BLOCKCHAIN IN SOCIAL NETWORKING
Thangamuthu Poongodi, R. Sujatha, D. Sumathi, Palanimuthu Suresh, B. Balamurugan · 2020
Since the last decade, the social media platform has served as an entry point for establishing connections, content sharing and social interactions for many users. Exploiting customer's information is very prevalent nowadays by gaining insight into user's habits, preferences, connections, behaviors, content and location. Logging into a social media website paves the way to becoming a target of marketing campaigns for advertising. Primarily, most social media sites available today are centralized and provide opportunities for exploiting the user's content well. Privacy and data security are of great concern in social media platforms. Blockchain, with distributed ledger and decentralized concept, secures users’ content by encrypting it. The social media platforms such as Whatsapp, iMessage, Signal, Wire, Threema, etc., follow end-to-end encryption for security. A problem occurs when metadata is exchanged along with messages, thereby providing an opportunity for third parties to steal the user's personal details. Blockchain-based social media provide more benefits than just security and privacy: Cryptocurrencies are used for secure communication by paying and buying content in peer-to-peer marketing. Blockchain assists in gaining control over the user's own content. A decentralized approach to blockchain technology in social networking ensures privacy and enables e-commerce, crowdfunding transactions as well as smart apps and contracts. Nowadays, the digital social network media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc., provide free access. Obviously, development and server infrastructures are vital to social networking platforms and their profit focuses on advertising and analytics in the social network business era. The fundamental problems facing social networking includes fake news (Facebook), excessive trolling (Twitter), censorship and demonetization (YouTube).