How social media, other areas can benefit from emerging technology

So there is this new trend that has been popping up alongside the trendy terms ‘’Bitcoin” – It’s called Blockchain technology.

What’s it all about?

To put it in lay man terms, the Blockchain technology is a process that allows people who don’t otherwise trust themselves be made to trust themselves.

It is a distributed ledger allowing multiple parties to collaborate without having to trust each other.

It allows for transparency, authentication and auditing.

Blockchain technology cuts out a central system that we see in the regular world.

This is how bitcoins are transacted for example, where a network of computers operate on a peer-to-peer user basis rather than a central authority.

With social media, there is so much blockchain technology can potentially do in the areas of maintaining privacy, bypassing the control African leaders have over their citizens’ social media activities and even the social networks who reportedly collect data of their users at times without explicit permission.

The same principle still applies, decentralization with a private secure platform, exchanges can be made that cannot be touched by any government, resisting top-down censorship and control, while encouraging users to spread truth and downvote propaganda, thereby allowing the community decide what content dies or thrives.

An inherent advantage of a distributed system based on the blockchain is that it eliminates the presence of meta-data on centralized servers, which can be used by third parties for tracking, surveillance, or data gathering.

The technology also helps battle fake news while rewarding online users. For example, blockbased social network OnG.social rewards users and publishers’ engagement on merit with cryptocurrency, enabling the community to decide which posts have merit and which are “voted down” for being fake news.

These are just some of the ways the emerging technology of blockchain is applied.

As more awareness about blockchain technology comes up, it only becomes a matter of ‘when’ and not ‘if’.