We all know that banks, credit card companies, money transfer services, and even some governments fear crypto currency and blockchain technology. But we can now add another industry to that list, and that is social media. Recently, most major social media platforms have announced they are banning crypto related ads. The most likely reason being that they are afraid of SEC regulations regarding ICOs coming out. However, there is also a deeper fear I believe that social media CEOs are thinking about, and that is the fact that blockchain based services are a direct and appealing alternative to current centralized social media platforms.

Recently, Facebook has faced huge criticism for the way they allowed third parties to handle user’s data. The backlash as been so bad that Facebook has lost $80 billion in market value in the last two weeks. Of course, the price will recover, but it shows that investors and the general public are not happy with how Facebook is handling data, and this issue is resonating with the public in a way that centralized social media platforms would rather not have.

Now of course, Facebook is not going to fail over this, but it is very possible that this is a turning point. Not long ago, speaking about the dangers of social media and the power they have as a centralized warehouse of everyone’s data made you out to be a conspiracy theorist. But now, the idea that social media companies are just as evil as other companies seems to be very mainstream, and only the most clueless people are not concerned about social media platforms stockpiling so much data.

Not only that, we recently had YouTube offend many users and content creators when they started censoring content based on the political or social views contained inside the videos. It became so bad, that even talking about a news story with the word “gun” would cause the YouTube automatic content algorithm to demonetize the video or even de-list it. This is because recently, Youtube started making an automatic transcript of the audio of every video upload, then it searches that transcript for words or speech it deems a problem. And this is all before any user even sees the videos, so it’s very troubling and a system that can easily be abused.







And this is where decentralized blockchain social media platforms can come into play. They can offer all the benefits of a social media platforms without the fear of a centralizing party taking advantage of the authority they have gained by accumulating personal data. And it is this fact that has the current social media platforms seeing blockchain as an emerging technology that is a direct competitor.

Current social media platforms will never adopt any type of decentralized format, because all of their value comes from their centralization and accumulation of data.

What makes this all so fascinating is how fast social media companies already have a competitor on the horizon. Social media companies for the most part have been considered the young and cool companies of the corporate world. But with the Facebook scandal, they are starting to look more and more like the companies of the old days. Billion dollar corporations that abuse their power and customers to squeeze out every last penny of profit. But a new younger technology is on the horizon already, and that is blockchain. I find it very fascinating that social media companies already have a competitor. It just shows you how fast everything is moving these days compared to just 10 years ago. And things will only get faster from here.