Blockchain And Social Media
Just as Rome was not built in a day, one of the most significant challenges for any startup is its ability to achieve critical mass.
Social Media Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were launched in the year 2004 and 2006 respectively and since then have only multifold their business. They have connected nearly 3 billion people with their family, friends and have transformed how businesses advertise in the process. These Dotcom era social media platforms have their own data collection policies and collect users data to monetize it to the targeted advertisement companies. Dotcom era social media network is full of rage and malicious, fake content and users. Blockcom era focuses on a decentralized network where the digital giants of today should neither have the ownership nor the right to censor the content. User themselves should have the right to monetize their own data. One such Blockchain initiative is AKASHA which stands for ‘Advanced Knowledge Architecture for Social Human Advocacy’ and has still not gone into ICO.
Problems with Social Media!
- Malicious factors: Suppose an account associated with a person named X gets hacked today. After a two day lockout, followed by identity verification, X gets his account back. The problem doesn’t end here. Firstly, X starts unfollowing the 1000 accounts that the hacker followed from his behalf which were now spamming X’s feed. Secondly, the hacker may gain access to some private information of the person X. This illustrates the problem with social media, their vulnerability to malicious attacks. According to reports, nearly 2/3rd of US adults who have an account on social media have been hacked once.
- Censorship :
- According to survey, nearly 62% of the adults consider social media as their primary portal to news, which gives access to the portal some really filthy power.
- In May 2017, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia was locked out of his Facebook account for 24 hours after publishing content related to Maltese political figures affiliated with the Panama Papers.
- In 2016, Facebook deleted Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s posting of a Pulitzer Prize-winning image from the Vietnam War,the poignant “Napalm Girl” photograph by Nick Ut, for violating Facebook’s nudity policies.
Who gives them the power to decide what is to be taken down and what not is to be taken down?
3. Centralized ownership: Social media networks enjoy a monopolistic position in the market. A handful of companies gather huge amounts of data from users (sometimes in ways that cross ethical boundaries), and subsequently monetize that data through the sale of targeted advertising.
THE SOLUTION
Need of the hour is to move towards decentralization as quickly as possible. One such initiative is AKASHA which is the brain child of Ethereum. When you upload something on Facebook, your browser uploads the data to Facebook’s servers. From there Facebook sends the data to your friends browser or maybe to a dozen other people for advertisements. Facebook acts as an intermediator here. And the foremost use of Blockchain is to eradicate the intermediaries. AKASHA on the other hand does not store any data on its server, the data is uploaded onto IPFS which returns a unique hash value of that upload, which in a way also solves copyright issues. Have a look at the following two tables and compare how a Blockchain based can ensure your data privacy and save you from frequent data breaches.
If you’re not paying for it, you become the product.
References
- Blockchain Revolution by Don Tapscott & Alex Tapscott
