EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

anti-abuse tools embedded within the platform. (Mastodon, 2021b). Diaspora is another decentralised network that functions in a way similar to Mastodon. Crowdfunded and open-source, the network is separated into “pods” and users belonging to these communities. Moderation of content is delegated to individual pods and their moderators (Diaspora, 2021). A different system is employed by Aether , a fully peer-to-peer social network divided into communities. Content moderation is given to moderators, who are chosen by active users in an always-ongoing election; additionally, users can “self moderate” content seen by them through various filters (Aether, 2021). In its current form, Aether is possibly the network (currently operating) closest to the “protocol” model of social media described below. These models are networks that decentralise both platform infrastructure as well as the task of content moderation. Different models are also possible. Minds presents a different type of decentralisation: while the code is open-source, the platform is not divided into separate servers and communities. Instead, the delegation to users occurs to some degree at the level of preferencing and content moderation. Users can award each other tokens that can be in turn used to boost the presence of user content. Content moderation policy employs a randomly selected jury of users to act as an appeal mechanism (Minds, 2021). Additionally, though not a social media platform as much as a social news site, Slashdot , otherwise a website with its own server, employs a user-based content moderation system. Users can be temporarily chosen to moderate content a limited number of times (Slashdot, 2021). In contrast to the category of platforms above, the clear difference in this group is that the platform controls most of its own infrastructure while delegating some parts of content moderation to its community. 3.2 The “Middleware” solution The proposals mentioned in Section 1 focus on the reform of the largest currently existing platforms and are more like the latter category of decentralised social networks or websites than the former. As Keller points out, most of them revolve around the same idea, which is to insert a new layer of independently operated services into the environment currently only controlled by social media platforms (Keller, 2021, p. 168). Masnick’s version of the idea is based on the notion of protocols used until today in many areas of the Internet (e.g. the e-mail protocols still in use today) and subsequent applications of these protocols (e.g. various e-mail clients). He thus imagines a version of a “platform protocol” and applications that would build on it, handling e.g. content moderation instead of a centralised platform (Masnick, 2019). Similarly, Fukuyama et al. see an opportunity to separate some functions of social media platforms from their current operators and place them in a “middleware” layer of services. These services could in theory serve as anything frommere content

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