Facebook activism
It certainly can not be said that the leadership team of Facebook is singing after the avalanche that fell on it. There is certainly no shortage of energy, ideas and action on the Memlo Park campus. This activism is something that can certainly be attributed to the credit of Mark Zuckerberg and his team, a team made up essentially of technologists. It is therefore natural that their thoughts are primarily aimed at technology even if Facebook has become something much more than a merely technological company. According to Steve Bannon, for example, it is now a public utility and must be regulated as such. An eventuality that robs many people of sleep. And then you can't stay with your hands, something must be done before tomorrow comes.
What's the most disruptive idea Facebook's leadership team is filtering with? It is to transform the very nature of social media by converting it from a centralized to a decentralized structure. “Many of us have chosen to work in technology with the belief that it can be a decentralized force that can put more power in the hands of the people,” Zuckerberg wrote in his year-end message. Instead, the opposite happened: centralization prevailed, which ended up concentrating power instead of distributing it. With the concentration of this power has come success and money, but so have come so many problems that now threaten success. For this reason, the founder of Facebook has decided to explore solutions that go against the trend of centralization.
A Facebook cryptocurrency?
In early May, Zuckerberg leapt to action: He asked David Marcus to lead a small team to explore the possibility of bringing blockchain technology, the decentralized ledger of activity, into Facebook that is inflaming the imaginations of not just innovators but also of the great economic and financial power established and even of entire nations such as Switzerland. David Marcus, of French origin but raised – in fact – in Switzerland is a weighty executive. His resume is truly out of the ordinary. Joining Facebook four years ago, after serving as president of PayPal for two years, he took over Facebook Messenger where he implemented a peer-to-peer payment system. Marcus recently joined the Board of Directors of Coinbase, one of the largest bitcoin and ether exchanges in the world.
There is now a widespread belief that blockchain has the potential to build a whole new world of commerce and relationships in cyberspace, thanks to its ability to dispense with any centralized intermediation structures, as they are, in fact , even servers and data centers of Facebook.
Facebook hasn't released any details about Marcus' mission so we need to go looking for clues to understand what the purpose and outlet of this experimentation may be. For example, Facebook could use this technology to manage payments on social networks through its own cryptocurrency. This could be the simplest and most natural outcome of the work of the team led by Marcus. But there is much more
Beyond cryptocurrency
Indeed, there may be more ambitious goals in Marcus' work. The blockchain could provide solutions to directly impact the current critical issues of the social network that have fully manifested themselves in the last period, namely privacy and fake news. The blockchain could be the tool to permanently decentralize the processing of personal data
and place control in the hands of the users themselves. In fact, the blockchain is able to support smart contracts, which regulate transactions or relationships, in which subjects can define access permissions to their data and activities.
But it could also be the tool to identify and neutralize the propagators of fake news. By setting a public key to identify the identity of users within the blockchain, it would be possible to limit the spread of hate speech and terrorist propaganda.
There are already experiments underway especially in the field of journalism and information. Facebook may have the resources to take these initiatives out of the corner.
Furthermore, the blockchain could be the solution for transforming social media from a totally free service into a service with micropayments, easily manageable with the blockchain, with a double track for the acquisition of services by users and for the acquisition of data and content from social media.
In fact, Facebook could create its own cryptocurrency with which to settle transactions within the social media, even those made by third parties who currently accuse Facebook of receiving all the economic benefits of the activities that take place there even if powered by third parties.
Fight competitive threats
Perhaps Facebook's adventure in the blockchain responds more to a strategic need. Zuckerberg & co. they have always been careful to neutralize any competing action in the field of social media. This is the logic that led to the acquisition of Whats app, then Instagram and the cloning of Snapchat's most innovative services once its acquisition was completed. The same ratio could move the initiatives connected to the blockchain which in fact, due to the basic and general nature of this technology, could give rise to dangerous competitive activities.
A competitor already exists and has the characteristics to give rise to some concern. We are talking about Telegram, the instant messaging service founded by the Russian brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov. Telegram has everything that Facebook lacks and that it would need to get out of the critical issues that weigh on its future. With Telegram, conversations are encrypted point-to-point and saved on the user's device and not on the social media's central servers. Telegram already has an advanced solution to apply duly revised blockchain technology, the Telegram Open Network (TON). For this project, the Durov brothers have raised, with an epic ICO, 1,7 billion dollars in cryptocurrency subscribed and also by institutional investors. Telegram already has 70 million active users.
There are other initiatives looking to blockchain as the new technology paradigm for social media and messaging. There is Kik, a messaging app, which has launched its own digital tokens and is implementing a cryptocurrency-based payment system. There is Steemit, a social media platform, which rewards users for posting with cryptocurrency payments.
Is Decentralization Worth Facebook?
There are many observers who have great misgivings about the marriage between Facebook and the blockchain. Facebook is today a very centralized company: it has 25 employees in California, various data centers and 2 billion monthly users whose activities tend to be managed centrally. Facebook's strength lies in a centralized database that takes care of content and relationships. Facebook is today a hyper-centralized structure that is challenging to redirect towards decentralization which is the main principle of the blockchain. If it became a decentralized structure, as is implicit in the decision to implement the blockchain, Facebook would probably lose control over its users.
Which is a worse evil than the bad press, the US Congress, the European Union and Steve Bannon. Perhaps the union between Facebook and the blockchain is not love, but a buggy.
