Social Media Platforms

Finding an ethical social media platform

In this guide, we look at the main issues surrounding social media, including the harms to users and content moderators, user privacy, as well as military links and tax avoidance. We examine the main platforms and the companies behind them, and investigate the most ethical alternatives.

The guide rates 21 different social media platforms, from the massive Meta and its suite of Facebook, Instagram, Threads and Whatsapp, to the wildly different X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and LinkedIn. We have also included platforms that have been created federally such as Mastodon, and ones that seem more niche such as Pinterest and Reddit. The guide also covers messaging services such as Telegram and Snapchat. 

With scores out of 100 ranging from 0 to 81, there are ethical options available, depending on what you're looking for. 

Is it possible to move social media platforms?

This guide is, in many ways, quite different to our other guides. For many people, swapping one social media platform for another is not an easy task, unlike, for example, swapping your brand of toilet roll. 

Firstly, many people have spent years building up communities and networks on these platforms, and may even depend on them for running a business or project. But also, these platforms do quite different things and function in different ways. So, it might not be that easy to swap a less ethical one for a more ethical one – as we at Ethical Consumer well know.

But still, there appears to be a growing appetite to move away from platforms owned by Big Tech, and there are alternatives out there. Whether you wish to use them is, of course, your choice.

Current social media use

According to research by Ofcom, only 36% of social media users report that these platforms are good for their mental health.

People are also becoming more passive consumers of social media, with only 49% of users posting and commenting, a decline from 61% in 2024.

Despite our changing habits and the growing awareness of the harm social media can do, platforms including messaging platforms such as WhatsApp, are still widely used, with nine in ten adult internet users using at least one social media platform, rising to 97% among 16-34-year-olds.

But despite the differences, and whether they are used for communication, information sharing, videos, discussion, career networks or as a news source, many of the same problems crop up. We explore these issues in the guide.

Misinformation and disinformation

In a study of over 900 experts across academia, business, government, international organizations and civil society by the World Economic Forum, respondents said misinformation and disinformation will be the highest global risk in 2027, above extreme weather events and state-based conflict. The organisation said in an increasingly fragmented media landscape “flows of misinformation and disinformation from those creating it are becoming more challenging to detect and remove”. 

The Reuters Institute Digital News Report survey of almost 100,000 people globally found the networks considered to be a major threat of misinformation were:

• Facebook (selected by 49%)
• TikTok (48%)
• X (34% globally, but 61% in UK)
• Instagram (32%)
• YouTube (30%)
• compared to news websites (22%).

In the UK, Facebook and X were considered serious threats for feeding unrest, with algorithms allowing misinformation to flourish rather than be quickly corrected, and many people were angered by Elon Musk’s interventions in domestic politics. Reuters Institute found the top three trusted news brands were BBC News, The Guardian, and Sky News, and the top three fact-checking brands were Snopes, Full Fact, and BBC Verify. 

User harm

Although social media can have positive effects on its users, there is increasing evidence of its harmful and addictive qualities, especially among young people.

According to Dr Hans Henri P. Kluge, World Health Organisation Regional Director for Europe, “it has been shown to lead to depression, bullying, anxiety, and poor academic performance.”

In 2017, British teenager Molly Russell died by suicide when she was just 14 years old after viewing a torrent of harmful content online. Her dad, Ian, stated: “Instagram helped kill my daughter.” Five years later, a coroner officially confirmed the family’s view, ruling that it was likely that the harmful material she was exposed to online contributed to her death. The Molly Rose Foundation campaigns to hold tech companies, government, and regulators to account to make the online world safe for children and young people and to promote systems-level change. 

Legal cases against social media companies for harm

Is social media facing a tobacco moment?

In March 2026, a US jury ruled that Meta and YouTube designed addictive products that harmed young people. The claimant testified that she became addicted to YouTube at age six and Instagram at age nine, going on to become depressed, self-harm, and later develop body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia. The claim was also brought against TikTok and Snap (Snapchat), but these companies settled the lawsuit just before the trial began.

Similar trials are ongoing, and some have asked whether social media is now having its tobacco moment, with the harms of social media well evidenced and the courts increasingly ruling that social media companies have created addictive and harmful products.

Although most social media platforms have implemented better safeguarding policies in recent years, especially for younger people, some countries are choosing to ban platforms for certain age groups. Australia has implemented a social media ban for under-16s, though its implementation has faced challenges as around seven in ten children remain on the major platforms. Other countries look likely to follow suit. The UK government has thus far resisted implementing such a ban but instead issued an open consultation, which closed on 26 May, to help shape future policy on young people and social media.

How private is your data on social media?

Readers may have heard the expression, “If it's free then you're the product.” 

Rebel Tech Alliance claims this is only part of the story. “Your behaviour, once gathered up into an endlessly updated profile, becomes the raw material that makes up the product that Big Tech sells,” the group says. “Advertisers pay to get access to information on what you are about to want, so they can sell it to you.”

Rebel Tech Alliance warns that Big Tech companies gather information on our online activity to create profiles, or “creepy proxy versions of you that are built up to represent you – what you like, what you do, what you'll do next”. If social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube claim not to sell your data, they instead produce a valuable product for advertisers – “access to the ability to influence you”. 

According to Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, this commercial model is based on online profiling comprises: “Extraction, prediction, manipulation”. And the influence is not confined to selling you holidays or toiletries; fossil fuel firms have engaged advertisers to undermine and weaken public opinion, and their opponents’ activities, around climate change.

We write more about our new digital privacy rating in a separate article.

How do the social media platforms rate for digital privacy?

Ethical Consumer's new digital privacy rating encompasses some generic privacy categories across tech services, and some specific ones for social media. For social media we looked at issues such as tracking, end-to-end encryption of messages, algorithms, and what data is harvested from mobile phones if the app is used. 

Over half the brands in the guide failed to score any points for digital privacy. 

Eight companies scored 45 or above (out of 100) for the digital privacy rating. The best social media platforms for digital privacy were

• Telegram: scores 95/100 and comes top of the list when it comes to privacy. Its messaging is end-to-end encrypted and it doesn’t harvest user data for advertising or to be sold to third parties, nor does it use user data to train AI.
• Lemmy scores 70/100
• Friendica scores 70/100
• Mastodon scores 80/100

Lemmy, Friendica and Mastodon are decentralised platforms and don’t use user data for personalised advertising and because they don’t rely on algorithms they don’t collect user data. These platforms don’t appear to offer end-to-end encryption for private messages, though there appears to be plans to add it in future.

• Bluesky scores 70/100. It doesn’t sell user data for personalised ads and allows users to control their own feeds by giving them “algorithmic choice”. “As a user, you’re given a few default feeds to start out with as you get settled into the app, but you can easily swap them out for one of the many feeds that others have created.” Direct messaging is not end-to-end encrypted, but it planned to add this in the future.
• UpScrolled scores 65/100. It doesn’t sell user data to third parties. The platform does have an algorithmic feed (which relies on user data being collected to inform the algorithm), but users have the option to turn this off and only see posts from accounts they follow. Direct messaging is not end-to-end encrypted, but it planned to add this in the future.
• Monnett scores 50/100. It processed user data to enable third parties in the future to advertise on its platform but stated it didn’t share individual user personal data or usage data. However, the platform doesn’t rely on algorithms, which reduces the need for personal data collection (to feed the algorithm) and gives users more control over what they see. Its messaging isn’t end-to-end encrypted.
• Discord scores 45/100. It uses user data for targeted or behavioural advertising and marketing but doesn’t allow user data to be used for training AI systems. It offers end-to-end encryption for audio and video calls, but it did not appear to be included on messages.

Worst scoring companies for digital privacy

All the other companies in the guide scored 0/100. 

Big Tech has got rich on our data, using a range of data collection tools such as cookies and trackers, and then selling user data to third parties.

For example, Meta as a whole was considered to have a poor approach to user privacy, with reasons including harvesting user data for targeted or behavioural advertising and marketing, its possible incorporation of user data into its AI training datasets, and its cross-platform account integration.

Facebook and Instagram/Threads collect information about user activity on other websites or apps, including via technologies such as cookies and tracking pixels. The Messenger app, which is part of Facebook, had the possibility of end-to-end encryption but this didn’t appear to be the default, while Instagram was found to be ending its support for end-to-end encryption from 8 May 2026.

WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted, meaning only the sender and recipient can see message content, preventing the provider from accessing messages. However, according to the Data Safety information page on the Google Play Store, the app collected a total of 14 data types. Of these, 11 collected data types were to be used for purposes of advertising, marketing, personalisation, or analytics.

TikTok’s direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted. While privacy campaigners have stressed that end-to-end encryption is essential for user privacy, others have argued that it allows the spread of harmful and illegal content. TikTok falls into the latter camp, stating that end-to-end encryption prevents police and safety teams from accessing direct messages if needed. Many will not feel comfortable with companies being able to access supposedly private messages. But when it comes to TikTok, its links to the Chinese state add another layer of concern.

The environmental impact of doomscrolling

The environmental cost of social media is more than the energy used to charge a smartphone. Whenever we view a photo or video through a social media platform, it requires data to be transferred from servers from around the world.

In 2023, French digital technology company Greenspector measured the energy used scrolling the newsfeed through a smartphone on 10 social media platforms. In its study, the company measured energy use and also estimated water usage and land use. The social media platforms with the greatest environmental impact were found to be TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. 

Considering energy consumption alone, TikTok remained the worst performer. Its estimated global emissions were similar to the annual emissions of Greece with the average user emitting 48.49kg of CO₂e per year, equivalent to driving a petrol car for 123 miles.

Greenspector concluded, quite naturally, that the more multimedia content on a platform, the more energy it required, adding: “Text-based content, on the other hand, is much easier to load and consumes much less energy.”

Greenspector’s recommendations included switching smartphones to dark mode and avoiding auto-starting videos and repeating them.

What are social media companies doing about climate impacts?

None of the social media platforms scored highly in the climate rating.

Most of the smaller companies and platforms weren’t considered to be heavy carbon emitters, but they also lacked policies and reporting on how they were reducing their carbon impacts. 

The Big Tech companies all scored zero and most have seen their real emissions increase due to their heavy investment in AI and the vast amount of energy that is required for this. They try to mitigate (or hide, depending on your viewpoint) these increasing emissions through measures such as purchasing renewable energy certificates.

For example, in Meta’s most recent sustainability report, the figure it emphasises when reporting its emissions is 8.2m metric tonnes, but this includes “contractual instruments” (purchasing renewable energy certificates). Its actual location-based emissions are much higher at 15.6m metric tonnes. And this figure rises each year, representing a 148% increase since 2019.

Impact of content moderation on tech workers

Social media platforms have procedures for content that violates their policies, such as removing it. Content moderation is largely automated but is also done by humans – invisible cogs that work to keep social media safe but face low pay and poor conditions.

Most Big Tech firms keep this work at arm's length, outsourcing it to other companies such as Accenture, Concentrix, TELUS Digital, and Teleperformance, who generally situate these jobs in low-paid countries and regions.

Workers are expected to view and assess disturbing content, often at great speed and with little support. According to the Global Trade Union Alliance of Content Moderators, which launched in 2025: “A staggering number of moderators experience depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, and severe mental health consequences because of this exposure to graphic content, often without adequate support or breaks. Unrealistic ‘seconds-per-video’ performance targets and rolling short-term contracts pile extra stress on a workforce already facing trauma.”

Would AI moderation be better?

The Union is pushing for better pay and support for the workers that do these jobs. But it seems likely that many of these jobs might soon be replaced by AI. For example, TikTok has stated: “Automation is increasingly effective at improving speed and consistency of moderation at scale.” It claims to have removed 112m pieces of content between July and December 2025, with automated systems actioning 93.8% of all violating content without human review.

Meta has also stated that over the next few years it will be deploying more AI systems to deal with content moderation across its apps and reduce its reliance on third-party vendors. Humans will still play an important role, they claim, but this will be at a higher level, with experts designing and training the AI systems, and “making the most complex, high impact decisions.”

Workers losing their jobs to AI comes with obvious problems, particularly if they struggle to find other work. But content moderation, with all the mental health issues that come with it, does seem like a job better suited to AI rather than humans. Although, as we note in our guide to AI tools, consistent accuracy is not one of its strongest suits.

Tax conduct of social media companies

The only companies that scored full marks for tax were small companies and the likes of Friendica and Lemmy which aren’t companies at all, but decentralised, volunteer-run platforms. Others which scored full marks were Mastodon, Monnett, and Upscrolled.

Nextdoor scored 60/100, but lost 40 marks for having one subsidiary in Ireland.

Worst companies for tax payments

Our research found that the Big Tech companies don’t do well in our tax conduct rating, with all of them scoring zero. 

Although endemic in the tech sector, we have been calling for a boycott of Amazon for its tax avoidance practices since 2013. Amazon owns Twitch.

Snap Inc is interesting because, in 2021, it committed to publicly disclosing, on a country-by-country basis, its total tax income when it becomes profitable, and even getting certified by the Fair Tax Foundation. The company is still reporting losses, so that day has yet to come. It currently scores 0/100 because it is incorporated in the tax-haven state of Delaware, despite its principal offices being registered in California.

Unlike most of the other Big Tech companies, TikTok has received little attention for its tax affairs. So we have highlighted the problems below.

Military links and social media companies

Most of the companies in this guide scored 80/100 for military link.

Companies with this score didn’t appear to have any links to the military or arms industry but also didn’t have any policy to rule this out. Mastodon was the only platform to have such a policy, which states that it won’t accept funding from arms and weapons manufacturers and military contractors.

Worst scoring companies with links to the military

Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and SpaceX (which owns X) all scored zero for having clear links to the military.

Google Public Sector LLC, a subsidiary of Alphabet, has won many contracts from the US Department of Defense. The largest contract was described as for "joint warfighting cloud capability program management."

Since 2020, AWS (a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc) has been awarded 137 contracts by the US Department of Defense. In 2024 and 2025, Amazon also provided software to two Israeli weapons manufacturers (Rafael and IAI), whose weapons were used to devastate Gaza.

Meta previously prohibited its AI tool Llama from being used for military, warfare, and nuclear industries, but it later had a change of heart and, in November 2024, announced that it had made "Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work."

Llama has been used by defence startup Legion Intelligence and weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. Microsoft has 1,386 contracts with the US Department of Defense, the largest being with the US Marine Corp for a current award amount of $220m and running between 2022 and 2026.

The company had also worked with the UK’s Ministry of Defence and arms manufacturer BAE Systems.

TikTok scored 40/100 as we found some links to the military, but no evidence of direct military contracts was found. An article by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies titled 5 Things to Know About ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, stated: "In 2018, backed by China’s Ministry of Science and Technology, ByteDance established the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. This institution stands at the crossroads of civilian AI and military applications, collaborating with Chinese universities to produce cutting-edge research for China’s People’s Liberation Army."

Alternatives to mainstream social media

The most radical alternatives to Big Tech social media platforms comprise networks of interlinked servers. Each server has its own moderator who sets the rules and gets to decide who can join. These servers can then link to one another to allow users to see what’s posted on different servers.

This federation of servers is sometimes called the “Fediverse”, to which belong platforms such as Mastodon, Friendica, and Lemmy. 

The Fediverse follows an ethos of cooperation not competition – when you sign up for one platform, you can see posts from another. A good analogy is email; someone with a Gmail account can email someone with Hotmail or Yahoo. In this way, belonging to Mastodon allows you to read posts created on Lemmy.

These platforms allow you a greater say about what goes into your brain. With no algorithm, you’re at liberty to view posts only from the accounts you follow, and an advertising-free space frees you from creepy background profiling that bombards you with targeted adverts. These platforms encourage free speech that respects fellow users. The autonomy to choose what community to join also frees you from the harmful aspects of social media, such as “rage bait” (increasing internet traffic through incendiary or provocative material), and some of its addictive and brain-rotting qualities such as “doomscrolling” and automatic short-form videos.

A Fediverse consisting of many voluntarily run servers may also elude the controlling influences of megalomaniacs and monopolistic companies.

Even so, Meta made its Threads app compatible with the Fediverse in 2023, with some concern from campaigners that its gestures towards working with the likes of Mastodon would be ultimately damaging. 

Other alternatives to Big Tech social media

Other social media platforms that are not part of Big Tech include Bluesky, Monnett, and UpScrolled.

While these platforms aren’t part of the Fediverse (though Bluesky can be interacted with through Fediverse platforms), they score well in our rating system and do offer an alternative to Big Tech. 

They have a greater focus on privacy, are not owned by big companies, and aim to provide an antidote to how antisocial the dominant social media platforms have become.

Who owns which social media platforms?

Meta owns 5 different platforms and messaging services, whilst others have no 'owner' in the traditional sense.

To help you understand the options if you are looking for alternatives to the Big Tech platforms, the table below outlines ownership and purpose of each platform.

What Ethical Consumer readers think of social media

We surveyed our readers on their attitudes to social media in April 2026.

It is clear that people want to talk about this topic because we had a lot of responses, and many of them were long! Thank you to everyone that took part.

We asked:

1. What social media do you use, or not, and why?
2. How do you feel about social media?

What we learned

• People are worried about its wider effects on society, politics, and on their children’s lives.
• While it has some positive features, it is addictive and even with good intentions, people often end up doomscrolling.
• Lots of people don’t like mainstream social media platforms but are familiar with them and feel these platforms are needed to stay in touch with friends and family, run businesses/projects, or stay abreast of campaigns, groups, and local businesses.
• Social media used to be good, but not anymore. Author Cory Doctorow has written a book about it: Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.
• Many people use WhatsApp, but don’t consider it to be social media.
• Experiences of alternative social media platforms and the Fediverse are generally positive.
• People enjoy watching videos of cats

Here are some of our favourite quotes from our readers:

'Wait, Ethical Consumer uses some of these social media platforms!'

We would love to get off these platforms and leave Zuckerberg and all the other Silicon Valley tech bros behind. Like many people stuck in the social media trap, if we abandoned all mainstream social media platforms now we’d lose the community we have built up over years. Our research and work would reach far fewer people and we’d probably suffer financially. So, at the moment it isn’t a viable option.

We left Twitter/X not long after Musk ruined it and joined BlueSky instead (please follow us if you don’t already). We did open a Mastodon account but the server that we joined shut down and we haven’t since rejoined.

Are there any platforms you’d like us to join?

Additional research by Alex Crumbie.