(originally posted on Linkedin)

What should our democracies do to avoid their further demise by technical hacking or “gaming” of social media by undemocratic forces?!

1. Require all social media with large a user bases to abide to radically higher socio-technical standards to (A) maintenance logs for forensic use (B) mitigate the risks of hacks from outsiders and insiders alike (C) maintain their editorial control systems (personal feeds, etc.) publicly reviewable and within scales of complexity that makes it reasonably inspectable and assurable.

2. Introduce nationally and internationally new antitrust rules and/or mandatory social media interoperability, to mitigate the concentration of power in one or a few huge too-big-to-regulate companies.

3. Aggressively promote, through pre-commercial procurement and R&D programs, the wide availability of affordable personal computing devices which allow, at once, radically-higher levels both of user authentication/disclosure and of confidentiality; so as to promote at once freedom of speech, private assembly, and radically mitigate subversion of the public sphere by monied and foreign powers.

We’ve been working on (1) and (2) at the Trustless Computing Association by establishing a new Trustless Computing Certification Body.