How Alt-Tech Platforms Position Themselves on User Safety

The post-lunch session at Social Media & Society 2024 is on platform governance, and starts with Paloma Viejo Otero. Her focus is on the question of platform safety, which has become an increasingly important issue for social media platforms. Facebook has long emphasised the free flow of information and the freedom to share and connect, but this was replaced by a new set of core values in November 2019 – support for the free flow of information in particular was replaced with a new safety rhetoric that emphasised a greater role for moderation.

In response to such changes, there is now a growing literature on how platforms conceptualise safety, and how their mechanisms for controlling the flow of information in the name of safety have evolved; one key approach here is the moderation tactic of deplatforming. In turn, alt-tech platforms respond to such moderation by deconstructing the mainstream platforms’ idea of safety in order to advance their project of an absolutist understanding of freedom of expression.

The present project examined how such alt-tech platforms (Parker, Truth Social, Gab, Rumble, Bitchute, Odyssey, Gettr, Minds) articulate their community guidelines, missions, and visions, with particular focus on the location of such documents on these platforms – since this location reflects how the platforms conceptualise the positioning and relevance of these guidelines.

This found that these platforms emphasised the freedom of users, and minimised their responsibility for how users exercised such freedoms. This reflects a particularly US-centric, absolutist understanding of freedom of speech; any attempts to ensure user safety from the harms associated with free speech are constructed as censorship, and the main mechanism for self-defence made available to users is self-governance.