In brief

  • Discontent grows online with the centralized policing of social media platforms.
  • Tyler Winklevoss tells Decrypt what heā€™s looking for in the next YouTube alternative.
  • Messari explains why it didnā€™t change platforms after their Twitter shadowban.

With gatekeepers increasingly policing coronavirus content, discontent with legacy social media platforms is festering online. Is now the time for decentralized and uncensorable alternatives to finally get traction in the mainstream? Tyler Winklevoss thinks soā€”and he's willing to put some money on it.

ā€œA central party should not play referee,ā€ Winklevoss told Decrypt. ā€Rules should be made by a platform's community of creators and users, not a small group of executives cloistered in Silicon Valley.ā€

There are plenty of recent examples. Yandex, a Russian version of Google, blocked online protests where citizens dropped pins on its map app to voice their displeasure with the coronavirus lockdown. Facebook blocked plans for quarantine protests in real life. Twitter has been called out for shadow bans and the throttling of impressions.Ā And YouTube started blocking contentĀ that contradicts the World Health Organization's guidelines.

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Building the social network 3.0

With all these problems in mind, the Winklevoss twins have tweeted that theyā€™re looking to invest in a Youtube alternative. But the new platform better be decentralized and protect free speech, they tweeted.

Tyler Winklevoss toldĀ DecryptĀ heā€™s looking for platforms ā€œwhere users have full control of the content they create.ā€

ā€œA native token should accrue to those who bring their resources to bear on the platform, such as creators getting paid or 'tipped' for the content they produce, users for their engagement,ā€ he said. ā€œBoth creators and users should have a say in governance, which will invariably lead to interesting debates and forks down the roadā€”which is a good thing. Those who have different ideas can always opt-out and start their own platform, similar to schisms that we see in religion."

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Given the Winklevoss brothers' history with the social network, their interest in building another is not to be taken lightly.Ā  They claimed co-credit for coming up with the idea for Facebookā€”and reportedly won more than $150 million in stock and cash as part of a civil court settlement with Mark Zuckerberg. So who better than they to build a crypto-charged, next-generation social network that fixes the many problems that beset generation 2.0?

Tyler Winklevoss conceded that incumbents ā€œare well within their rightsā€ to police their platforms. But he pointed out thatĀ  now is the right ā€œtime to build more democratic alternatives.ā€

Where do we go from here?

Some platforms, such as MastodonĀ and 3speak, have already attempted to clone platforms like Twitter and Youtube. The ā€œfree speech networkā€ Gab, which exemplifies Winklevossā€™ point on forks to new platformsĀ after disagreements, has also gained some traction with over 1 million registered users as of last year.

But Gab developed a reputation for attracting the hate-speech crowd, and thus far no free-speech platform has caught on with the masses.

And even the victims of centralized censorship are unwilling to take their followers elsewhere. For instance, the crypto analytics firm, Messari, was recently caught in the crossfire over COVID-19. The company and its founder, Ryan Selkis, were briefly shadowbanned on Twitter as they sounded the alarm on the virus in March, and released a dashboardĀ which tracked the virus alongside market fluctuations.

ā€œYou're talking about maybe a few million users compared to a few hundred million on Twitter, and closer to 2 billion on YouTube and Facebook,ā€ Messariā€™s marketing lead Connor Dempsey pointed out to Decrypt. ā€œWith a small team, we don't have the luxury of committing to decentralized alternatives until they hit that kind of scale.ā€

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Perhaps the incumbents themselves will willingly become more Web3-ish. Twitterā€™s Jack Dorsey, a prominent advocate of Bitcoin, has said he wants to eventually decentralize TwitterĀ through his Blue Sky Project.

But in the meantime, thereā€™s definitely money to build a better, Web3 version of Twitter and others.

ā€œThe pandemic has reminded us just how little control we have over our data, and how much power and influence we've entrusted to a very few,ā€ Tyler Winklevoss said. ā€œThese centralized platforms make up their own guidelines with respect to 'misinformation' and dissent, many of which are arbitrary and at odds with the principles that our country was founded on.ā€ Instead of cloning the incumbents, maybe it's time to create entirely new social media platforms with free speech and decentralization principles in mind.

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