this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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Does Europe Need Its Own Social Media Platforms? (vid.freedif.org)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[โ€“] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For the record, there isn't a lack of investment in tech keeping European social media from happening. There were a bunch of early competitors in Europe that did quite well as Facebook/Reddit/Myspace alts at the national level.

They were pretty uniformly either acquired and dismantled or pushed out of the global market by the increasingly monopolistic current leaders, and particularly Meta.

It was venture capital and the insane advantage of launching in a consolidated, monocultural 350 million people market that drove that process. Alternatives in markets with less overlap or with more barriers to US competitors did not suffer the same fate.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yes, the EU has been just as ineffective at preventing monopolies in this area as it has been in the tech sector as a whole.

However, some platforms have also failed due to their national orientation: From Germany, I am familiar with StudiVZ, an early Facebook clone, and Xing, a LinkedIn (Microsoft since 2016) clone. Both failed due to their national focus, as they only served Germany.

So this was probably largely a network effect, but for the rest it was exactly as you say: typical of unregulated capitalism, the big platforms, backed by venture capital, bought up more and more competitors from the same and related sectors (such as Meta's purchase of WhatsApp in 2014) until they achieved a monopoly position. This was not prevented and is now a massive problem.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Preventing monopolies single-handedly is pretty hard. At least they are better than others at reclaiming some revenue and deploying some modicum of control.

But I think you may underestimate how much of a handicap there is in breaking out. If you go look at areas that need some degree of localization, like eBay, Uber or Amazon competitors what you end up seeing is that nation-specific startups tend to thrive and slowly spiral out to other countries. They often dominate indefinitely unless the US global leader decides it's time to sink billions in scorching the earth in that market.

When you don't need logistics, infrastructure and region-specific services it's almost impossible to compete with unlimited willingness to sink money in creating a monopoly. I don't know how you stop that, because particularly in social networks, but online in general people typically want to use THE thing. It's extremely rare that two competitors on the exact same service survive, grow and make money indefinitely, let alone a well populated market.

I don't know what the solution is to that. Nationalization? I mean, I can't believe there isn't a public EU payment provider, at least. That seems like key infrastructure that shouldn't be privatized, let alone existing almost entirely outside your country. Social networking and online comms are even harder because, frankly, you also don't want them to be controlled at the national government level, that's just as scary.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's all absolutely right. The tech monopolies, which are mainly owned by US companies, are almost impossible to break up โ€“ and it's certainly not something we can expect from users themselves. In my opinion, this can only be achieved through regulatory intervention, such as Switzerland has implemented for Amazon for example. Unfortunately, however, this is also highly unlikely within the EU.

Nevertheless, I think it is necessary. Essentially for two reasons:

  • I believe that the manipulation of opinion by the current social media will sooner or later lead to the end of democracies, as I believe is already beginning in the US.
  • The user data that makes social media platforms so valuable will continue to be controlled by US corporations, making it impossible for European companies to ever gain a foothold in the AI market (despite all the ethical problems and the inappropriate marketing hype surrounding it, I do not consider AI to be a trend, but rather a key technology).

In short, I think that if Europe does not do everything in its power to finally become more independent in terms of technology, we will very quickly fall even further behind than we already are. I also fear that we will no longer be able to save what is left of our social market economy or preserve our democracies.

[โ€“] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Hah. If anything you're giving US democracy way too much credit there.

I think something's got to give, and European strategic independence will certainly be a requirement, both in this area and others.

I just don't know what that looks like or what the path to it looks like. And in the meantime the antidemocratic dynamics are already at play. We may be in a much worse position on all of this by the end of today.