https://www.cjr.org/special_report/building-honest-internet-public-interest.php A chunk of this is just popular narratives that are imo probably false/not very relevant--in general I think a lot of people on the left are butthurt about losing the 2016 election and as a result tend to overly blame tech companies instead of confronting the reality that "maybe a lot of people just genuinely like Trump"--but I think I can get behind the core argument, which I'd phrase like this: A purely market-based (digital) media ecosystem will tend to underinvest in public goods, so it'd be worthwhile to have some publicly funded alternatives. My thoughts: I think we'll get the most bang-for-buck not necessarily by trying to develop noncommercial social media alternatives, but by creating an ecosystem where there are more small- and medium-sized businesses => more consumer choice. (I.e. "unbundling social media") The article also hints at passing regulation to make Facebook et al support interoperability, since either way you have to deal with the incumbents' network effects somehow. this is a pretty common proposal. that article was written in 2019, when social media companies seemed more powerful than they do now. now imo there's a clearly better option: rebuild from scratch in the newsletter ecosystem, which is already interop-based. and do it fast before substack turns it all into another closed platform