Decentralized vs Centralized Social Media: Is it time to delete Facebook?
Or are recent scandals representative of a bigger problem?
It’s been one of the biggest topics on the planet in recent weeks: Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been the subject of international allegations of unethical company conduct, leading to a global Delete Facebook (hashtag #deletefacebook) movement.
Facebook isn’t the only company concerned recently either, as concerns have been rife amongst many leading centralized platforms regarding just how safe user data is on their servers.
Cambridge Analytica is a company which has been at the forefront of these recent allegations, and the story has gained appeal due to its tie-in with the controversial Trump presidency.
Its significance is such that it has even led techno-magnate and Tesla co-founder / CEO Elon Musk to abandon the Facebook platform entirely as a result. Even if it is something of a ‘trolling’.
Human Rights & Ethics VS Politics in the 21st century
Privacy is widely considered to be an innate human right and has been since the age of reason. As such, it is a common concern and one which has sparked debate ever since across the world.
In March 2018 the combined vested interests of mainstream media organizations and establishmentarian politicians collided; resulting in the well-timed “revelation” of highly questionable activities.
Despite the repeated warning signals, it is only now that such information has come to prominence.
Cambridge Analytica, and the Data Mining economy
The Cambridge Analytica scandal pertains to the actions taken by the leadership team and subordinates within the British ‘political consulting firm’ over the past five years since its founding in 2013.
This controversy surrounds a common process named ‘data mining’.
In many ways, data mining is quite like the methods employed by scammers and marketers to illegally obtain telephone and address records for cold calling & junk mail. The difference here is that the legal ramifications for using software tools and algorithms to gain permission to, scrape, record, and store user data indefinitely are much more questionable.
A flagship example of data sharing depravity
In this case, acquired data was subsequently used to inform predictive and reactive political marketing campaigns utilizing psychological insights from the data; campaigns including successful ones such as President Donald Trump’s election and Brexit. This was in addition to operations those performed in international and (even more) politically unstable locations.
CEO Alexander Nix has been a prime candidate for questioning and he has proven to be the face of the problem due to the public nature of his job role. He maintains that the company has done nothing wrong, and that all the data gathered via Facebook was done so with full compliance from its various respective owners.
Likewise, if this is the case then Facebook cannot be held legally liable for the consequences of the actions either; depending on the conditions denoted on their platform’s terms of service (TOS).
This most likely won’t prevent government authorities from using both organizations as political scapegoats however, which may also incur financial penalties.
How Can I Avoid This Happening to Me?
If you’ve gotten this far in the article, then you are probably pretty tech savvy.
That doesn’t stop the above instructions from being laborious to carry out, and not without its fair share of mouse clicks. This is because the privacy settings on many of these centralized social media platforms are hard to find, and many are hidden behind a series of additional buttons and tabs.
Also, you delete a conversation history or even an entire account on Facebook (for example), it is never gone entirely. The information remains stored on the company’s internal centralized series of servers for the foreseeable future instead, vulnerable to external attacks or misappropriation.
Rather than having to tick every box that relates to added privacy and security (opt-in), it would be great if all these features which benefit the user were enabled automatically (opt-out). It would be even better if all messages were end-to-end encrypted on a social platform which also included full license rights management tools for users to employ with their own media.
Decentralizing Social Media: The SocialX Solution
If you know anything about the distributed ledger concept, you’ll know that it is synonymous with decentralized blockchain technology. Essentially, information pertaining to individual transactions between users and entities are logged and perpetually stored by a vast network of participating user terminals, connected in a P2P fashion. This makes it very difficult for a malicious third party to access or edit the data stored on the ledger, which is more commonly referred to as a ‘blockchain’.
Furthermore, user data is anonymized through encryption — compared to the public directories of information offered by many centralized platforms. This is exactly why we created SocialX as a decentralized and blockchain based social media platform.
In addition to the above features, content is prioritized and has value assigned to it by the platforms users. It’s a great contrast versus the advertising structure which most centralized social media sites revenue are dependent on — and helps to prevent external manipulation such as that performed by firms like Cambridge Analytica.
SocialX plans not to directly implement censorship methods based on their own biases but rather leave it to the community to define what content they believe is valuable, worthless, or ethically unacceptable.
SocialX believes that a platform for social interaction should be governed and policed by the society that inhabits it, rather than a centralized state of arbitrarily empowered governors.
For more information, check out the website or join Telegram.
