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Blockchain Technology can Create a Social Media Platform that Facebook Can Never be

Facebook has become so much more than a social media company over the years. Not all of their decisions are appreciated by the general public, though. It also seems the platform faces major concerns regarding privacy and censorship. Blockchain technology may very well be the undoing of platforms like these for many different reasons.

Facebook Faces Many Problems

Being the world’s leading social network often comes at a price. For Facebook, there are growing concerns regarding privacy, data harvesting, and content censorship. Right now, users are forced to give their content and personal information freely to the company because there is no way to circumvent this problem. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, can make such platforms obsolete fairly quickly. Users can see which data is shared and with whom in a transparent manner. The idea is everything Facebook is, but also what Facebook isn’t or can’t be.

RBC Capital Markets analyst Mitch Steves has been thinking along the same lines. In his opinion, blockchain can disrupt social media for multiple reasons. Being able to share all types of content with only the people you want to without relying on intermediaries sounds quite appealing. This will prevent data harvesting by internet monopolies such as Facebook and Google. 

One of the pressing problems remains how data can be misused. Those issues are not easy to solve by any means. Privacy issues are also present on Facebook right now. The company’s recent exposure of data through Cambridge Analytics is just one example of this problem. Things are going from bad to worse for the company in this regard. Centralized control of user data simply isn’t working, that much has become more than evident.

People Are Fed Up With The Company

It has become painfully evident Facebook is fighting a losing battle on multiple fronts. Earlier this week, we saw a major social campaign telling people to delete FB altogether. Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp, is one of the people behind this campaign. Ever since Facebook bought out WhatsApp, Acton has become a lot more vocal about his dislike for the way things have gone. It is obvious this situation will only spur new debates moving forward.

On top of that, the platform has the audacity to ban specific advertisements on the platform, cryptocurrencies in this case. It is censorship in its purest form, illegal programs and scams do need to be blocked in one way or another, and they have made no effort to prevent spurious members peddling their scams and spam. Facebook’s decision to ban cryptocurrency ads altogether has created a lot of bad blood, for obvious reasons.

With a transparent network, such decisions aren’t even an issue, as users can determine what they want to see or not see. One entity should never make this decision on behalf of over a billion people. Whether or not most people will move away from this social platform moving forward, remains unknown however Facebook’s growth has started to decline. It is time people started to see these platforms and companies for what they really are – profit driven monopolies. Transparency has never been one of Facebook’s strong suits.