Decentralized Social Media: Fixing Traditional Big Tech Bit by Bit

By Ben Armstrong, Founder of BitBoy Crypto

How The Blockchain Solves Bad Incentives, Scams, and Censorship

The wiring of the internet is a maze that we can hardly comprehend but rely on for mostly everything. But there is a glaring problem that was recently put on display when Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp suffered a major outage, sidelining businesses, brands, and people that have grown to rely on it. The vast majority of our data is owned and controlled by third parties. We are constantly faced with security and censorship threats. Your data isn’t your data–it can be deleted, sold, or censored at the whims of big tech or hacking groups as we saw on Monday, October 4th. This is because centralized systems, by their very nature, are susceptible to tampering. Blockchain fixes this–solving for bad incentives, scams, censorship, and restoring power back to the individual.

Bad Incentives Create Bad Actors

The incentive structure spurring centralized companies to capture data and silo it for monetization is clear. For traditional big tech, more network growth on their platform means more profit while the middlemen take a cut of each ‘transaction’. Decentralized media totally inverts this monetization model wherein the value harvested from a user branches away from that individual, not the other way. Today, value stems from the centralized traditional tech oligarchy. As Vitalik Buterin said: “Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.”

But perhaps the more significant problem is not just the data silo– it’s that the bigger the data silo, the sweeter the honeypot is for malicious entities.

Check Please: Why Verification is Not Meaningless, but Means Less

Twitter has experienced multiple security breaches and is low-hanging fruit for scammers. High-profile accounts for celebrities, individuals, and organizations are routinely compromised. In the infamous crypto giveaway scam, hijackers actually used verified accounts from crypto companies like Binance and Coinbase, as well as well-known personalities such as Bill Gates and Elon Musk. Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of BTC were received by the scammers due to human error originating from the centralization of the platform. Certain internal, credentialed Twitter employees have top-tier access, presenting the golden-ticket opportunity for scammers to hack, bypass restrictions, and infiltrate an account’s security established by the owner.

Those hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoin, which likely turns into hundreds of millions of dollars worth of bitcoin as time goes by, does not even include the money scammers have stolen from trojan-horsing their way into users DM’s via impersonation accounts. For instance, my Twitter handle is @Bitboy_Crypto. Impersonators have created @Bitboy__Crypto (Notice the additional underscore?) among countless other combinations. Joe Rogan is verified, but that doesn’t stop people from impersonating him and using his likeness to exploit others. What’s more unnerving is that the Twitter verification criterion is opaque and biased–one central entity holds the right to deem one account verified over another without apparent rhyme or reason. While verification certainly helps, it doesn’t eliminate the problem.

A blockchain-based solution can thwart scammers because of its immutability and ability to prevent ‘double-spending,’ or in this case, duplication of an individual/organization/entity. For instance, network participants must agree the account is valid through a process called consensus. Like a block in a transaction, each subsequent interaction is assigned a timestamp secured via cryptography and connected to the most recent block in the chain. Every new piece of content created will simply add to the chain that is 100% verifiable at a glance. The original record will always be accessible while showing the origin of an account, including every conceivable off-shoot of activity.

Without Freedom to Offend, There is No Freedom to Express

According to a recent study, published by Google’s Jigsaw project with the digital rights nonprofit Access Now and the censorship measurement company Censored Planet, governments worldwide are enacting internet shutdowns at an increasing frequency and sophistication–and it’s happening exponentially. For instance, out of nearly 850 shutdowns documented over the last 10 years, 768 have occurred since 2016. According to the study, internet shutdowns lie along a spectrum, from a total shutdown or blackouts that cut off access to the entire web within a given region to more targeted partial shutdowns that impact specific services, like popular social media and messaging apps. The justifications for shutdowns range from national security concerns to “curbing the spread of misinformation.” Further, the study indicates that shutdowns aren’t just becoming more widespread; they’re getting more subtle through tactics ranging from throttling a URL to dramatically slow its function, blocking specific internet addresses, and restricting mobile data usage.

I have experienced this as a content creator firsthand. For example, saying a word that rhymes with “toe bid” triggers YouTube’s algorithm and means people won’t see the video. It could be demonetized, taken down, and lead to the channel getting suspended or even erased. Humans at YouTube cannot tell you what you did wrong because they don’t know–it’s algorithmic. An infraction falls into a broad category because the algorithm is not smart enough to pinpoint the specifics of the violation. Yet, humans created the algorithms. Without a moment’s notice, people can have everything taken from them- whether that means a content creator’s income or an individual’s opinion. As Mark Twain said: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”

We have to have free, open, censorship-resistant social media. Blockchain gives us the ability to achieve this because it removes the need to trust a centralized authority.

History Will be Written on the Public Ledger

The existence of a single point of failure in centralized platforms is a matter of public scrutiny now, with users realizing that a decentralized alternative will provide more security, freedom of speech, and control over their data. However, because the communications layer is still heavily reliant on the current infrastructure of the internet, decentralizing the web will take some time. Decentralized social media, on the other hand, is an iteration in the right direction.

Yes, we live in a capitalist society, and these platforms are free to do as they see fit but remember, the other side of this (bit)coin is that others can build alternatives. History won’t be written by the victor anymore. It will be written on the public ledger for all to see.