As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a

A new campaign aims to safeguard social media from billionaires using Bluesky’s underlying tech

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2025-01-13 18:30:04

As Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg continue to reshape the social media space, a group of international tech entrepreneurs and advocates has launched a campaign to protect social media from the control and influence of billionaires.

The initiative, Free Our Feeds, aims to protect Bluesky’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, and leverage it to create an open social media ecosystem that can’t be controlled by a single person or company, including Bluesky itself.

The goal of the initiative is to establish a public-interest foundation that would fund the creation of new interoperable social networks that can run on the AT Protocol, and build independent infrastructure to support these new platforms, even if Bluesky were to end up in the hands of billionaires.

The campaign comes a week after Meta announced that it was dropping fact-checking and loosening its content moderation rules. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is publicly traded, but Mark Zuckerberg essentially controls the company through his ownership of super-voting shares, which make it hard for activist shareholders to oust him or push for changes. It also comes as Bluesky saw a recent surge in users who migrated over from X (formerly Twitter) after owner Elon Musk used the platform to promote the presidential campaign of Donald Trump and other political causes, including the right-wing AfD party in Germany.