A strange idea I saw from a European group is to get the government to run a social media site because they will supposedly handle human rights better than the private sector.

Governments, and yes, European governments (even if they pretend to care about human rights for marketing purposes), are actually some of the biggest violators of human rights around.

The best they can often muster is "at least we are better than x government" which is like Facebook saying "at least we are better than data broker x in protecting your privacy".