Perhaps this is me being overly cynical, but a state-run social media platform seems like a recipe for massive, invisible, unchecked government surveillance and/or censorship. The last several years have made it abundantly clear that many parts of the US government do not consider privacy a right, and while our rights to free speech remain intact, I do not believe it is safe to assume this will remain the case across future administrations. In the worst case, a sufficiently popular administration could abuse state-run social platforms to locate, silence, and/or arrest dissidents, paving the way towards China-esque authoritarianism.

While such an extreme scenario is, needless to say, unlikely, the idea of centralizing the majority of social media under the control of a government that has shown increasing interest in mass surveillance remains something I am exceedingly dubious about.