Blockchain, open standards, and a revolution in social media

Jack Dorsey’s comment last week seemed like a canon blasting through an ossified tech industry.

The CEO announced a new initiative to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” that Twitter would ultimately adopt. Dorsey provided few accompanying technical details, but based on a subsequent tweet by Twitter CTO leader Parag Agrawal, the project may somehow involve blockchain technology. The combination of blockchain and open standards has the potential to seismically shift power dynamics between users and the social media platforms.

Administration without representation

The big social media giants like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube are defining features of the internet today, in part due to the inability for users to switch to alternative networks. Departing members forfeit their content, connections, and personal data curated over the lifetime of their accounts, forcing them to reconstruct online identity from scratch. These high barriers to exit incentivize users to remain with incumbents despite reported data breaches, invasive monitoring, and disinformation challenges. Even though Twitter and Facebook allow users to download certain types of content from their profiles, the data excludes details and machine-readable formats required for new platforms to restore a user profile.

Without the ability to “vote with your feet”, the average user has very little influence on how social media platforms govern our digital environment. Small teams make decisions on platform functionality or terms of services that impact how billions of users engage in the digital world. By controlling the dominant means of communication, social media platforms must strike the paradoxical balance of guaranteeing free speech while censoring content that doesn’t abide by the terms of use.

Opening the playing field

Open standards would effectively translate the user data on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other social media companies into a “common language” that would be comprehensible to other platforms. Instead of remaining locked on specific platforms, a users’ posts, social connections, and other types of content could be transferred between social media providers. A blockchain could provide the cryptographically secured and decentralized conduit to connect these platforms while protecting the privacy and user control of where the data flows.

An open data ecosystem built on blockchain also lower the barriers for new social media platforms to compete with the incumbent platforms. This freedom allows users to “vote with their feet”, and empowers them to find platforms that securely and freely engage with the digital world on their terms. A diversified social media industry not only incentivizes stronger data security than an incumbent-dominated industry, but also fosters innovation of inclusive solutions that represent users of different backgrounds. If members of certain groups perceive discrimination by policies or algorithms by a social media providers, they could export the valuable data and social connections of their social media account and move it to a competing platform where they feel better represented.

Open standards and blockchain technology could create a new social media landscape that enables underdogs to compete with the big incumbents in a way that benefits users and society. If Dorsey’s suggestion to create a blockchain-supported open standard comes to fruition, it will not only liberate users from a handful of social media providers, but it could reinstill the internet with individual creativity and agency that promotes inclusivity and access for all.