Tips for Elon Musk: How to build a decentralized version of Twitter?

Musk won.

On April 25, Twitter and Musk reached a final agreement, with an entity wholly owned by Musk acquiring Twitter for $54.20 per share in cash, with a total transaction value of approximately $44 billion. After completion, Twitter will become a privately held company. Of course, although the acquisition transaction has been approved by Twitter's board of directors, it is still subject to shareholder and applicable regulatory approval, as well as other customary closing conditions.

In short, Twitter has been taken into Musk's pocket. According to his previous promise, he will open source its algorithm, solve the problem of fraud robots, add editing functions, strictly abide by freedom of speech and other reforms. One of the issues that has attracted much attention is: how to create a "decentralized social media."

Just as Bitcoin tokenized freedom, we can use similar infrastructure to run social media applications! Technically, it is possible, at least for a proof of concept. In fact, back in 2014, Casey Kuhlman, Tyler Jackson, and I proposed a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called “Eris”, which was basically a “distributed version of Reddit” that ran on a blockchain backend (Ethereum POC 3 to be exact), as shown below:

If you look closely, you will find a "My DAO" button in the upper right corner. At that time, the idea of ​​DAO seemed crazy to many people.

Although the prototype achieved nothing in 2014, the crypto market was still very immature at the time, and it was almost impossible to tell the difference between smart contracts and "pop pies" (just a joke), and people regarded "DAO" as a topic for Confucian discussion, but now the situation is completely different. Given my experience in the Bitcoin/blockchain field, and considering that many venture funds are currently wandering around in this field, I really want to build a product and come to a $20 million pre-seed round of financing. However, after experiencing a startup, I have vowed not to try to develop or sell software again, so I'd better stay in my own law firm. (Chain Catcher Note: Preston Bybne is a partner of the well-known law firm Anderson Kill)

Let’s be honest, it’s definitely easier to design a prototype than it is to design something that people actually want to use. Even in the simpler world of “Web 2” technology, there have been thousands of social media applications, but only a handful have succeeded. Creating a social media application is easy, but running a successful social media business is incredibly difficult.

Frankly, attempts to build “decentralized social media” have been made before, but they don’t seem to work out very well. The most successful attempt so far is probably the free and open source social network Mastodon, although it’s not perfect and individual instances don’t scale well (as Donald Trump’s attempted social media platform Truth Social discovered when they copied Mastodon in an attempt to take a shortcut to social media stardom, Mastodon’s backend couldn’t handle their traffic).

By the same token, if you want to store everything in plaintext like Bitclout does, and dump every communication on the blockchain, it's not that hard, but there's a problem - scalability will suffer. Facebook doesn't need to agree on the global state, and they delete data (Facebook generates over 4 PB of data per day, by the way). Any social media system that tries to imitate Bitcoin (like Bitclout) can't put data on-chain, otherwise the data will still end up being stored on a small number of nodes running in data centers (this is very similar to Ethereum, isn't it?).

So, what other issues do we need to pay attention to when building a "decentralized Twitter"?

Illegal Content

First, there are legal issues.

It turns out that social media companies are bound to a host of regulations, such as data privacy laws, as well as other regulations (some of which are uniform in the United States, but some of which vary by country) that apply to the removal and reporting of illegal content within the United States, copyright issues, data protection, and mandatory disclosure of subscriber records. All of these factors need to be considered in the design of any "decentralized" social media application.

Lawyers have long cited the issue of illegal content as a major obstacle to the adoption of decentralized storage solutions.

In the United States and around the world, the most prevalent illegal content is what law enforcement refers to as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), and intentionally hosting this content carries severe penalties, such as large fines and long prison terms, and the crypto industry's response to this long-standing Internet problem seems to have been indifferent or even outright ignored. In contrast, Web2 applications that host user-generated content, such as Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook, have taken a very proactive approach to this type of illegal content.

Both centralized service providers and blockchain node operators are considered “providers” (a term meaning “electronic communications service provider”) under U.S. federal law, and they are required by law to destroy illegal content. Facebook and other companies use a variety of software, including Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, to automatically detect, remove and report illegal content.

But as far as I know, many blockchain-based services, such as StorJ or Sia, have no such controls (or only very limited controls) and allow the storage of encrypted data without creating user records and without requiring the service provider (in this case, the node operator) to be able to determine the stored data or assess the legitimacy of the stored data.

It is very likely (in fact, very likely) that decentralized data storage services are currently being used to host illegal content, and of course, the node operators hosting these services may not be aware of it. However, for "decentralized social media" applications, this "blindness" is not allowed, so when designing decentralized social media, it is necessary to ensure that law-abiding users can participate in the network and that the content does not violate local laws. But so far, it seems that no blockchain solution with a storage component has attempted to solve this problem, so if Musk wants to build a decentralized Twitter, this problem must be solved in the design, otherwise no one will run nodes for decentralized social media services.

intellectual property

Likewise, the intellectual property system is not well suited to use in a decentralized manner.

Social media node operators will be acting as “content service providers” and therefore “entities that provide transmission, routing, or connectivity for digital online communications … material selected by users without modifying the content of the material sent or received,” and in particular, the DMCA specifically states that these social media node operators must consider:

(a) registration with the Copyright Office is necessary to obtain safe harbor protection under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act;

(b) Be careful about hosting material that may give rise to claims of copyright infringement

At a minimum, addressing this issue would likely require implementing the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown protections for any third-party content hosted on a node (which would involve node operators filing their own cases with the Copyright Office if they wanted to profit).

Worse still, we may see some “copyright trolls” seize on copyright loopholes of social media node operators and then sue them for profit, because once they are sued for copyright, they are likely to lose money in the end - this is also the most common practice of some unreasonable copyright enforcement law firms.

At this point, it’s hard to speculate what kind of infringement and enforcement might be expected in decentralized social media. However, judging by what we’ve seen in Web 2, it’s certain that something similar will emerge in the Web3 space once “copyright trolls” become profitable.

Data Protection and Disclosure

Another issue arises when a person participating in a decentralized network may obtain a large amount of user data in the process of operating his or her node - data protection and disclosure.

For example, in a decentralized social media system, the network would allow users to download user profiles and posts. Let’s say I follow @A16Z, and @marmotrecovery follows me, @A16Z would be allowed to download and store my information and posts, as well as the information and posts of everyone who follows me, including @marmotrecovery. Judging from the sheer number of users @A16Z has (half a million), it’s safe to say that if A16Z ran a node on this hypothetical network, they would likely be a “service provider” under the California Consumer Privacy Act or other local laws, and would likely be required to implement a compliance program.

By the same token, node operators may also become “electronic communications service providers” under the U.S. Stored Communications Act (18 USC § 2701 et seq.), and thus may be required to hand over records on their computers to the government without the government first obtaining a warrant—at least to the extent that those records relate to third parties owned and controlled by the node operator, but users are unlikely to want to run a network that results in intrusions into their personal lives. So, decentralized social media needs to be designed so that as little third-party data as possible is stored on nodes.

Finally — some rough conclusions about the design of future decentralized social media networks

It seems unlikely that a decentralized Twitter would use blockchain infrastructure.

Content removal and moderation will be the single most important factor in the design of any decentralized social media system, and ironically, the unfairness of content moderation in Web 2.0 is one of the reasons that drove the creation of decentralized social media in Web3. At the very least, the centrality of content moderation to the social media user experience means simply dumping everything onto the blockchain, as Bitclout has done.

On the other hand, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) also believes that censorship is a major problem and expressed the hope that blockchain technology can be used to fix the "broken model" of social media. He believes that traditional social media platforms are a very chaotic system with no interoperability between different platforms. For example, tweets cannot be seen on Facebook, and Whatsapp cannot read messages on Facebook, even if they are products of the same company. SBF proposed that different social media platforms can extract information from the same basic data and conduct independent review. This will help solve the problems that plague social media while creating a fair competitive environment.

However, the first truly successful "decentralized social media" system will not attempt to be a singing, dancing world computer, but will have participants copy the absolute minimum viable information required for the network to function. When using a social network, perhaps the only thing the social network cares about is whether a particular piece of content was posted by a particular person, and the "blockchain" part, if there is one, should be reduced to a register that provides a username and an associated public key, and that's it.

For the most part, the first successful decentralized social media service will likely limit the type of data hosted by users to plain text.

Firstly, hosting only texts written by users and perhaps a select group of followers is a low liability proposition from a criminal, copyright and data protection law perspective. Of course, hosting texts would also be easier on bandwidth and more easily transferable P2P.

Secondly, for the hosting of videos and images, if there is no other reason, it is actually handled by "outsourcing" simply because of the large amount of data involved. At this stage, although there are many third-party platforms (Bitchute, Cozy, Odysee) with lax content review policies for video content, this can at least "exempt" you from responsibility, and then solve the market gap currently served by organizations such as YouTube, and exempt node operators from the responsibility of supervising the content (especially copyright issues) - this is actually very useful.

To serve content, what decentralized systems need to do is not to block external links to these services (blocking external links is a practice that both Facebook and Twitter have participated in), but to allow users to control what others can see by manipulating whitelists/blacklists of third-party content providers. In this case, decentralized social media will become another source of referral traffic to external websites (links).

Of course, the above understanding may be wrong.

However, the simpler answer to this question is more likely to be the right one, so the future of “decentralized social media” may look more like RSS than Ethereum.

Original author: Preston Bybne, partner of the well-known law firm Anderson Kill

How to Build Decentralized Twitter

Compiled by: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher