A look at My Friends My Data, a group of startup founders pushing for legislation to force tech giants like Meta to let creators transfer followers between apps
A new coalition of start-ups is calling on tech giants to allow creators to reach followers on more platforms. Tweets: @carnage4life , @joshconstine , @ianbetteridge , and @taylorlorenz See also Mediagazer Tweets: @carnage4life : The premise of this article is that people's personal data is a commodity that big social networks should share with startups so they can grow. This is counter to the prevailing privacy winds from GDPR & CCPA to government reactions to Cambridge Analytica https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Josh Constine / @joshconstine : Today's social networks hold our friendships hostage. Thank you to Dispo's @Dlisscious for launching My Friends My Data to restore choice through social graph portability https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Ian Betteridge / @ianbetteridge : Creator's followers are not their property to move from service to service. Sorry. https://twitter.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : I wrote about My Friends My Data Coalition (MFMD), a group of start-up founders working to push tech giants to adopt a new industry-wide standard that would allow users to transfer followings from one app to another, creating more competition btw apps https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Social graph portability has been circling Washington for years: back in 2019, TechCrunch argued the FTC should force Facebook to make its friend lists exportable while weighing fines over the Cambridge Analytica fallout. What has changed is who is asking — instead of regulators floating the idea, founders of dependent startups have organized into the My Friends My Data coalition to lobby for legislation themselves.
The push lands at an awkward moment for Meta. The company is chasing creators with resource shifts away from News tab and Bulletin toward the creator economy while rebuilding Facebook around TikTok-style unconnected recommendations — both moves that make locked-in follower counts less central to its product, even as they remain central to its moat. Ex-CrowdTangle co-founder Brandon Silverman already showed the template for insider-turned-reformer with his bipartisan transparency bill, and MFMD extends that playbook from data disclosure to data exit.
First-order effects
- Meta faces a direct lobbying threat to its core asset: legislation mandating follower transfer would let creators leave with their audiences, converting the social graph from a lock-in mechanism into shared infrastructure.
- The coalition's member startups gain a policy vehicle they lacked individually, while skeptics like Ian Betteridge — who argues followers are not property to be moved — frame the immediate counterargument the bill must survive.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms and small networks become the natural beneficiaries and likely allies: portable audiences lower their customer-acquisition cost to near zero, pressuring every incumbent whose growth depends on rebuilding graphs from scratch.
- Privacy regulators pull in the opposite direction — the same post-Cambridge Analytica framework that produced GDPR and CCPA treats personal connection data as sensitive, so any portability mandate must reconcile export rights with consent rules or stall in that conflict.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds from the FTC's 2019 portability discussion through MFMD's lobbying, network effects stop being treated as a private moat and start being treated like interoperability obligations — the kind of structural check on platform power Stratechery flagged back when Zuckerberg's 2017 manifesto invited scrutiny.
- The unresolved tension between portability and privacy law would then define the next era of platform governance: whether users' relationships are regulated as personal data to protect or as infrastructure to share.
The trend: Social graph portability is migrating from a regulator's thought experiment to organized startup lobbying, part of a broader movement to govern network effects as shared infrastructure rather than private property.