Declaration of Digital Independence

Version 1.3 (June 29, 2019; version history)

See also: Social Media Strike!FAQ about the project to decentralize social mediaResources

This document is included as Chapter 11 of my 2020 book, Essays on Free Knowledge. Please support the struggle for freedom by buying a copy!

Humanity has been contemptuously used by vast digital empires. Thus it is now necessary to replace these empires with decentralized networks of independent individuals, as in the first decades of the Internet. As our participation has been voluntary, no one doubts our right to take this step. But if we are to persuade as many people as possible to join together and make reformed networks possible, we should declare our reasons for wanting to replace the old.

We declare that we have unalienable digital rights, rights that define how information that we individually own may or may not be treated by others, and that among these rights are free speech, privacy, and security. Since the proprietary, centralized architecture of the Internet at present has induced most of us to abandon these rights, however reluctantly or cynically, we ought to demand a new system that respects them properly. The difficulty and divisiveness of wholesale reform means that this task is not to be undertaken lightly. For years we have approved of and even celebrated enterprise as it has profited from our communication and labor without compensation to us. But it has become abundantly clear more recently that a callous, secretive, controlling, and exploitative animus guides the centralized networks of the Internet and the corporations behind them.

The long train of abuses we have suffered makes it our right, even our duty, to replace the old networks. To show what train of abuses we have suffered at the hands of these giant corporations, let these facts be submitted to a candid world.


They have practiced in-house moderation in keeping with their executives’ notions of what will maximize profit, rather than allowing moderation to be performed more democratically and by random members of the community.

They have banned, shadow-banned, throttled, and demonetized both users and content based on political considerations, exercising their enormous corporate power to influence elections globally.

They have adopted algorithms for user feeds that highlight the most controversial content, making civic discussion more emotional and irrational and making it possible for foreign powers to exercise an unmerited influence on elections globally.

They have required agreement to terms of service that are impossible for ordinary users to understand, and which are objectionably vague in ways that permit them to legally defend their exploitative practices.

They have marketed private data to advertisers in ways that no one would specifically assent to.

They have failed to provide clear ways to opt out of such marketing schemes.

They have subjected users to such terms and surveillance even when users pay them for products and services.

They have data-mined user content and behavior in sophisticated and disturbing ways, learning sometimes more about their users than their users know about themselves; they have profited from this hidden but personal information.

They have avoided using strong, end-to-end encryption when users have a right to expect total privacy, in order to retain access to user data.

They have amassed stunning quantities of user data while failing to follow sound information security practices, such as encryption; they have inadvertently or deliberately opened that data to both illegal attacks and government surveillance.

They have unfairly blocked accounts, posts, and means of funding on political or religious grounds, preferring the loyalty of some users over others.

They have sometimes been too ready to cooperate with despotic governments that both control information and surveil their people.

They have failed to provide adequate and desirable options that users may use to guide their own experience of their services, preferring to manipulate users for profit.

They have failed to provide users adequate tools for searching their own content, forcing users rather to employ interfaces insultingly inadequate for the purpose.

They have exploited users and volunteers who freely contribute data to their sites, by making such data available to others only via paid application program interfaces and privacy-violating terms of service, failing to make such freely-contributed data free and open source, and disallowing users to anonymize their data and opt out easily.

They have failed to provide adequate tools, and sometimes any tools, to export user data in a common data standard.

They have created artificial silos for their own profit; they have failed to provide means to incorporate similar content, served from elsewhere, as part of their interface, forcing users to stay within their networks and cutting them off from family, friends, and associates who use other networks.

They have profited from the content and activity of users, often without sharing any of these profits with the users.

They have treated users arrogantly as a fungible resource to be exploited and controlled rather than being treated respectfully, as free, independent, and diverse partners.


We have begged and pleaded, complained, and resorted to the law. The executives of the corporations must be familiar with these common complaints; but they acknowledge them publicly only rarely and grudgingly. The ill treatment continues, showing that most of such executives are not fit stewards of the public trust.

The most reliable guarantee of our privacy, security, and free speech is not in the form of any enterprise, organization, or government, but instead in the free agreement among free individuals to use common standards and protocols. The vast power wielded by social networks of the early 21st century, putting our digital rights in serious jeopardy, demonstrates that we must engineer new—but old-fashioned—decentralized networks that make such clearly dangerous concentrations of power impossible.

Therefore, we declare our support of the following principles.


Principles of Decentralized Social Networks

  1. We free individuals should be able to publish our data freely, without having to answer to any corporation.
  2. We declare that we legally own our own data; we possess both legal and moral rights to control our own data.
  3. Posts that appear on social networks should be able to be served, like email and blogs, from many independent services that we individually control, rather than from databases that corporations exclusively control or from any central repository.
  4. Just as no one has the right to eavesdrop on private conversations in homes without extraordinarily good reasons, so also the privacy rights of users must be preserved against criminal, corporate, and governmental monitoring; therefore, for private content, the protocols must support strong, end-to-end encryption and other good privacy practices.
  5. As is the case with the Internet domain name system, lists of available user feeds should be restricted by technical standards and protocols only, never according to user identity or content.
  6. Social media applications should make available data input by the user, at the user’s sole discretion, to be distributed by all other publishers according to common, global standards and protocols, just as are email and blogs, with no publisher being privileged by the network above another. Applications with idiosyncratic standards violate their users’ digital rights.
  7. Accordingly, social media applications should aggregate posts from multiple, independent data sources as determined by the user, and in an order determined by the user’s preferences.
  8. No corporation, or small group of corporations, should control the standards and protocols of decentralized networks, nor should there be a single brand, owner, proprietary software, or Internet location associated with them, as that would constitute centralization.
  9. Users should expect to be able to participate in the new networks, and to enjoy the rights above enumerated, without special technical skills. They should have very easy-to-use control over privacy, both fine- and coarse-grained, with the most private messages encrypted automatically, and using tools for controlling feeds and search results that are easy for non-technical people to use.

We hold that to embrace these principles is to return to the sounder and better practices of the earlier Internet and which were, after all, the foundation for the brilliant rise of the Internet. Anyone who opposes these principles opposes the Internet itself. Thus we pledge to code, design, and participate in newer and better networks that follow these principles, and to eschew the older, controlling, and soon to be outmoded networks.

We, therefore, the undersigned people of the Internet, do solemnly publish and declare that we will do all we can to create decentralized social networks; that as many of us as possible should distribute, discuss, and sign their names to this document; that we endorse the preceding statement of principles of decentralization; that we will judge social media companies by these principles; that we will demonstrate our solidarity to the cause by abandoning abusive networks if necessary; and that we, both users and developers, will advance the cause of a more decentralized Internet.


Please sign if you agree!

You can also sign on Change.org.

 

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I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing…

Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to James Madison, Paris, January 30, 1787. Jefferson was the author of the original Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776.
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Please do dive in (politely). I want your reactions!

237 responses to “Declaration of Digital Independence”

  1. Peter Pa

    I watched you Tucker Carlson earlier in the week. I have cut back my usage of social media e.g. LinkedIn and Facebook; I have been searching for alternatives because the outcome of using social media for nearly ten-(10) plus years e.g. MySpace, Classmates, Friendster, GeoCities, Google+ has been dismal. Facebook deleted my initial account [Did they really delete it or is it stored in the internet archives in Utah?]. My suspicion was a guy [employed with Wired] I knew from elementary school did not like my conservative views. I founded a MeetUp group in 2015 [now closed in April 2019 due to no sponsors and lack of interest from locals] with the goal of collaborating in a handful of topics e.g., 3D printing, business development, cybersecurity, etc., Big Government and Big Corporation and Big (blank) always tries to squeeze free thinkers from existence! I can go deeper because “The Swamp” was deeper than I ever thought when I was in it as a contractor!

  2. WALTER RICHTER

    I agree and i support this declaration of course!!

  3. […] appeal published in late June – just days before Independence Day in the US – states that these rights were […]

  4. […] internautas a hacer huelga en las redes sociales durante los días 4 y 5 de julio. Se basa en la Declaración Digital de Independencia que elaboró hace escasas semanas por la que pide medidas para restablecer la privacidad de los […]

  5. […] Sanger, cofundador de Wikipedia, está pidiendo a los internautas firmar una Declaración de Independencia Digital, que fue publicada en su sitio web apenas unos días antes de este 4 de julio –Día de la […]

  6. I’m of two minds on the subject. I agree with everything in Larry’s declaration of digital independence and as far as I know, I agree with the petition language (although I haven’t yet followed the link to change.org). But as they say in Leftbook these days, self care means don’t read the comments. I don’t know which breaks my heart more irreparably, the fact that the Internet I once loved has degenerated into a cesspit of monetization gimmicks and aggressive spyware, or the fact that the open source movement I once loved has degenerated into a frat house, a Tucker Carlson fandom, basically a dumpster fire.

    1. dp

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  7. […] “Given the last 12 months of revelations about Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Reddit etc we show solidarity with this position and believe everyone should be aware of their digital rights,” the team wrote in a statement shared online this week, also pushing Sanger’s “Declaration of Digital Independence.“ […]

  8. Wow, kudos, Larry!

    I view what’s happening now as the electronic version of book-burning, and it alarms me.

    I’m also concerned that, even as we’re now trying to address the problems of centralized social media, those problems already starting to expand further. Mark Zuckerberg is now urging America’s federal government to enforce the same sort of censorship policies upon ALL social-media providers that he’s been privately imposing upon Facebook. And the United Nations is yearning to assert control over the World Wide Web to do likewise at a global level.

    Does the fundamental architecture (physical and/or electronic) of the Internet itself need to improve to better prevent tyrants from seizing control of it? How can this best be achieved?

    1. Abdul Rashid

      I believe a privacy protocol based on individually managed certificate based encryption authorized by claims is the way to go. The onus is on the individual to allow access to their data for a specified time. This needs to be made easy for users with varying levels of identity and access management sophistication.

  9. Tiago Fernandes

    It’s time to take the Internet back!

  10. Abdul Rashid

    This declaration is a good start, I support it. In this age of information we also need a democratizing platform for the masses to adopt. We need a privacy protocol that protects an individuals data. This protocol needs to be the de facto standard that all entities adopt to remain relevant in a privacy based internet.

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