This paper stems from a study of the historical shift from internet protocols as commons to social media as platforms. From Alphabet (Google) admitting that Gmail scans personal emails to extract commercially valuable data, to Snapchat recognising that supposedly ephemeral messages may be stored (Federal Trade Commission, 2014), to Tinder’s secret algorithm matching people based on a desirability score (Dent, 2019), to Grindr being caught sharing HIV-status information of its LGBTQ+ users with other companies (Ghorayshi & Ray, 2018), 1 the ongoing question revolving around those communication devices is always the same: can we trust them? How transparent are their algorithms? How ethical are the values embedded in their design? How safe and fair is the communicational space they are enabling? What data do they collect and store, and what do they do with them? The climax of this crisis is probably best epitomised by the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica episode and the following public hearings of Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, who was held accountable for this “breach of trust” (Wong, 2018). IntroductionĪfter a decade of growth and unquestioned pervasiveness in all walks of life, in recent years social media platforms have been subject to what can be called a trust crisis: trust in their ability to preserve privacy and the integrity of personal data, to prevent the spread of disinformation, or to protect users against harassment, among others. This paper is part of Trust in the system, a special issue of Internet Policy Review guest-edited by Péter Mezei and Andreea Verteş-Olteanu.
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