG: Are there any significant distributed ownership platforms other than Mastodon?
TR: Blue Sky is supposed to incorporate that kind of model, but so far they haven’t. I am not aware of any other decentralized social media platforms.
AG: Could you explain what a “distributed ownership model” like Mastondon’s is? Who owns it and what does it mean, concretely, that they own it?
TR: The big social media companies like X and Facebook contain and control their platforms on a central server, aka a computer or collection of computers.
Mastodon operates instead on an interconnected set of individual and independent server computers controlled by different people that are interoperable, meaning they can talk to one another whether they’re in San Francisco or Shanghai.
AG: What makes them “interoperable”?
TR: Interoperability means that accounts or users on totally different server computers can all talk to all of the other server computers. For example, if you have an account on “Twitter” and that account is disabled, then you can’t see or interact with any other Twitter accounts. You have been centrally disabled. In Mastodon, you can just move to another individual server and you are back in the Mastodon network and can see and communicate with any other Mastodon account.
AG: OK, continue.
TR: Users log onto Mastodon on one of these many servers, aka computers, all of which are owned by different people, but then they can talk to anyone else who is logged onto Mastodon anywhere in the world.
Therefore information on Matodon is not centrally contained and controlled, and your interactions with the Mastodon community are not subject to disabling, banning, or deprioritizing in any meaningful way.
AG: OK, I want to try and get very concrete again. Let’s imagine there are 100,000 computer users who put their computers into service as Mastodon servers, meaning that they let other people access the Mastodon network by logging onto the Mastodon network on their computers. Let’s say, just hypothetically, that 80 Mastodon users access the platform on each of these 100,000 servers and that adds up to the 8 million Mastodon users capable of talking to one another. I know there’s nothing that precise going on, but is that a fair description of how Mastodon works?
TR: Yes.
AG: When I set up a Mastodon account, it didn’t say that it was assigning me to any particular server—say, to the home computer operated by Joe Smith in Saskatoon, or whomever wherever. So how did I wind up accessing Mastodon through that person’s server?
TR: You likely signed up at joinmastodon.org, which is the user friendly interface. It encourages you to join mastodon.social which is the largest server and unless you actively click “pick another server,” you will just open an account at mastodon.social. This helps people get on Mastodon without being paralyzed by a multitude of server choices before they even get started.
Someone who sets up an individual Mastodon server is likely to be setting up a community of interest, i.e., technology, art, birds, or whatever their particular interest is. That means that posts about that particular interest will appear when you log on through that server.
If you simply signed up to mastodon.social, no particular content will be favored, but you can then search for content or individuals and build your own communities.
AG: What is “the largest server”? Is it a single computer controlled by a single person? How many of Mastodon’s eight million plus users are on it? And, if most people log onto this largest server, isn’t the network largely contained and controlled by its owner?
TR: Mastodon.social was the first one and it is still the biggest, so if people don’t have a better idea, they end up there. It is somewhere between 1 and 2 million users and goes up and down. It is just one server node on the Mastodon network. You don’t need to have an account on Mastodon.social to reach or talk to all the people with accounts there, so no, it is not contained or controlled. You could have your own server of one, and if it is interoperated with Mastodon—what the network calls “federated”—then you can reach all the people on mastodon.social.
AG: How does content moderation work on Mastodon or similar networks? When I signed up, I was notified of community standards like not posting racist, ageist, homophobic, or xenophobic content and not inciting violence.
TR: Every single server or node on the network has an owner, and that owner is responsible for any moderation on their server. Most servers will provide moderation guidelines that they present to new accounts. They’ll tell you what they moderate, if anything, and why.
The server you probably joined, mastodon.social, has very conventional community standards that are pretty similar to what any corporate social media network would put out. There are also some out there that are considerably more strict or considerably more laissez-faire. If you don’t like the moderation you are being subjected to on a particular server, you can leave and join from another server while still being in and on Mastodon.
AG: That seems like a very large difference—that content moderation is not centrally controlled. African Stream, for example, would be able to move from a server that banned it to another that won’t while remaining on the Mastodon network. Is that correct?
TR: Yes.
AG: Presumably someone thrown off of one server for posting racist, ageist, homophobic, or xenophobic content, or inciting violence, could move from one server to another too, no?
TR: Yes. On the negative side, moderation by server owners is largely a volunteer effort, so it can sometimes be inconsistent or fall behind.
AG: Members of the Western political elite have been saying for years that social media is dangerously out of control. Speaking at the World Economic Forum, former Senator, Secretary of State, and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said that it needs to be censored and brought under control in order to build consensus, especially in democracies. He also said that the First Amendment is in the way.
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said that RT and other Kremlin propaganda like African Stream need to be brought under control, and shortly thereafter all the major platforms except X banned African Stream. Elon Musk is a champion of free speech who promotes X as a free speech zone, and he didn’t ban it, but we can’t expect him to ultimately tolerate speech that is imminently challenging his inordinate power.
Do you think that elites will ultimately try to come after Mastodon or any similar platforms if they become a serious threat, and are these platforms beyond their reach?
TR: I think there are a couple things going on in your statement. There is a legitimate problem with bots and troll farms distributing blatant misinformation on social media sites. I think society does have some legitimate interest in cracking down on things like, for example, telling people polling places in Black neighborhoods are closed when they aren’t.
The purpose of public debate is to air conflicting views and, yes, build consensus, and there is an element of good faith involved in that process or it doesn’t work. You end up with polarization, as we have because people are exchanging differing sets of facts, not differing opinions about the same set of facts.
Then there is the question of the bounds of acceptable debate, managed dissent, and the interests of governments in uniting people behind an agenda. Journalists sometimes act as “stenographers of power,” collaborating with governments in this way, and elites do want to make social media platforms do the same. Social media platforms are clearly messier and more difficult to control.
It isn’t a question of the Kremlin or not the Kremlin. The Russian and Chinese governments do everything the U.S. government does on the platforms commonly used in their countries. Governments are going to try to control what they think are dangerous ideas, and most governments perceive anti-imperialist narratives or economic redistribution narratives or anti-nationalist narratives as dangerous.
But if a social media platform is decentralized, what can governments actually do? If they pressure one server owner to take their server down, another pops up. There is no corporate entity to pressure. Not much you can do but counter-propagandize.
AG: Is Mastodon more of an English language platform, and if so, can it accommodate other languages as the big platforms can?
TR: There are lots of Mastodon users in Germany, speaking German, and the network can accommodate any written language.
AG: Do Mastodon and any similar platforms have limitations in Africa, where most internet access by far is via cell phones?
TR: For individual posters, no. There are phone apps for using Mastodon. I use one called “Tusky.” But for servers (host computers), you generally need more computing power, and limited broadband can impact the number of servers in a country and that can limit the vitality of the online conversations in and about that country. Not real interesting if African issues are literally invisible in an online community and you’re African, so you need a variety of African servers for it to be viable.
AG: Meaning that Africans who set up Mastodon servers are likely to be creating African communities of interest, and with fewer personal computers and less broadband, there will be fewer African communities of interest created. Is that correct?
TR: Yes.
AG: Why do you think Mastodon has failed to grow a larger user base?
TR: Mastodon does not provide an algorithmic feed. Social media users are used to trying to game the algorithm to “go viral.” When that isn’t in play, and all you can do is connect with people who want to connect with you, many people lose interest. On the big platforms they get hooked on the dopamine rush of likes, shares, and followers.
AG: I understand the dopamine rush, but can you explain the algorithmic feed?
TR: An algorithmic feed is a machine-learning formula that every corporate social media platform uses to try to show you content that it thinks interests you in the hopes of keeping you there generating clicks and responses from you that the platform can use to develop a more detailed profile of you to sell to advertisers.
Going “viral” is largely a function of having your post picked up by an algorithmic feed as engaging (which can also mean gruesome, outrageous, disgusting, tragic etc.), meaning a large percentage of the people who saw it were engaged by it. A post that is gathering engagement on its own may then be shown to you even though the platform’s algorithmic feeds have never indicated that it would engage you in the hopes that it will.
Thus, if you do engage with something in an algorithmically determined feed (like “for you” in Twitter), you somewhat unwittingly throw that content into other people’s algorithmic feeds and keep it circulating. Which is why we all make things like Twitter worse for everyone when we engage with trolls and bots. The purpose of a feed displayed by an algorithm, and the social media companies spend a lot of time tweaking and perfecting these algorithms, is to keep you clicking, liking, and sharing for as long as possible and to allow the companies to extract as much information about your preferences, interests, politics, health, associations, hobbies, and so on as they can sell. Surveillance capitalism uses artificial intelligence to facilitate data extraction at scale from corporate social media platforms.
AG: If a significant anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist user base were to emerge on Mastodon, would there be levels of physical, infrastructural control that might take it down?
TR: The entire internet operates on wires, cables, and fiber lines that are owned by a couple of companies. The backbone is undersea cables. Satellite is currently only used for satellite internet services and military uses. Satellite is a very small portion of commercial internet usage.
On a root level, the entire internet, not just social media, is vulnerable to some degree. Obviously, government itself runs on the internet as well, so switching off the undersea cables would have catastrophic ramifications, but you can’t say it’s impossible.
To suspend, expel, or shadow ban individual users or sets of users generally requires a centralized operation like Twitter, not a distributed one like Mastodon.
However, when payment systems are involved, there really isn’t a distributed model, so going after access to payment systems like Stripe, which suspended African Stream, is still possible.
So, is Mastodon protected from the root internet system? Of course not. But it is protected from the random corporate assaults that we see on a day-to-day basis. Like the other little things we use to mitigate harm—the TOR browser, VPNs, turning off location data when we don’t need it, using “do not track” mechanisms, etc., they don’t solve all the problems, but they reduce the personal harms we experience from extractive data systems.
AG: Is Bitcoin or other cryptocurrency a possibility for supporting sites like African Stream?
TR: The premise of cryptocurrency is yes. The entire purpose of the cryptocurrency movement, in its purest sense, is a distributed method of currency that doesn’t rely on, and cannot be shut down by, central banks. In practice, cryptocurrency has been highly volatile and hard to use, so it is more of a potential use case. But the potential is there and that is the idea.
Crime is another thing that needs to be financed outside the control of the central banking system. That is why cryptocurrency has been so heavily used in criminal activity.
AG: How might decentralized platforms like Mastodon impact social media consumption?
TR: They have the potential to break some of the addiction to algorithms and virality that hook us to the big corporate platforms. Mastodon is slower, but it holds the promise of being more real, and, in the end, what we need for a meaningful anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist movement isn’t a million likes or a million follows, but a meaningful exchange of information that powers action and builds relationships.
AG: Tracy Rosenberg, thanks for speaking to Black Agenda Report.
TR: You’re welcome.