Is #deletefacebook enough? Promote #facebookAlternatives



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Facebook being open and vulnerable to third parties collecting data from its users was a key factor in the recent Facebook scandal.

As long as the privacy settings of a user allowed it, user data could be harvested via friends who gave apps permission to access their data.

Basically your data is available for third parties to harvest via your network of friends without you realising it - if you didn't actively change your privacy settings.

Creating emotionally engaging videos of apparently independent sources and feeding them into the targeted Facebook users' newsfeeds, persuaded many of the voters in several democratic elections to an extent that it affect the outcome.

Check out Channel 4 News youtube channel for more details on their investigations:

Apparently Facebook was fully aware about the fact that apps can harvest user data via their friends' network and found it "completely legal" back in 2011 when NGO activist Max Schrems sued them in Ireland. (see article in Austrian newspaper derStandard)

Is it enough to delete your Facebook account to make a change?

Even if I manage to convince all my family, friends, acquaintances, their family, their friends and their acquaintances I'm still pessimistic of the future.

Because the majority of persuadable people via Facebook to distort democratic elections will still be using Facebook - which is likely to still be open and vulnerable to third party data harvesting.

What else could we do?

Besides connecting with Facebook friends, many people use Facebook on a daily basis. They create or find events, check on social groups, local communities; find information on companies, contact companies, promote themselves or their company etc. - It has become an integral part of their life.

The global connectivity and availability of content is a huge advantage of Facebook. All the "Like us on Facebook", "Follow us on Facebook", "Share on Facebook" statements encourages people to go on Facebook.

In order to make a significant change we have to make Facebook an unattractive or unnecessary place to go to and people will naturally stop using it.

Putting the light on data privacy and the ethical or moral implications caused by the recent scandal may not be enough to induce the needed change. We need to change the necessity for people to use Facebook as part of their lives.

If there is no need to go on Facebook, if there is a more attractive place to socialise online, to get in touch with friends, communities, to easily contact companies or to promote oneself; then people wouldn't be spending time on Facebook or resorting to it for information.

Promote alternatives

Instead of simply deleting Facebook accounts and hoping that raising awareness will gradually spread throughout the world - which may not reduce the persuadable Facebook users significantly - the #deletefacebook movement should also urge people, groups, communities and businesses to promote alternative online platforms to their Facebook audience and gradually but eventually phase out their presence on Facebook.

If you are a content creator, a group owner, a Facebook page promoter consider moving your audience to an alternative platform and removing the "blue f" on your social media links.

If you are a follower, consumer and user, raise awareness to the Facebook pages you like and groups you are part of and urge them to move to an alternative platform and drop their Facebook online presence.

Instead of waiting and hoping for people to realise that they should care about leaving Facebook - or in fact any surveillance-based social media, which is very unlikely - we should aid and accelerate this process by moving the available content (groups and businesses) to alternative platforms.

If the #deletefacebook movement manages to persuade content providers to move to #facebookalternatives, I think we could avoid political election distortions and their shocking outcomes much sooner than if we only raise awareness by leaving the network.

A potential alternative?

When talking about deleting Facebook, you wouldn't think that a messenger app would be a viable alternative to a social media platform. However, I think that the messenger app Telegram has the potential to provide us with a new platform that is very close to a social media platform.

For having only been around a few years it has grown to a fairly large amount with 180 million users, despite not having spent any money on marketing. (https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/telegram-stats/)

Telegram's primary goal is not to make profit, it has no intend to go public and more importantly it puts data privacy and protection from third parties as one of their fundamental values.

Recently Telegram refused to hand out encryption-keys of its chats and was fined by the Russian Supreme Court. It is now facing a ban in Russia, but Telegram has officially announced that it stands to its values and will continue to protect its users' privacy.

How can Telegram be used as a social network?

Apart from keeping in touch with your contacts, every telegram user has access to a free online cloud storage that is said to be unlimited.

Use channels as albums, dropbox and newsfeeds

Private channels can be used as personal online storage for photos, music, videos, or any other file types as long as the file size is less than 1.5GB.

To share a photo, music or video album with your relatives or friends you can simply add them to the private channel. The content can only be viewed by the users who have joined the channel - they will only be able to join a private channel if an admin invites them.

Viewing a channel looks like a chronological order of the posted content - very similar to a Facebook page. Photos can have captions and @mentions and they can also be grouped into albums of 10 pictures. The app has integrated music players and allows streaming of music and video files before they are fully downloaded which makes the viewing experience very user-friendly and fast - let alone the instant view capability of posted links.

The ability to like or comment on posts is not an integrated feature, but can be achieved with telegram bots (see https://t.me/like and https://t.me/commentsbot).

These private channels can also be used as a collaborative dropbox storages if all members are granted admin rights. Files in the channel dropbox can be easily accessed in the shared media section. They are grouped by type and one can search for names using the search field in the channel.

Public channels can be used to broadcast yourself to the wider telegram community. You can make a unique @channelname, which can be found and viewed by anybody in the telegram network - even without joining the channel.

There are already many public telegram channels users can find and follow such as newspaper agencies, popular reddit posts, themed photos, health advice, videos on inspirational talks, etc.

Public channels support unlimited subscribers and are perfect for content creators, groups and businesses to directly broadcast to their audience and promote themselves.

Individuals can build a public online profile and share their status, stories, links or other content.

All channels can have a short description to serve as general information and a pinned message which appears as a sticky message at the top. This message can include a longer welcome message describing rules and how to contact the channel owners as a channel is mainly used for one-way communications.

Private and public groups for events and two-way communications

Private group chats can be used in combination with a channel to promote private or public events. The channels serve as broadcast to the audience and the group chats serve as the discussion forum of the event.

Public group chats will have a unique @username as well, and can be used as a public two-way communication with the audience of an interest group/business.

To avoid group chats becoming too crowded and messy, #hashtags, $cashtags, @mentions and rules should be established by the organising party. Message replies can help following a discussion thread.

What's missing?

There are some elements that Telegram could improve on with regards to usability and mainstream appeal.

It needs a solution to the cluttered list of contacts, channels and group chats. As soon as the number of contacts, channels and group chats increase to over 20 it becomes less user-friendly to browse through your subscribed channels or browse your own private channels. Currently there is the option to type in a channel name in the search field to pinpoint a specific channel.

A way to group and organise the list of subscribed channels, owned channels and groups could greatly improve the usability and Telegram's attractiveness.

There is no easy way of finding public channels or groups unless you know what you're looking for.

If the global search could encompass a search in the description of a channel it would be easier to find channels with similar interests.

Promoting your public channel within your contacts is currently rather difficult. You can put your public channel in your personal description or send your contacts a link to your channel, but there is no simpler way of finding public channels owned by your contacts.

If it would be possible to automatically gather the public channels of all contacts, it could ease the discovery of public channels and help connecting contacts to each other by allowing them stalk their public channels.

It is not a website platform, but an instant messenger based one.

Even though there are desktop clients for Telegram, many users may be more comfortable viewing things on a web-browser rather than in a message-style format. Posts that include links can still be opened in web-browsers. But messages without a link are viewed in the telegram app/desktop client by default, which has an instant messaging style and could put off some users.

Apart from that, the user base and content provider are missing especially in the Facebook and Whatsapp dominated countries.

So besides #deletefacebook, also promote #facebookalternatives to content providers.

Note: The author is not affiliated with Telegram, but solely supports Telegram's vision and values.