A new movement wants to protect social media from billionaires

Over the past few years, concerns about billionaires using media outlets they own to signal boost their own beliefs has become a growing concern. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. Elon Musk owns X (formerly Twitter)—and might be in the running to buy TikTok, if a Bloomberg report is to be believed.

Donald Trump, of course, owns a majority stake in Truth Social. And Mark Zuckerberg, who owns a controlling stake in Meta, recently announced he is doing away with fact-checking at Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. Now, an effort is underway that hopes to wrestle at least some part of the social media world away from the world’s richest people.

An initiative called Free Our Feeds is pushing to protect the technology that powers Bluesky, called the AT Protocol, and use it to create an open social media ecosystem. Think of it as social media crypto—a technology that is designed in a way that backers say no one person can control.

Free Our Feeds, which is independent from Bluesky but claims to have the support of the company, was organized by a group of tech entrepreneurs and advocates from the Mozilla Foundation, Numeno AI and more. It’s a small movement so far–and faces tremendous odds– but it does have the support of some notable names, including Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, actor Mark Ruffalo, early Facebook backer Roger McNamee and musician Brian Eno.

“Today’s public square is on private property,” the group wrote in a blog post. “The detrimental consequences to society of this status quo are diverse and well-documented: concentration of profits and power, degraded information and media landscapes, prominence of polarizing content, disinformation and online harassment, degraded mental health, and more.”

The campaign is hoping to raise $4 million initially to go toward a three-year, $30 million goal. That money will be used to create a foundation which will support the AT Protocol and built infrastructure that includes a second relay system, which is essentially a backup of all content on the network letting users access posts even if Bluesky were to restrict access to the data. It also plans to fund developers to create an ecosystem of social applications built on open protocols.

To date, the group has raised just over $33,000 in one day via GoFundMe. Free Our Feeds says it expects to have the independent foundation overseeing AT Protocol up and running by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, social media site Mastodon, which saw a surge in signups following Musk’s takeover of Twitter, announced Monday that it is transferring ownership of its ecosystem and platform components to a non-profit organization to ensure that it will not be owned or controlled by a single individual.

“When founder Eugen Rochko started working on Mastodon, his focus was on creating the code and conditions for the kind of social media he envisioned,” the site wrote in a blog post. “The legal setup was a means to an end, a quick fix to allow him to continue operations. From the start, he declared that Mastodon would not be for sale and would be free of the control of a single wealthy individual.”

Mastodon’s growth has slowed since the initial surge of users after Trump’s takeover of Twitter, but BlueSky has seen a surge in signups in recent months, hitting 26 million users at the end of 2024, nearly half of which joined following Donald Trump’s victory in the election.

The company is reportedly in the process of raising another funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures which would see BlueSky valued at $700 million.

While the majority of the focus on reclaiming the town square from billionaires is focused on social media, there are some movements underway to change the legacy media landscape as well. Washington Post columnist Jen Rubin, who has been a harsh critic of Trump, announced her resignation Monday, saying Bezos, Disney-owned ABC and Meta were empowering right-wing nationalism. She has joined former White House ethics czar Norm Eisen to form a news startup called The Contrarian, which uses the tagline, “Not owned by anybody”.

“We’ve watched as corporate and billionaire owners of media outlets abused their audiences’ loyalty and undercut journalism’s vital role in a free democracy,” said Rubin in a press release. “Instead of safeguarding democratic values, they have enabled the gravest threats to democracy – Donald Trump and his allies – at the very time when a robust and independent press is most essential. We need an alternative, truly independent outlet that is unafraid of the administration and unwilling to equivocate or bend the knee.”

 The outlet has signed up 134,000 subscribers in just one day.

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