As her social media presence and public visibility grew, she was exposed to the shadow side of platforms meant to connect the world: harassment, stalking from parasocial followers, impersonation through fake accounts, sexism, and racism.
Through her work, it became clear that digital platforms were capable of connecting the world, but they also were spaces where users were limited in how much they could control about their online experience.
In 2018, she set out to fix that by starting Block Party, a company focused on making the internet safer and giving people more control over their experience online.
In this week’s newsletter, we’re sharing a case study on Block Party to explore how users have lost control of their online experiences, the misaligned incentives of social media platforms, and how new approaches are paving the way to an internet where users are back in the driver’s seat.
// Block Party
Block Party’s latest product, Privacy Party, is a browser extension that makes it easy for users to update their settings and manage their profiles and content across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Venmo, Strava, YouTube, and more.
- Our digital footprints are massive and sprawling across multiple platforms.
- Most users don’t read the lengthy “terms of service” when creating an account. Platforms also make it hard to adjust settings away from the defaults that err on the side of less privacy.
Privacy Party allows users to “deep clean their social media” in just a few clicks. It scans a user’s social accounts for potential exposures, generates recommendations to protect a user’s online presence, and then automatically updates the settings across multiple platforms.
Privacy Party’s early adopters have been those, like Chou, who have dealt with issues of privacy and safety online.
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"You don't get promoted for building a better settings page or for helping people to protect their privacy."
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// Market & regulatory failures
Privacy Party is one example of new tools aimed at giving users greater agency online. The growing need for solutions speaks to a market and regulatory failure in how platforms are designed, how tech companies make money, and the challenges of regulating them effectively.
There are a number of factors at play:
- Incentives of tech companies: As Chou witnessed first-hand inside tech companies, there’s more of an incentive for employees to build features that drive user engagement and thus revenue than to improve user privacy or enhance content moderation. “You don't get promoted for building a better settings page or for helping people to protect their privacy,” Chou said.
- Network effects that consolidate power: Many users feel locked into participating on certain platforms. They might disagree with a platform's privacy and content moderation policies, but they can’t take their social graph—the social relationships in a person’s online network—with them. The lack of interoperability and openness between platforms prevents people from having real choices about their digital experience.
- Market power: The network effects of major social media platforms have created an oligopoly dominated by a few giants, with a long tail of smaller platforms struggling to compete—at least for now.
- Lack of user customization: It is algorithms, not users, that decide what content is most engaging. Users can’t customize their feeds; “It’s not like going to a grocery store magazine rack and getting to pick out the magazine you want,” Chou said. “I can choose not to pick up the tabloids at the store, but on social media, it just keeps showing me tabloids. I don’t get to choose.”
- Tech regulation is not easy: Passing legislation is a slower process than tech development, and tech products and their underlying algorithms are constantly changing.
- Misaligned incentives about data: Our individual data is more valuable to tech companies than it is to us. User data is financially valuable in the aggregate but less so when it’s atomized to a person.
// The movement to reclaim agency
Block Party is part of a groundswell of innovation aimed at restoring users' control over their digital experiences and data.
- New applications: From browser extensions like Privacy Party to Consumer Reports’ Permission Slip app, which helps users take back control of their data, there are new applications, tools, and extensions that transcend specific platforms to give users greater control over their digital lives.
- New platforms: There are fast-growing platforms like MeWe (built on top of the Frequency blockchain and Project Liberty’s DSNP that gives users greater control over their own data), Mastodon, and Bluesky that are focused on greater privacy, enhanced interoperability, and more user-control over their social graph.
- New cooperatively-owned servers: Social.coop (a user-governed Mastodon server) and May First (a bilingual web-hosting co-op) are two examples of cooperatively owned servers, where people collectively and transparently operate a platform.
- New data trusts and data unions: There are new governance models around data, like Data trusts, where trustees look after the data or data rights of groups of individuals, and data unions, where a user’s real-time data is bundled together with others' for the purpose of distributing a share of the revenue when someone pays to access it.
- New protocols: Project Liberty’s DSNP has been designed to put users back in the driver’s seat where they can control their data and their social graph.
// The next chapter of the internet
Whether it’s an invisible governance-level platform like DSNP that transforms a user’s relationship with the internet or a browser extension like Privacy Party that automatically resets default user settings across dozens of platforms, there is a meta-transition to a more user-controlled internet.
For Chou, that means our online experiences are as carefree as going to a coffee shop or running an errand.
“My vision,” she said, “is for everyone who wants to go online to do so freely and feel safe about doing it. They should be able to control the experience that they want, who they're interacting with, what they're seeing, and what data of theirs is being exposed or shared.”
// Regain control of your digital identity
Project Liberty and Block Party are co-hosting a workshop this Thursday September 5th at 12pm ET that offers attendees practical tools and proactive measures on how to safeguard their online presence. Participants will learn how to deep clean their social media accounts, manage their digital footprint, and implement strategies that significantly reduce the chances of falling victim to online attacks. Register here.
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