Challenge
Challenge
Celebrating achievement
Social media is a competitive environment, but it is also opaque and confusing. We believe the rules for how content is amplified should be transparent and fair, and that rather than raw engagement, communities should decide what events and other content is showcased, and what is suppressed or removed.
The key distinction with legacy social media is that we heavily weight towards active user intents, rather than revealed preferences. This way users can actively participate in curating content, including delegating to other users who have more clout or subject-matter authority in their community, whether that be salsa or knitting or astrophysics.
Truth
Truth
Amplifying authenticity
It has never been more important to be real, to be authentic. We have aligned our incentives so that we don’t encourage screen addiction or other negative behaviours. Plug is embedded in real world communities to increase the amount of real world contact and connection between people you interact with on our website.
That is why real world events are so central to our mission. By bringing people together in physical spaces, around shared activities, interests, and values, we believe that this will make online interactions reflect the honesty, civility, and kindness that we experience in our daily lives.
Care
Care
Maximising inclusion
Far from from making us feel connected, included, and accepted, academic study after study after study suggest a powerful link between time spent using social media and loneliness. It is no wonder people are leaving major social media sites, or reducing their screen time, even if that makes them feel more disconnected and excluded.
Plug.events is committed to an architecture that fosters inclusion and builds bridges between communities. Human beings are diverse, as reflected in the array of interests and cultures that help us orient our lives together. At the most foundational level, we cultivate equity by creating safe and integrated spaces for everyone.
Independence
Independence
Owning our responsibilities
It is no secret that social media companies have cut corners with data privacy, the mental health of users, and democratic integrity under the pressure imposed by capitalism to prioritize engagement and growth. Technology platforms have created a race for human attention that’s unleashed both invisible – and increasingly visible – harms to society.
The unspoken truth is that executives in social media have trapped themselves in a perverse game that serves investors in a race to own the world, and advertisers who are harvesting your attention as a commodity. Way down the list of priorities are the real intentions and long term interests of ordinary users, who bring all of the value to these platforms.
Plug.events is truly independent, built by the good will of a talented group of ordinary people who came together behind a shared vision. We are the wilfully broke, who have worked without pay, sometimes for years, eschewing the standard startup trajectory in favour of our independence.
Because we are beholden only to you, our partners, supporters, and patrons, we have the freedom to serve you effectively, to make good decisions to resolve wicked problems that have plagued social media since its inception.
Privacy By Design
Privacy By Design
Your privacy is our priority
Invasiveness is baked into social media, through the paradigm of big data, behaviorism, and the business model of advertising. This makes it an intractable issue for existing platforms.
Our model side steps the entire issue by removing the negative corporate incentives entirely, allowing us a freer hand to be both privacy first, and privacy by design.
Privacy by design is a framework that helps companies build privacy protections into their products from the very beginning. Privacy first is an overall commitment by a company or organization to protecting the privacy of its users or customers. This encompasses a broader set of principles and practices that aim to protect user privacy.
Our promise is to use a novel privacy model that ensures that users maintain control over their data. Instead of collecting and monetizing users’ personal information, passively monitoring your behavior to better target and guide you away from your intentions, towards ours, we have aligned our interests with your active intents and goals, and then locked them in place. So you will have the option to freely use the platform while keeping your data entirely private, or share it with the other users and communities that you trust.
We are Responsible Free Speech Absolutists
We are Responsible Free Speech Absolutists
Freedom of Speech, but not Freedom of Reach
We amplify local subject-matter authorities and bridge builders within shared spaces in order to prioritise truth and good faith debate in general, while having enough humility and contextual sensitivity to know that small, self-regulating communities (ideally below the Dunbar number) are the real authorities on what is and is not hate speech and misinformation, given the right conditions.
We believe in letting people choose who to trust, not having click-maximizing algorithms choose for them.
We believe that hosting a broad range of views is good for democracy.
We believe in freedom of association and in free speech – and we do not believe those things can be safely compromised – but with caveats:
- If we as a platform are facilitating speech then we must qualify that freedom of speech is not the same as freedom of reach. Everyone has a right to free speech, but nobody has a right to an audience.
- It is not our right, not even on Plug.events itself, to decide who has a right to an audience or not outside the explicit rules we set for the platform. We do not have the right to insert our personal politics from an ivory tower into a contextually contingent public discourse.
Provenance by Design
Provenance by Design
Amplifying real people sharing content in good faith
Provenance by Design is a model for designing ethical social technology that guarantees that every piece of content suggested or amplified on our platform is genuinely associated with real individuals who are actively involved and invested in the activities they claim to be. Through a combination of community vouching, peer verification, and optional ID verification, our platform is more resilient against large scale social engineering tactics. This multi-layered approach not only safeguards users’ personal data from falling into the hands of fraudsters and malicious actors seeking to manipulate their online behavior, but it also provides regulators with confidence in our system’s ability to curb the dissemination of false or misleading content is minimized, protecting the public from potential harm caused by misinformation.
By establishing a robust network of authenticated individuals, we ensure that interactions on our platform are genuine, authentic, and free from deceitful influences. This not only promotes a safer online environment but also fosters a sense of trust and reliability among our users.