Earlier this month, the European Commission approved the registration of a new European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) calling for the development of publicly funded social media alternatives in Europe.
An ECI is one of the EU’s participatory democracy tools. If it collects one million signatures within one year, the Commission will be required to formally consider the proposal. ECIs do not automatically result in legislation. But they serve an agenda-setting function, and bring emerging political demands into the EU policy debate. In this case, the initiative reflects growing concern about the societal role of dominant social media platforms. If successful, it will require the Commission to formally respond to the proposal for a public social media initiative.
Calls for alternatives to platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have intensified over the last year. The citizens’ initiative echoes issues related to disinformation and polarization, hate speech, advocating for a tax-payer funded European social media platform. These demands intersect with broader concerns around digital sovereignty and the EU’s structural dependence on infrastructure that other jurisdictions can surveil and disrupt access to.
In its call for a publicly funded social media platform, the ECI raises the right questions, but doesn’t fully spell out the right answer. A European platform, even with public money, if sustained on the same surveillance-based business model of current platforms, would reproduce the same harms. A European entity can always be acquired, public infrastructure has a long history of being privatized or captured, and closed platforms eventually become, to use the technical term, enshittified.
Public money deserves a more ambitious target: not another centralized platform, but for creating the conditions for a genuinely public digital ecosystem—a Digital Public Space. Achieving this requires building resilient networks on interoperable infrastructures, sustaining public-interest feed curation, protecting critical infrastructure from commercial capture, and coordinating the tools and services that ensure safety and integrity.
Building in the Open
Any alternative must be built on interoperable infrastructure. Part of what makes dominant platforms so entrenched is that they weaponize network effects and closed ecosystems to keep users captive: leaving a platform entails losing your content, history, connections, and audiences. A publicly funded alternative that replicates this dynamic would only re-create this challenge. The goal is not to build a better incumbent—it is to create the conditions under which no single actor can become one again.
This requires, first, using existing regulatory tools, like the DSA and DMA, to enforce interoperability. However, regulation alone is insufficient if public money simultaneously funds architectures that reproduce the same dynamics of lock-in. Regulation and public investment have to be mutually reinforcing, toward an ecosystem where diverse alternatives can emerge, and where network effects and proprietary infrastructure no longer cement dominance. Interoperability should remain at the heart of any alternative social network, supported with public funding.
Platforms like Mastodon (based on the ActivityPub protocol) or Bluesky (based on the ATProtocol) demonstrate the potential of interoperable networks. ActivityPub’s federated model allows users to choose among independently operated servers that each manage their own moderation and hosting, while still interoperating through a shared protocol. ATProtocol allows users to port their identities and content across providers and choose between different hosting providers, moderation services, and algorithmic feeds. These architectures indicate how publicly funded social networking can be organized as a layer of interoperable services rather than a vertically integrated platform controlled by a single entity.
With Public Interest Curation
Many of the harms from current platforms stem from the business model that underpins the way algorithms curate our feeds. The logics that steer content are structured around surveillance-based advertising, which optimizes for engagement and attention capture. These dynamics systematically reward outrage, polarization, and virality.
The ECI argues that a public social media platform should enable users to choose the algorithms that shape their feeds. However, interoperability and algorithmic choice are only enabling conditions for the ultimate goal: moving towards information environments that are not structured around virality and engagement. This, in turn, requires not only interoperable infrastructures, but curation models grounded in different logics.
News and broadcasting have long had public and non-profit alternatives alongside commercial providers, considered essential for ensuring a plurality of perspectives. The same logic applies to the algorithmic curation of social media.
And it is the public broadcasters, which have a long history of public interest curation, that could play a key role in delivering algorithmic feeds not solely reliant on advertising revenue or engagement metrics. They represent several models, developed over decades, that can be adapted to the realm of networked and participatory media: editorial boards, independence charters, and a public remit. Applied to social networks, these frameworks can shape how algorithms prioritize and recommend content, embedding public-interest objectives into systems that would otherwise optimize for engagement. Similarly, commons-based models, based on participatory and community-driven decision making can also offer alternative approaches to curation.
Public funding can play a pivotal role in sustaining an ecosystem of diverse algorithm providers, from fully public alternatives to publicly supported non-commercial models.
On Public Infrastructure
Public interest curation, on interoperable networks, may still require a core of publicly provisioned infrastructure. Even on interoperable networks, dominant providers and chokepoints can emerge, based on the affordances of the open protocol, and the resources and coordination needed to run infrastructure as the network scales. Control over critical infrastructure can then translate into power over other functions that depend on it, such as curation and moderation.
For instance, on ATprotocol, provisioning an AppView (resource-intensive infrastructure that aggregates and indexes content across the network) also entails the power to encode moderation policy, and maintain control over which alternative feeds are available, for everyone that relies on the infrastructure. While alternatives exist, user adoption remains heavily concentrated on Bluesky PBC’s own AppView.
On ActivityPub, large instances concentrate moderation authority in ways that undermine the decentralized ethos of the network.
As interoperable networks scale, the sustainability models for non-commercial hosting and curation remain nascent and largely untested. Where commercial models do emerge, they risk extending the same incentives around surveillance, attention capture, engagement optimization, that the calls for alternatives are meant to address. Public investment in non-commercial infrastructure is a mechanism to ensure resilience against new forms of capture.
For Safety and Integrity
The infrastructure needed to ensure the safety and integrity of public discourse is where the case for public funding is most consequential.
On ActivityPub, moderation happens at the instance level. This enables communities to set their own norms, but creates resource challenges as instances scale. The burden on volunteer moderators grows with the network, often without corresponding growth in funding or institutional support. The dynamics here are analogous to those facing maintainers of critical open source projects: essential infrastructure sustained by individual commitment but chronically under-resourced.
On ATProtocol, while initiatives like Blacksky and Eurosky have built alternative hosting infrastructure, genuinely decentralizing control over the network, they still depend substantially on Bluesky PBC’s core moderation infrastructure. This demonstrates how commercial actors can retain de facto norm-setting power across an ecosystem, even where the protocol itself is open.
Public provision and coordination of core moderation capabilities would mitigate both under-provision and the risk that decisions about what speech is visible on the network are determined by the ability to provision infrastructure. In practice, this would require sustained funding for essential safety functions, including network abuse mitigation, handling illegal content, and cross-network threat detection.
Further, coordinated cross-infrastructure and cross-protocol threats—harassment campaigns, disinformation operations, electoral interference—add a further dimension: there are no actors with the capacity and mandate to respond at ecosystem scale. While current platforms fail frequently to respond sufficiently to these threats, their centralized model allows at least internal coordination around these threats.
On open protocols, individual providers may address threats within their own systems, but lack the network-wide insight and capacity to identify and address coordinated activity across infrastructures or protocols. This is a gap that commercial actors have little incentive to address, and cannot be sustained by volunteer effort alone, given the resources and coordination involved.
This points to the safety and integrity of the public square being coordinated as a critical public function, backed by public funding. The practical implication is a core of publicly provisioned infrastructure—protecting people and public discourse at ecosystem scale, across instances and protocols.
Toward Digital Public Space
The ECI builds momentum around a real problem but needs a clearer proposition. A true alternative goes beyond a centralized European platform—it is a set of conditions that public funding must enable: interoperable infrastructure that resists capture; information environments grounded in public interest; with a publicly mandated and resourced layer for safety and integrity.
