by Evan Henshaw-Plath — aka Rabble

Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we’ve witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms.

Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to organize securely. Protestors seeking to plan No Kings marches, wondered which app could be the most trusted. Inbound international travelers have been deleting their social apps for fear that immigration officers will search their phones. And during major disasters, like the tragic Texas floods and the LA fires, emergency responders and volunteers find their critical updates buried by algorithms that prioritize engagement over urgency. On a daily basis, countless online communities face arbitrary deplatforming, surveillance, and loss of their digital spaces without recourse or explanation.

These aren’t isolated incidents: they’re symptoms of a fundamental crisis in how we’ve allowed our digital communities to be governed. We’ve unwittingly accepted a system where massive corporations control the public sphere; algorithms optimize for advertising revenue rather than human connection, and we the people have no real agency over our digital existence.

We’ve Lost Our Way

I’ve spent decades building social technologies, including working at Odeo, the company that ultimately pivoted to become Twitter. There I was the social app’s first employee and de facto CTO until late 2006; and have since built numerous other community organizing platforms.

I’ve watched with growing concern as our digital spaces have become increasingly toxic and hostile to genuine community needs. The promise of social media as we defined it in the early days — to connect and empower communities of people — has been subverted by a business model that treats human connection as a commodity to be monetized.

Today, if you run a Facebook Group with thousands of members, you have no real authority — your community exists at the whim of corporate policies you cannot influence. This is fundamentally at odds with how real-world communities have always operated. Your local gardening club, bowling league, or neighborhood association, has democratic processes for leadership and decision-making. Why should our digital communities be any different?

It’s Time For a New Social Media Bill Of Digital Rights

I believe that the time has come for a new Social Media Bill of Digital Rights. Just as the original Bill of Rights protected individual freedoms from government overreach, we need fundamental protections for our digital communities from corporate control and surveillance capitalism.

So what could such a Social Media Bill of Rights include?

1. The right to privacy & security: The ability to communicate and organize without fear of surveillance or exploitation.

2. The right to own and control your identity: People and their communities must own their digital identities, connections and data. And, as the owner of an account, you can exercise the right to be forgotten.

3. The right to choose and understand algorithms (transparency): Choosing the algorithms that shape your interactions: no more black box systems optimizing for engagement at the expense of community well-being.

4. The right to community self-governance: Crucially, communities of users need the right to self-govern, setting their own rules for behaviour which are contextually relevant to their community. (Note: this does not preclude developer governance.)

5. The right to full portability — the right to exit: The freedom to port your community in its entirety, to another app without losing your connections and content.

To determine whether these are the appropriate “Rights”, I’ve just launched a new podcast, Revolution.Social where I invite my guests, including the likes of Jack Dorsey, Cory Doctorow, Yoel Roth, Kara Swisher and Renee DiResta, to share their feedback and debate where we need to head next.

Architecting For A Better Future

The good news is that the technical foundations for a better future already exist through open protocols that work like the web itself — interconnected and controlled by no single entity.

• The Fediverse, powered by ActivityPub, enables platforms like Mastodon to create interconnected communities free from corporate control.

• Nostr provides a foundation for decentralized, encrypted communication that no one can shut down.

• BlueSky is pioneering user choice in algorithms.

• Signal demonstrates that private, secure communication is possible at scale.

Unlike the walled gardens of Meta, TikTok, and Twitter (now X), these open protocols allow communities to connect across platforms while maintaining control of their spaces. When you use email or browse the web, you don’t worry about which email provider or browser your friends use — it just works. Our social spaces should function the same way.

What’s missing is the bridge between these technical capabilities and the tools communities actually need to thrive. We need to move from closed, corporate platforms to open protocols that communities can shape and control. This isn’t just a technical challenge — it needs to become a social movement. We need to build systems that are co-designed with communities, that respect their autonomy, and that enable their authentic purposes.

This isn’t a utopian vision — it’s an extension of how human communities have always worked. The gardening club raises money for soil and seeds. The sailing club maintains boats for teaching kids. Communities have always had the ability to self-organize, self-govern, and self-fund. We simply need to bring these proven models into our digital spaces.

How You Can Begin To Make Change Happen

The path forward begins with understanding that we are not passive consumers of social media — we are active participants in shaping its future.

Start by exploring and supporting open protocols and platforms. Join communities on Nostr, Mastodon or BlueSky. Demand transparency and control from the services you use. Join the growing movement of technologists, activists, and community leaders working to build better digital spaces.

We deserve better than what today’s social media platforms offer. We have the technical knowledge, the social understanding, and the urgent necessity to build something better. The question is no longer whether we can create more equitable and empowering digital spaces — it’s whether we will choose to do so.

The moment for this transformation is now. As our lives become increasingly digital, we cannot afford to leave our communities at the mercy of corporate platforms and profit-driven algorithms. We must reclaim our digital spaces and establish the fundamental rights that will allow our communities to truly thrive in the digital age.

Watch this space: I’m actively working with other community leaders to build better tools for our digital communities, as this recent article in Techcrunch describes.

Note: this article also appears in Techdirt.