The decentralization of Social Media through the blockchain technology
Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi
Abstract
Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most popular applications of the daily life of users in the worldwide. Today, the number of Social Media users is more than 4 billion, and this trend increases year after year with a high impact on the privacy issue. During the last years, decentralization of social services has been considered as a big opportunity to overcome the main privacy issues in OSNs, and not only (fake news, censorship, etc.). Blockchain technology represents today the most well-known decentralized technique, which has been taken into account to develop the new generation of decentralized social platforms. Blockchain-based Online Social Media (BOSMs) are decentralized Social Media platforms that use the blockchain technology as the underlying technology or as a tool in order to provide rewarding strategies. In this tutorial, we will highlight the BOSMs scenario by presenting their main characteristics and how data could be collected and analysed.