Key Points
- Chelsea Manning promotes a decentralized internet model to enhance user privacy and control.
- She highlighted that today’s censorship is often algorithmic, shaping content visibility rather than outright suppression.
- Manning criticizes social media monopolies for promoting engagement-driven content and notes that whistleblowers now face issues of misinformation.
- Manning calls for a revised social contract on data sharing in a decentralized internet model.
At the Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Chelsea Manning, former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and current security consultant, emphasized the ongoing threats posed by censorship and called for a more decentralized internet to safeguard individual online privacy. Manning highlighted that internet decentralization, specifically through “decentralized identification,” would grant people greater control over their personal data, bypassing reliance on tech companies.
Manning explained that censorship today is more nuanced, often rooted in algorithms that determine content visibility rather than outright suppression. “It’s about who’s doing the censoring and what the purpose is,” Manning said, noting that content visibility on social media platforms is largely determined by algorithms that maximize engagement. She argued that social media monopolies have conditioned users to prioritize engagement-driven content, which can limit exposure to diverse perspectives.
Chelsea Manning suggested that a decentralized internet would counteract these trends, returning to the open, distributed model of the early 1990s. She believes such a model could restore a sense of user agency, allowing people to make privacy decisions through encrypted, self-managed identities rather than relying on corporate terms of service. Manning proposed a “better social contract” to define the parameters of data sharing in this decentralized system, ensuring individuals have more control over their information.
Manning also discussed the shifting challenges for whistleblowers, noting that the landscape has changed significantly. “We’re at an interesting time because information is everywhere,” she observed. Unlike in the past, when governments prioritized secrecy, they now devote substantial efforts to spreading misinformation and disinformation. Manning emphasized that today’s whistleblowers must sift through extensive information to verify authenticity, marking a shift from secrecy versus transparency to tackling misinformation.
Working with Nym Technologies, a company focused on privacy solutions, Chelsea Manning’s advocacy for internet decentralization and privacy rights is deeply rooted in her experiences. Convicted in 2013 for leaking military documents to WikiLeaks, Manning served prison time before President Obama commuted her sentence in 2017. Now, she calls for technological solutions that empower users to retain privacy and secure their digital identities in an increasingly complex information landscape.
