Facebook: Consensual to De Facto Monopoly

For some time now, if you want to set up an online community group - whether for tracking local shop opening times, obscure computer languages or LGBTQ+ support - Facebook has been the one place to go.

Facebook Groups aren’t the best. They’ve suffered problems with moderation, privacy and spam. The user interface is fairly user hostile, and many useful features are absent. Yet… you rarely have to tell someone how to set up an account, the service is reliable and vaguely familiar and, well, it just works.

So we’ve allowed it to become a consensual monopoly, in the sense that when you ask “where shall I host my group about low fat cooking?” tech workers will just shrug their shoulders and reply that you might as well use Facebook.

This monopoly has been reinforced by the conventional wisdom that there can be only one winner when it comes to social networks. Once you have the critical mass of users, any other platform is not just second fiddle, it’s useless, irrelevant. We’ve built in the idea that users don’t just have momentum, they are an immobile force. You’ve got them all? You win!

Except of course, the rapid establishment of Bluesky has proven this wisdom to be false. If you build it, not only will they come, they will actively leave previous services behind. The long period of stability that companies like Facebook have enjoyed has allowed us to forget that before it there was MySpace, Geocities and other vibrant, exciting user communities.

Unfortunately, this may be less of a worry for Facebook in the UK at least, as the Online Safety Act swings into force in 2025. Designed to protect vulnerable people online, the act is vague and threatening to any “user-to-user service” on the web. Such services (essentially any community group hosted online) now have a duty of care that comes with serious consequences - the operator can be held directly liable for fines of up to ￡18 million (or 10% or turnover, should it be higher). Supporters quite reasonably point out this is designed to prevent services from hosting harmful content or putting their users at risk.

Whilst this might not be much of a concern for your local knitting group, it has some worrying side effects. Organisations providing general online communities - as Facebook does with its Groups - now have to consider the risk of being tangled in open-ended investigations and malicious campaigns. It encourages, or even requires that user privacy is overridden so that moderation and censorship can be carried out. It’s also sufficiently broad that public interest websites may be caught.

Indeed, Facebook has been one of the many groups that have objected to the Act for these and other reasons. However, it may be one of the biggest beneficiaries. If running an online community is now a riskier proposition, it is companies like Facebook, with large legal departments, warchests of profits and direct contacts within government that are most able to take those risks. New challengers and privately run communities are conversely facing a significant deterrent.

It’s tempting to think that ”our community doesn’t have that sort of content”, or that harmful content is so obviously abhorrent that removing or preventing it would never be in question. However, we should remember that mainstream politicians and public figures are currently waging a war against a number of vulnerable groups including minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Only this week, Facebook has bowed to that pressure and now allows its users to state that being gay is a “mental illness”. It is a very short step from there to saying that a support group is promoting harm.

Against that backdrop, a number of independent online communities have said they are considering how to survive in 2025. Ironically, it is Facebook that can provide a safe haven, with its established moderation and legal protection. In essence, the Online Safety Act has made the incumbent operators the only game in town - a de facto monopoly. If you want to know where to host your community online, we’ll shrug and say you might as well use Facebook.

This is an abysmal situation to be in. Enshrined in well meaning regulation, Facebook is not a trustworthy or benevolent supporter, nor is it particularly interested in innovating or evolving services for communities. We’re furthering the concentration of services into a handful of suppliers - or hastening the “enshittification” of the internet by Cory Doctorow’s account.

Now more than ever, we should be building new, independent and accessible online services. Bluesky has shown this is possible. When the level of dissatisfaction with the incumbents is at an all time high there can be no better time to decide what the next generation of websites and communities should look like. We know we can address the tech problem, and that Facebook Groups is ripe for replacement. The question is whether the necessary investment, community outreach and infrastructure can be gathered together to offer serious alternatives.

And for the wider community, we need to think about how to ensure an environment exists where challengers to the current dire status-quo can rise and thrive.