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After the Capitol riots – is decentralized social media an option?

As the Capitol riots have focused the world’s attention on the misuse and abuse of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, decentralized social media networks are being suggested as a potential solution - but would they really be such a good thing? The experience so far suggests they might not.

The Capitol riots have seen an immediate response from all the major soclal media networks, with Donald Trump being banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for life. Similarly, the Parler platform has been denied distribution via the Apple and Google app stores, and denied hosting by Amazon. From a big-tech perspective, this is just the beginning – and the calls from lawmakers to reign in and censor Facebook, Twitter and others will likely only increase in the near term.

Predictably, there will also be an opposing call and associated pushback against the power of the state and the ubiquitous big-tech monopolies to censor the voices of the people. Like it or not, these platforms have become the world’s default broadcast channels, and as such, many argue that they should not also be the head censors too.

So what role could decentralize social media play in addressing at least some of these concerns? After a massive Twitter hack in July 2020, there were renewed calls for decentralized social media solutions that could not be compromised in the same way. The fact is, though, that there are already a dozen or more decentralized social media platforms built on the blockchain. Some are abandoned projects, some show strong potential, however, to date, all have struggled to gain and maintain a significant user base. And if a decentralized Facebook or a peer to peer Twitter was actually able to attract a mass user base, would the result be a utopian dream or dystopian nightmare?

Decentralized social networks

Steemit and Minds emerged as the two most popular decentralized social platforms, each with over one million registered users. Both platforms can be thought of as incentivized social media platforms as they reward users in cryptocurrency for contributing to their networks.

Launched in 2016, Steemit runs on the Steem blockchain and rewards users in its native digital currency STEEM for posting, curating, and commenting on content. Steem was the first get-paid-to-blog platform that leveraged low-cost digital currency payments for its reward mechanism and it benefited from its first-mover advantage in this emerging segment of peer to peer social media.

Steemit has almost 1.2 million registered users with around half a million active users that discuss a wide range of topics such as news, sport, politics, and technology but with the bulk of discussions focused on cryptocurrency as the user base largely comes from this community. After strong early momentum, time, and the bear market of 2018 have not been kind to the project, as a range of issues have seen user interest decline.

Minds refers to itself as an open-source, decentralized social media network that pays users in cryptocurrency for contributing. Launched in 2015, the goal of Minds is “for content creators to take back their internet freedom, revenue, and social reach,” according to its whitepaper. Minds focus on supporting free speech is also front and center on its homepage – stating “Our content policy is based on the First Amendment and governed by a community jury in order to minimize bias and censorship.”

Minds is monetized using the Ethereum-based MINDS token and the platforms shares revenue with creators based on the popularity of their posts. In May 2020 Minds reported having over 2.5 million registered users.

Voice – A decentralized Facebook?

A new contender in the blockchain-powered social media space is the Voice platform that is being developed on the EOS network. Voice, which is still in beta mode, promises data ownership and financial rewards for users via its native token. With financial backing from Block.One and the large EOS community, Voice is poised to become a top contender among the blockchain-enabled social media networks.

Beta users are now able to invite friends to join the app, and public posts are available to see. The Voice team describes the project as a decentralized, anti-censorship alternative to Facebook, Twitter, and Medium. CEO Salah Michael Zalatimo, says that Voice promotes “transparency, authenticity, and humanity.”

The Voice feed looks like a cleaner version of Medium with a Twitter-style feed on endless scroll. When a user creates a post, if others like it, the poster earns Voice Tokens, and the post gains visibility. The more popular the post, the more tokens earned.

Other blockchain-enabled social media networks include DTube, Mastodon, Sapien, and Yours. All have struggled to gain and maintain traction.

The benefits of decentralized social networks

The benefits of decentralized social media include censorship-resistance, personal data ownership, improved content curation, less/no ads, and new content monetization models.

However, despite these obvious benefits, there is a dark side to a fully decentralized, 100 percent censorship-resistant social network model. What happens when anyone in the world can publish anything they want?

Imagine a decentralized social media network that enables user privacy through encryption and Tor integration, incentivizes user contribution through a token-based reward model, curates content purely based on user votes and runs without any sort of authority that can enter into the platform to make any changes or edits once the network is live. As enticing as this may sound to free speech advocates, the outcome would most likely not be pleasant.

If content cannot be edited or deleted by the operators of a social media network, the platform is at risk of being hijacked. An “anything goes” social network is at risk of being swamped with illegal content, criminal activities, and hate speech. In other words, it would quickly deteriorate into what sections of the dark web have become today. These platforms already exist, but due to their extreme content, don’t grow beyond their existing small communities.

For example, the Gab social network was started to preserve freedom of expression and at one time planned to move towards a decentralized blockchain model. It describes itself as “a social network that champions free speech, individual liberty, and the free flow of information online.”

Wikipedia notes that “The site has been widely described as a safe haven for extremists including neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the alt-right. It has attracted far-right and alt-right users and groups who have been banned from other social networks. Gab claims to stand for free speech and individual liberty, though these claims have been criticized as being a shield for its alt-right ecosystem.”

The problem of free speech and how to censor content is ongoing. Due in part to the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory in 2020, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have stepped up their content moderation practices as the misinformation continues to spread. The QAnon phenomenon began on 4Chan, a message board with limited content moderation that has become a home for an online user base that enjoys extreme content.

Community self-governance through the up and down voting of content – a staple among the “decentralized” social media platforms of today – is not a solution to the freedom of speech content problem. Unwanted content may not trend or be featured on the main page(s) of the platform but users who access the platform to search for illegal content will not have to look far to find it. Any search option – whether text or hashtag-based – would enable quick access to anyone looking for illegal pornography, drugs, hate speech, or other illicit materials.

Looking to the future

The rise of conspiracy theories such as QAnon and nation state-driven disinformation campaigns spread by social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook has contributed to an increasingly polarized and toxic online environment. Desire for anonymity is on the uptick. The events at the Capitol building and recents announcements by WhatsApp about its privacy policies has driven mass downloads of the encrypted messaging platform Signal.

Technology entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan has spoken about the need for a new social network that models physical-world levels of civility. “We need to rebuild civilization online first, then offline,” he argues. “We need to once again lean into the radically egalitarian nature of the original internet. All nodes are created equal. There is someone in India, Nigeria, Venezuela who is a better investor than most of the folks on Sand Hill or Wall Street. Crypto gives them the chance to rise.”

Srinivasan says that for some people, it was once novel to be able to yell at random strangers online. But it’s much less novel in 2020. Indeed it’s now the default state of affairs, thanks to likes and upvotes.

And so online insanity has created a demand for online (and offline) civility. We have physiological data that shows the effect of nutritional diet on metabolism. Just as it’s important to eat a healthy diet, it’s increasingly important to optimize your information diet, otherwise you are at the risk of becoming radicalized via the algorithms of the dominant platforms that will continue to show you content that reinforces an echo-chamber perspective that may well distort your perception of reality.

Srinivasan argues that decentralized platforms will eventually offer a solution. “The ledger of record is the set of all cryptographically signed feeds of on-chain data. It subsumes social media feeds, data APIs, event streams, newsletters, RSS. It’ll take years to build, but will ultimately become the decentralized layer of facts that underpins all narrative. Your platform must be like your private keys: irrevocable by any third party.”

How does this work in practice? Among other things:

  • Everyone has their own domain name

  • Pseudonymous by default

  • Content is open source

  • Code is 1st class citizen along with content

  • Oracles host facts

Balaji Srinivasan table
Source: Twitter

As more social media users become increasingly disgruntled with the way the dominant players in the space handle data and censor content, there may be a growing trend for social media users to explore decentralized alternatives.

Platforms that offer more free speech, user data ownership, and incentivization models that enable users to monetize their contributions are poised to attract more users in the coming years. At the very least, they will force the incumbents to consider or maybe even adapt their business models to become more ethical and user-centric.

Fully decentralized social media networks that operate without terms of service and can be used by anyone to post anything are difficult to scale. The risk is that they would quickly deteriorate into darknet-esque forums that cater to the minority who enjoy extremist content.


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