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SAN FRANCISCO – Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, fought publicly this month, with the question of whether his social media service had exercised too much power by hacking Donald J. Trump’s account. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to this power imbalance would be a new technology inspired by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
When YouTube and Facebook blocked tens of thousands of Trump supporters and white supremacists this month, many migrated to alternative apps like LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What these sites had in common was that they were also inspired by Bitcoin’s design.
The two developments were part of a growing movement of technologists, investors and ordinary users to replace some of the fundamental building blocks of the internet in ways that would be more difficult to control by tech giants like Facebook and Google.
To this end, they are increasingly focused on the new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which was built on an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power.
Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin is created and operated not by a central bank or financial institution, but by a wide and disparate computer network. It is similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publisher. This underlying technology is called blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger in which all Bitcoin records are kept.
Companies are now finding ways to use blockchains and similar technologies they have inspired to create social media networks, store content online and host sites without any central responsible authority. This makes it much more difficult for any government or company to ban accounts or delete content.
These experiments became relevant after the biggest technology companies recently exercised their influence in ways that raised questions about their power.
Facebook and Twitter prevented Trump from posting online after the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, saying he had broken his rules against inciting violence. Amazon, Apple and Google have stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that has become popular on the far right, saying the app has not done enough to limit violent content.
While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies’ actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment scholars and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities can decide who goes online and who does not.
“Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I don’t even trust the people who are making the decisions to make universally good decisions for a second,” said Jeremy Kauffman, founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service for streaming videos.
This led to a dispute over other options. Dozens of start-ups now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon web hosting services, all over decentralized networks and shared registries. Many have gained millions of new users in the past few weeks, according to data company SimilarWeb.
“This is the biggest wave I have ever seen,” said Emmi Bevensee, a data scientist and author of “The Decentralized Web of Hate”, a publication on the shift from right-wing groups to decentralized technology. “This has been discussed in niche communities, but we are now talking to the wider world about how these emerging technologies can impact the world on very large scales.”
Bitcoin first appeared in 2009. Its creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, said his central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and retain money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.
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For several years, Bitcoin has gained little traction beyond a small circle of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price went up over time, more people in Silicon Valley realized the unusual technical qualities underlying cryptocurrency. Some promised that the technology could be used to redesign everything from product tracking to online games.
Hype has diminished over the years as the underlying technology has proven to be slow, error-prone and not easily accessible. However, more investment and time has started to result in software that people can actually use.
Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project to store and display websites permanently, created an archive of websites and documents from the Hong Kong protests that angered the Chinese government.
Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, has also become an online home for some of the right-wing and neo-Nazi personalities who have been expelled from conventional social networks, along with marginal groups, in other countries, who have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capital firms, such as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.
One of the biggest proponents of the trend is Dorsey, 44, who spoke about the promise of decentralized social networks through Twitter and promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a provider of financial technology.
His public support for Bitcoin and designs related to it dates back to around 2017. In late 2019, Mr. Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology that aims to give Twitter less influence over who can and cannot use the service .
After closing Trump’s account this month, Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to deal with his discomfort with the power of Twitter, pursuing the vision set by Bitcoin. On Thursday, blue sky published the findings of a task force that is considering potential projects.
Twitter declined to make Dorsey available for an interview, but said it intended to “share more soon”.
Blockchains are not the only solution for those seeking alternatives to the power of Big Tech. Many people have recently migrated to the Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps, which do not need a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, said that decentralization makes it difficult to build good software.
Experimentation with decentralized systems, however, has increased in the last month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable in the event that major service providers stop or attempt to ban websites.
“The IPFS network gives access to the content even though it has been censored by companies and nation states,” said Brian Bondy, co-founder of Brave.
At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people who sign up daily has increased by 250% since December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have been largely a heterogeneous group of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who violated YouTube rules.
When YouTube removed the last videos from the white supremacist blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: “Why do we waste our time on this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, uncensored! “
Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said that blockchain-based networks face obstacles because the underlying technology makes it difficult to exercise any control over content.
“As a technology, it’s really cool, but you can’t just sit and be a Pollyanna and think that all the information will be free,” she said. “There will be racists and people will shoot each other. It will be the total package. “
Mr. Kauffman said that LBRY prepared for these situations. While anyone is able to create an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete – similar to the way anyone can create an email address and send emails – most people will have access to the videos through a website above it. This allows LBRY to apply moderation policies, just as Google can filter spam and illegal content in email, he said.
Still, said Kauffman, no one would lose basic access to online chat.
“I would be proud of almost any type of marginalized voice using this, no matter how much I disagree with it,” he said.