Here’s What Sam Bankman-Fried Would Do To Improve Social Media
The CEO and founder of FTX crypto exchange, Sam Bankman-Fried, shared his thoughts on how to improve access and functionality for social media platforms going forward.
Bankman-Fried spoke with Bloomberg Markets and Finance, and noted that one major issue within the social media space is the lack of data crossover between platforms – something that the blockchain space is addressing with cross-chain solutions.
“Right now one of the big problems with social media is there’s lots of platforms and all of the platforms are completely independent of each other.
There’s no ability to see a tweet on Facebook. If you message someone on Facebook, even WhatsApp can’t read it, [and] it’s the same company!
It’s a really messy system where there’s no interoperability between different platforms.”
The billionaire then points out another pain point – top-down moderation policies, noting that very few people have control over conversations of the general public globally.
“A second problem that you have here [is] moderation. What is the moderation policy for all of social media right now? It’s basically three guys.
It’s the people who run three companies who choose what does and doesn’t get censored. We’ve seen that that is a broken model.”
Regarding fixing all this, the FTX Founder notes that a solution could be blockchain technology to distribute user posts across all platforms within one single ecosystem.
“Here’s the core of what I think would be really exciting. You take a blockchain, you put the actual underlying messages directly on the blockchain.
What that means is any platform in theory could access those same sets of messages. So whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter or whatever the platform is, they’re all drawing on all of the messages. They can all write to this blockchain, they can all read from it.
What they are is different interfaces, effectively, living in this same universe. You have interoperability between platforms which solves a lot of these network problems, and allows for more competition because it means new people can enter the space without being miles behind in terms of user base growth.”
Bankman-Fried also talked about how moderation would remain up to the discretion of each platform within his model for blockchain-powered social media.
“When it comes to moderation, you can have different platforms making different decisions. Two people have two different platforms, but each with the same underlying set of messages accessible.
They don’t have to deal with this network effect problem but make slightly different decisions about what to censor, what not to censor.
That can at least give some consumer choice. It can at least give people options.”
