Wikipedia founder ‘calls for social media strike to protest power of giants like Facebook’
The founder of Wikipedia has called for a global social media strike to protest against privacy breaches and the power of companies such as Facebook.
Larry Sanger, a co-founder of the online encyclopedia, wants internet users to stop using services such as Facebook and Twitter from July 4 to July 5.
Sanger wrote in a blog post: 'This means we will not use social media on those days, except to post notices that we are on strike. We’re going to make a lot of noise.’
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'Nobody will be able to ignore what’s happening. We’re going to flex our collective muscles and demand that giant, manipulative corporations give us back control over our data, privacy, and user experience.'
Sanger describes his strike as a Declaration of Digital Independence, and calls for a different approach to the use of user data.
Sanger calls for services such as Facebook to be ‘interoperable’ (ie so posts could be visible across several services) and not to hoard user data.
Sanger wrote, ‘'Each of us individually owns our own data. Each of us individually controls it, just as we have control over our email, text messages, and blogs.
'It can be totally private, courtesy end-to-end encryption, or totally public; the choice is up to us.'
'Social media services [should] stop acting as silos but become interoperable. If we make a post on one service, it can appear on another service.
