One of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger has recently called for a strike against social media giants for two days to protest against ‘serious grievances’ and a ‘long train of abuses’ by the online social networks.
Larry Sanger has made this announcement of digital independence in a blog post he posted last month, in which signatories, reaching just over 1,000 (as of writing) can advocate for decentralized social networks. According to him, the primary goal of decentralized networks is to focus on publishing data freely ‘without having to answer to any corporation’ or entity.
Meanwhile, other objectives of this campaign against online networking companies notably Google, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and others, are supporting better privacy practices and ensuring no company, or small group of companies, control standards and protocols of our lives and how we interact with other people.
In his blog post, Sanger has expressed concerns that social media companies have “banned, shadow-banned, throttled, and demonetized both users and content based on political considerations, exercising their enormous corporate power to influence elections globally.”
The signatories probably believe that social networks notably the largest social media giant Facebook, are responsible for manipulating users’ personal data for advertising purposes at a massive scale.
Larry urges that on July 4 and 5, people with serious concerns against social media must go on strike and log off from all social accounts. He also recommends users to sign the Declaration of Digital Independence and follow hashtag #SocialMediaStrike.
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