Fixing Social Media with the Blockchain

Freni, Pierluigi; Ferro, Enrico; Ceci, Gabriele

doi:10.1145/3411170.3411246

Cited by 16 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Guidi et al (2020) analyse reward models for users in DSN. Freni et al (2020) discussed how blockchain can solve privacy and security problems with OSN. proposed a blockchain-based secure friend matching algorithm for OSN.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Rumour prevention in social networks with layer 2 blockchains

Thakur

Breslin

2021

Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.

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Social bots can cause social, political, and economical disruptions by spreading rumours. The state-of-the-art methods to prevent social bots from spreading rumours are centralised and such solutions may not be accepted by users who may not trust a centralised solution being biased. In this paper, we developed a decentralised method to prevent social bots. In this solution, the users of a social network create a secure and privacy-preserving decentralised social network and may accept social media content if it is sent by its neighbour in the decentralised social network. As users only choose their trustworthy neighbours from the social network to be part of its neighbourhood in the decentralised social network, it prevents the social bots to influence a user to accept and share a rumour. We prove that the proposed solution can significantly reduce the number of users who are share rumour.

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Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Rumour prevention in social networks with layer 2 blockchains

Thakur

Breslin

2021

Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.

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“…A DeSo is a platform that does not have a central governing body and operates on a public ledger, usually a blockchain [1]. Users are rewarded with cryptocurrencies, commonly called token or coin (see Appendix S1 for background), for their 1) content creation, 2) content curation, 3) content attention, and 4) community management [2]. For example, Steemit is a DeSo, analogous to Reddit, which has a price tag for each post that represents 'Steem tokens' that creators would earn for their achieved user engagement (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, on the 5th of November 2022, Elon Musk announced in a tweet that "creator monetization for all forms of content" will soon be added to Twitter. 2 Medium introduced its 'Partner Program' in which writers can get paid proportional to the user engagement they achieve.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While the idea of DeSo is not new, the possibility of major platforms embracing monetary incentives of DeSo is both promising and worrisome. On the one hand, it might help to alleviate problems linked to content moderation, (e.g., algorithmic ranking and managing objectionable content), data protection, advertisement pricing, and compensating content developers [2,4]. On the other hand, it may increase the spread of polarizing content [5] and misinformation [6] on social media if users are rewarded financially for their achieved user engagements, but it may also decrease it if monetary penalties are put in place [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Monetization of social media engagements increases the sharing of false (and other) news but penalization moderates it

Alizadeh¹,

Hoes²,

Gilardi³

2022

Preprint

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Social media companies are introducing new features for users to monetize engagements, derived from blockchain-based decentralized social media. These steps are potentially worrisome. The monetization of engagements might create incentives to post objectionable content. However, it is unclear to what extent such negative outcomes are likely to occur. To address this question, we first administered a survey that showed that many users have a poor understanding of the mechanisms behind monetization. Second, we conducted a survey experiment to examine the effects of hypothetical monetary incentives. We find that a simple nudge about the possibility of earning money for user engagements increases the willingness to share different kinds of news, including misinformation. The presence of penalties for objectionable posts diminishes the positive effect of monetary rewards on misinformation sharing, but it does not eliminate it. These results have policy implications for content moderation practices if platforms embrace decentralization and monetization.

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“…However, they did not have a big impact on the daily life of people. Thanks to the blockchain technology and the idea of rewarding valuable content, Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSM) [12] have been proposed by exploiting the most well-known blockchain [11], such as Ethereum, or EOSIO. The most well-known is Steemit, 1 which is based on the blockchain Steem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of Witnesses in the Steem Blockchain

2021

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Online Social Networking platforms (OSNs) have become part of people’s everyday life and their usage covers the deep-rooted need for communication among humans. During recent years, as people are questioning more and more OSN service providers, a new generation of proposals, based on blockchain became very popular thanks to the ethics adopted by these platforms. Steemit is the most important blockchain-based social networking site, which integrates, as main novelty an economic layer to the social media service. Steemit is implemented on top of Steem which, as in other blockchains, awards miners of the blocks with cryptocurrency. Steem miners, called witnesses, are not chosen based on the solution of a mathematical problem, as in Proof of Work based systems, but must be voted by other users. In this work, we decide to study the witnesses on Steem and their contribution to the social platform Steemit, and their social impact. We performed a set of analyses to shred light concerning their behaviour and to understand how they are socially perceived by other users. Analyses show an important social impact but, at the same time, some of them have a negative social impact. Their discussion is polarized towards content concerning Steem, Steemit, witnesses, and other platforms hosted on Steem.

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Fixing Social Media with the Blockchain

Cited by 16 publications

References 11 publications

Rumour prevention in social networks with layer 2 blockchains

Rumour prevention in social networks with layer 2 blockchains

Monetization of social media engagements increases the sharing of false (and other) news but penalization moderates it

Analysis of Witnesses in the Steem Blockchain

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