Why civ.works?

We are building an ad-free, subscriber-supported (think Netflix for Democracy!) civic social network, built for civic action and education. We will carefully use AI for preemptive content moderation and to help facilitate respectful, fact-based discussions about improving the quality and dignity of life for all. We will partner with trusted third-parties for fact-checking and analysis of news and information as a way to combat propaganda. And we will never sell or share our subscriber data as other platforms do.

Because civ.works is the product, not you.

“It is a great pleasure to welcome civ.works. It’s a wonderful idea, with great promise to provide a platform for meaningful civic action without the severely distorting interference of concentrated power, private or state.  Civ.works is insulated from the forces that have been so destructive of functioning democracy and is readily available for the kinds of constructive use that are so badly needed today.”   

–Noam Chomsky

Civic Works: A Trusted Global Civic Social Network

  1. Any meaningful democracy requires a foundation of an educated, informed, and engaged society. And we are using social networking technology to evolve and strengthen the foundation.
  2. A core social network provides easy web and mobile access to connect and share life events, photographs, and news with family, friends, and groups.
  3. Major platforms such as Zuckerberg’s Facebook and Musk’s former Twitter use your data to sell to advertisers, marketers, and political operatives to pay for executives, staff, programmers, sales personnel, and massive cloud computing capacity while they generate massive profits. You essentially are the product. In the 2016 U.S. Elections, and in the Brexit versus Remain campaign in the U.K., Facebook betrayed user trust by sharing massive amounts of user data with Cambridge Analytica (now Emerdata). The user data was analyzed to produce psychological profiles which was then intentionally used to manipulate voters and subvert elections. We are approaching social networking differently. The civ.works social network (social.civ.works) will use small monthly subscriptions to grow, pay for our secure cloud operations, and to pay staff salaries. We are committed to being advertising free, and we will not share or sell your data to anyone.
    We’re the product, not you.
  4. A federated and adaptive global model -each country/region will be managed independently so they can use civ.works technology while ensuring the use of the platform is optimized for languages, localizations, education, news, and civic actions.
  5. We will be a place for casual sharing of life events with friends, families, and groups, where subscribers can customize their civ.works experience. We will also build places for serious conversations where verified subscribers (think “Blue checkmark”, however implemented properly) can engage in respectful conversations and debate, seeking “across the aisle” agreements, and then working together to codify those agreements in law and policy.
  6. We will build an ecosphere of trusted partners to assist with rating shared news and information for facts and trustworthiness, thereby limiting propaganda, lies, and disinformation.
  7. We will provide revenue sharing agreements to help support local, independent, and investigative journalism and academic research.
  8. We will present civic action opportunities, including economic actions and educational actions, for all subscribers, based upon your location and issues you care about.
  9. We will adopt emerging social networking interfaces (API’s) that will allow our subscribers to easily interact and share with other platforms instead of locking subscribers into civ.works.

A two minute civ.works explainer video (thank you Ana-Maria Anghel!)

(Why are we building civ.works? -4 minute explainer video)

Our PSA (Thank you Jim Prues and Ed Peselman).