Communications of the ACM
Twitter, Facebook Want to Shift Power to Users. Or Do They?
Internet giants think bitcoin technology could help them solve many problems.
Credit: Erik Soderberg
Major Internet companies have come to see bitcoin technology as a potential solution to many challenges.
For example, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey hopes to underwrite development of bitcoin-inspired social media software so users and outside programmers have more freedom.
Twitter, Facebook, and other online giants are speculating that bitcoin-like decentralization could address problems like vetting sites for misinformation, and regulatory pressures driven by concerns of monopolization.
Dorsey directed a bitcoin-focused team at his company Square to build a basic iteration of Twitter that anyone can copy, so outside developers can more easily build atop that framework.
Meanwhile, World Wide Web creator and ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Tim Berners-Lee founded the company Solid to fix issues related to the centralized Internet by shifting ownership of personal data to users, and not to big corporations.
From The New York Times
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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