FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder Sam Bankman-Fried is sharing his vision of how to improve access and functionality for social media platforms in the future.
In an interview with Bloomberg Markets and Finance, the billionaire says one major pain point within the social media realm is the lack of data crossover between platforms, unlike the blockchain space which tends to focus on 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 [even though] it’s the same company.
It’s a really messy system where there’s no interoperability between different platforms.”
The FTX CEO adds that top-down moderation policies mean that very few people have the power to control worldwide conversations among the general public.
“A second problem that you have here [involves] 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.”
When it comes to possible solutions, Bankman-Fried suggests harnessing the power of blockchain technology to distribute user posts across all platforms which reside within a 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. [Then] 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.”
The entrepreneur concludes his remarks by discussing how moderation will remain up to the discretion of each platform within his hypothetical blockchain-powered social media model.
“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.”
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