Decentralized Social Media — The Only Fair Solution for Content Moderation
After the shocking event of US capital breach on January 6th, 2021, Facebook’s chief Mark Zuckerbergy wrote that the risk of allowing Mr. Trump to post “are simply too great”. Donald Trump’s Facebook account has been suspended for at least two weeks until after the transition of leadership to Joe Biden on the 20th of January.
On top of that, Twitter had also suspended Trump’s account for 12 hours with removal of certain tweets stating “servere violations of our Civic Integrity policy”. Many other major social media such as Youtube and Snapchat tooks similar actions as well.
While the suspension of Donald Trump’s social media accounts may be seen as an appropriate action against misleading and improper contents, many people still argue that individuals should have the right to voice and access political, controversial, or even extreme speeches. Many arguments also stated that content moderation from centralized social media system are extremely bias and favorable towards the largest group of audiences.
As mentioned above, the two major issues that the centralized social media (CSM) face
- content moderation is inherently subjective and any moderation can anger at least one party
- moderation at scale is impossible.
Decentralized social media (DSM) provides a fair solution to effectively address the issue of content moderation for social media governance.
Below are the three main characteristics to address the issues :
1. DSM provides Codes of Conducts (CoC) at the instances level.
An instance is a group or community that have specific CoC for users to follow. The CoC can be set and revise by the members in the instances and the level of restriction is solely based on what the members are comfortable with. DSM users join the network by selecting the instances they want to be in. In that way, they can view contents that are the most relevant and appropriate to them.
2. DSM is moderated by members of the community
CSM governance usually adjust their moderation algorithm after public scrutiny. However, DSM is moderated by the users in the community. One example is the use of ‘Loomio’ that presents new CoC or bans comments that do not obey with the agreed CoC. Moreover, when conflicts arise within an instance or between two instances, users can act as the moderation team to vote and make decisions on further actions to resolve the rising tensions.
3. Content moderation at CSM is extremely effective
Reported inappropriate content will usually be reviewed in less than 2 hours compare to 2–4 working days for CSM. On top of that, an average instances of 100 people will have more than 2 moderators.
Users join the DSM network by selecting or creating a group. Users will then be able to have access to all contents posted by the users in the group. To ensure freedom of speech, no comments will be removed and no accounts will be block. Accounts will be kick out of the instance, if it disobeys the CoC. However, the user can simply rejoins another instances where he or she finds fit.
As most people go on to social media to find a community that shares similar values and absorb relevant information, DSM becomes the perfect fit to transform the way we use social media. Taiwan, as one of the countries that invest heavily into the decentralized technology, also aims to disrupt social media’s user behavior and advocate freedom of speech.
PPT AI, for example, is backed by Taiwan AI Labs (non-profit organization led by PTT Tu, creator of PTT BBS) that focuses on building a decentralized applications for social communication and business contracts that is free from data dominated algorithms and data leaking.
Poseidon Network, a decentralized P2P network company, is also invested heavily in the DSM sector with the vision to promote utmost security in all types of data.
Many pioneers in the blockchain industry strongly believe that decentralization in all form is the key to transparent systems. While the long presence of well-adopted centralized system does provide a sense of safety to the public, decentralization upon the use of network allows people to understand the truth and take part of it.
DSM users, for example, could be one of the first to participate in the blockchain revolution and gain access to pertinent content. Take part and make the world a more transparent place.
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