Use Case: A Social Media Platform Over Blockchain

Use Case: A Social Media Platform Over Blockchain

Antier Solutions
3 min readAug 26, 2021

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Social media has evolved but the technology that enables it has not transformed the way it should have. Initially, social media found its use just as a platform to connect with people. However, over time it has evolved as a medium of business marketing, news propagation, eCommerce, and more. All this has exposed social media users to issues like digital privacy, identity frauds, data breaches, and more.

All this is happening because the existing setup of social media platforms is centralized. That means social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram store all the user data in a central server. Because of this, the users have no control over how their data is being exploited. Let us look at how blockchain can solve these pressing issues:

Control over Advertisement frauds

Department of Justice (DOJ) reported in 2018 that the ad tech model of social media platforms is being aggressively exploited. Ad frauds over $30 million were being reported by the end of 2018 and over the years, the number has exploded to over $23 billion.

Currently, ad frauds are on the rise due to data asymmetry. They are using fake domains and exploiting the existing data points in the current social media setup. However, with the introduction of blockchain-powered social media elimination of data asymmetry between the buyer and the seller is possible. This is achievable using an impression token. The ad publishers would use blockchain technology to generate a unique impression ID on the page. This unique impression ID helps establish a transaction between the buyer and the seller on social media. As soon as the seller receives payment, the impression ID becomes invalid.

User data privacy and protection

There’s no centralized governing entity controlling a social platform over the blockchain. No one can access the data without the consent of the platform user. Moreover, the blockchain enables end-to-end encryption of user data using private and public keys for transactions. This ensures a peer-to-peer information transfer in a way that the data messaging data is accessible only to the parties involved. As individual blocks store user data using immutable hash, it becomes nearly impossible to attempt identity theft.

Censorship resistant social presence

Social media users like to express and share their views openly on social media platforms. However, due to the centralized nature of existing platforms, users face profile blockages or post suspensions in the name of censorship. Therefore, it compromises the very essence of freedom of expression. A social media platform powered by blockchain will be completely censorship-free as there will be no centralized body trying to control users’ posts.

Social commerce can improve

Blockchain-based social media helps establish a social setup that incentivizes participants for their contributions. Let us assume a company wants to promote its products on such a platform. It can design the campaign in a way that whosoever reposts their promotional content receives rewards in tokens native to the blockchain.

This will help establish a synergy between social media users and business owners who want to promote their products. Both parties stay benefited because of the transparency established using blockchain technology.

Content originality authenticators

Decentralized social networks use distributed consensus mechanisms to ensure that the content posted is original. As a result, the users can trust that no one can clone and monetize their content. In addition, once a user shares his/her content, no one can modify it on the blockchain. This makes it easy to identify fake news and unauthorized copying of content. Blockchain-powered social media platforms can establish decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO) to curate the quality of the content.

Conclusion

Decentralized blockchain-technology powered social media platforms seem to be solving the data security issues faced by social media users today. With blockchain, users can once again gain full control of the data and the content they generate on the social platform. In addition to this, they also get rewarded for engaging in different activities like sharing or liking a social media promotional post.

Ultimately, this kind of set-up engages the users and helps business owners target the right audience without losing control of the data they generate.

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Antier Solutions

Decentralizing the world since 2016 through full-stack custom blockchain solutions. Follow this space for DeFi, DAO, NFTs, Metaverse, Crypto Exchanges & more.