Late last month, a large number of Taiwanese became the latest victims of AI-driven scams. According to media reports, this started when groups tagged thousands of Facebook pages in their posts. For over 3,000 of these page owners, the moment they tried to remove the tags, Facebook's algorithm automatically flagged them as accomplices and permanently suspended their accounts.

Behind these accounts are real people who spent years of painstaking effort to build followings in the hundreds of thousands. In the face of new AI-driven scams, social media platforms' indiscriminate crackdown wiped out users' accumulated work overnight.

This incident reveals a stark reality of the digital age: The personal connections and social footprints built on various social media platforms do not truly belong to the users. A single change in a platform's algorithm can cause one’s normal activity to be misidentified as fraudulent or malicious. Platforms can arbitrarily limit one’s reach and reduce traffic, leaving the user powerless.

How to rectify this sorry state of affairs? The answer lies in ensuring digital freedom of movement. Currently, on most social media platforms, users have no sovereignty over their data. The platform decides how one’s information can be used. Even if a user is dissatisfied, switching to a new platform is difficult. One is effectively trapped as it is impossible to take an existing social network somewhere else, and one’s past activity remains locked on the original platform.

Under the lock-in of network effects and switching costs, platforms lack incentives to improve and need not address user demands. They continue to grow simply by leveraging first-mover advantage.

Case in point is the U.S. state of Utah’s recent passage of the Digital Choice Act, which requires social media platforms to achieve "portability and interoperability" for the AI era by July 2026.

Think of it as keeping a phone number when switching carriers. If one wants to move a primary social hub from Facebook to LinkedIn, one could "pack up" accumulated data from Facebook and connect to LinkedIn. Even when a user moves to a new platform, they would not lose their digital footprint.

At the same time, users could choose to have all posts and their resulting interactions on a new platform like LinkedIn automatically update in real-time on Facebook, allowing friends from their old network to follow their latest updates.

This gives users the power to choose the platform with the friendliest interface and the best services. If dissatisfied, they can take their number and leave at any time without worrying about abandoning their network of contacts.

In addition, this creates opportunities for new platforms to emerge. By providing better services and experiences, legions of loyal users can be attracted. The lower switching costs especially benefit smaller, local platforms, allowing them to compete with global giants, even with a smaller user base.

Taiwan's own AI Basic Act, which recently passed preliminary review, calls for the government to establish mechanisms for data openness, sharing and reuse. The goal is to protect user rights and foster data innovation by periodically reviewing and adjusting related laws and regulations.

These platforms operate in Taiwan, using data provided by the people and earning substantial profits from advertising. From the perspective of the digital industry's governing bodies, it is reasonable to amend the law to expect and require these platforms to honor our “digital freedom of movement.” In the long run, this also creates an environment where more platforms can thrive as they are perfectly tailored to the needs of the people.