Sam Bankman-Fried understands Elon Musk. The cryptocurrency billionaire, owner of the FTX exchange platform, gave an interview to Bloomberg TV in which he said that social networks have a “broken model” that can be repaired using block chain technology (fundamental to the industry). of NFTs and cryptocurrencies). According to the 30-year-old , the problem is in the moderation policies of the networks: “What is the moderation policy for all social networks? Are they like three types? It is the people who run three companies who choose what what gets censored and what doesn’t. That’s a broken model… We saw a social network choose not to censor misinformation in 2016 and got burned for that decision, then we saw them choose censorship in 2020 and get roasted for that decision.”
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According to the businessman, the problem with the networks is that each one is independent of the other, even when they belong to the same company like Facebook and WhatsApp, which are part of Meta: “There is no possibility of seeing a tweet on Facebook. If you send a message someone on Facebook, even WhatsApp can’t read it, being from the same company. It’s a really messy system where there’s no interoperability between the different platforms.”
For Bankman-Fried, the use of blockchains could solve the problem and even encourage competition: “You put the actual underlying messages directly on the blockchain. What that means is that any platform could, in theory, access those same sets of messages. So whether you’re using Facebook, Twitter or any other platform… they’re all based on all the messages… They would be different interfaces living in the same universe.”
A few weeks ago (before buying shares of Twitter and launching a crusade to take control of the social network ), Elon Musk published a post questioning whether the platform “adhered to the principles of freedom of expression.”
Asked by Bloomberg TV interviewers if he had already spoken with Elon Musk about his proposal, Sam Bankman-Fried replied: “I haven’t spoken directly with Elon about this, but I would be excited to.”