Over the past years, activists and human rights groups in Palestine and across the Arab region have objected to Facebook's unfair and absurd targeting of content belonging to marginalized and oppressed communities, particularly pro-Palestinian content. This is happening at a time when cyberspace has become the only outlet for those societies to freely express their opinions, publish their news and what is happening there in terms of facts and brutal crimes, and bypass the censorship and repression imposed by the occupying power.
In 2016, after Facebook concluded an agreement with the Israeli occupation authorities, the targeting of Palestinian content on the platform increased, under the framework of a dedicated set of policies, including the closure or suspension of the accounts of journalists, media organizations, activists and any page that talks about the issue, as well as the accounts of ordinary users, under the pretext of removing "hate speech" or confronting "anti-Semitism" (1), which prompted Palestinian users to launch protest campaigns against the censorship of their voices on the world's largest social media platform.
Every time the crimes of the occupation against the people of Palestine are repeated, from the brutal bombing and aggression on Gaza and the occupied territories, Arab users face these fears of silence on their personal accounts, for fear of Facebook's algorithms that delete content and suspend accounts. The platform is using its algorithms in a completely brutal way, as soon as words like Israel or Palestine appear, it turns into something like collective punishment, without even looking at the context, and this is what we have been witnessing since the beginning of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on the seventh of October.
Over the past decade, Facebook has gone from being a communication platform into an essential and central part of our online digital life, and it's no exaggeration that it's one of the largest sites currently dominating the entire network. But as these sites gained more users, and as their popularity increased further, the Internet became a more enclosed place, controlled by four or five large companies, creating what became known as "centralized the Internet.
Internet centralization
There is a group of giant companies that control the entire Internet and earn a lot of money at the expense of users. (Photo: Shutterstock)
In early 1958, after the Soviet Union launched the first Sputnik 1 satellite, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower assigned the Advanced Research and Projects Agency (ARPA), which could be considered the Defense Department's right-hand research arm, to coordinate all defense research and development programs, including taking over the space race with the Soviets. The agency did not complete its mission in space research, because NASA appeared the same year and took over the mission. But the long-term effect of this new path was the launch of a galaxy full of new communications, first called ARPANET, and later known as the "Internet" (2).
In 1994, the term "Web 1.0" appeared to the general public, with the advent of browsers and websites, almost 3 decades after ARPANET emerged as a network for connecting computers within Pentagon's research institutions on landline telephone lines. The first version of the web consisted of a set of static site pages, and did not give users the ability to interact.
But 2004 came, and the Internet began to develop more, and user demand began to increase more on social interactions, and then the idea of forums began to appear and spread, then share music and share short videos, and then financial transactions on the network began to grow further due to the improvement of Internet speed, the development of fiber optic infrastructure, and the development of search engines.
This high demand for interaction and communication led to the emergence of many major Internet companies that we know today, for example, social media platforms began to appear, replacing forums, starting with Facebook and then Twitter and others, and facilitating communication and interaction between users. Google provided an effective way for users to navigate the network and search a huge amount of data, Wikipedia provided a huge library of information.
Most of these sites are based on user-shared content, rather than receiving content from sites with fixed pages, the so-called Phase II of the Web or "Web 2.0," which is the stage we actually live in on the Internet. There is a group of giant companies that control the Internet in full force, and make a lot of money at the expense of users.
The dream of decentralization
Blockchain technology is the dream on which the perception of the third version of the Web3 as a decentralized vision of the Internet is built. (Photo: Shutterstock)
In the aftermath of the global economic crisis that hit the world in 2008, specifically on the evening of January 2009, 3, the mysterious programmer Satoshi Nakamoto published the white paper of the first cryptocurrency "Bitcoin", and with it he outlined the basics of blockchain technology (<>).
We can liken blockchain technology to a giant ledger, in which every cryptocurrency trade is recorded. Each transaction is encrypted, and the sender and receiver are determined only by a series of numbers, but a public record of each currency movement is published across the entire network. The identity of the buyer and seller remains anonymous, but everyone can see the transition of the currency from person number "1" to person number "2", and the code can prevent person number "1" from spending the same currency again.
The code will allow money to be sent directly between people, without an intermediary, and no outside party can make more bitcoin, like fiat currencies print. Central banks or governments would play no role in this, and if Satoshi Nakamoto were running the world, he would have shut down the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, and perhaps Western Union, because everything depends on crypto proof rather than trust.
The goal of blockchain technology was to return to decentralization in the world of online economics and finance; decentralization here means that this giant ledger cannot be controlled by a single company, but is spread over a huge group of networked computers. Well, what will those devices gain?
Some decentralized communication platforms are emerging, such as Mastodon. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Every device connected to the network that offers these services will be rewarded for its work with the opportunity to earn more bitcoins. Instead of relying on giant financial institutions and a host of huge companies that control everything, why don't users trade currencies and money directly with each other?
Blockchain technology is the dream on which the perception of the third version of the Web "Web3" as a decentralized vision of the Internet is built. Proponents of the idea argue that Web3 redesigns the decentralization of the first web version "Web 1.0", which was filled with blogs, and then combines it with the interactive experience of applications of the second version of the Web "Web 2.0" such as social media platforms. All this is to provide a digital system in which the data belongs to the user and not to the giant companies, and transactions on the network are guaranteed by encryption technologies, instead of trusting these huge organizations.
Because this new version of the Internet will be based on user interactions via social media, some dreamy ideas for this field have begun to appear, namely decentralized communication platforms, such as Mastodon, which is based on an open-source protocol known as ActivityPub and based on blockchain technology (4).
Decentralized means of communication
Tumblr. (Photo: Shutterstock)
In recent months, a group of tech companies have poured some of their resources into the development of the Activity Pop protocol and what is now known as Fediverse; companies such as Tumblr, Medium, Mozilla, and even Meta itself, when announcing its new application, Threads, confirmed that it would add it to this protocol to join decentralized media.
But perhaps the most popular platform currently relying on this protocol is Mastodon, a platform that turned into a safe haven for users fleeing Twitter after Elon Musk's acquisition of the company last year. Many tech professionals now see the future as not Mastodon itself, but what its basic idea represents as a decentralized, open-source communication platform like ActivityPop.
The idea of this protocol is based on transforming closed social networks into co-usable networks; instead of relying on one separate platform, such as Facebook, everything can be linked to a single social graph and a fixed system for sharing content.
The idea itself is not new, of course, and it is based on older ideas about a radically different structure for these social networks, governed by open source protocols and not giant closed platforms that we don't know how they work. Its goal is certainly noble, which is to return the controller to the user's hand, and to keep the idea of social media globally in a position greater than any company, no matter how big or powerful.
Momentum began to grow around this idea precisely after Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter, when many went to search for a suitable alternative to the blue sparrow, and Mastodon was waiting. The idea of decentralization here is to store user data and content on a blockchain network and independent servers, rather than centralized servers controlled by a giant corporation, such as Meta, Google, Amazon or others.
How does it work?
On decentralized social media platforms, you can post a photo on Instagram, for your friend to comment on within the Twitter app (currently X). If your friend writes a post on Facebook, you can see it and share it on Telegram, for example. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Decentralized social media platforms are a complex technical concept, and are more related to the perception of the third version of the web (Web3) in the future, but let's try to explain it in a simplified way; any communication platform consists of two basic elements, first there is the application or user interface, which is the same application that you use on your phone such as Facebook or Instagram. Secondly, you will find the data that goes into the work of this application, such as your friends list, other personal data that you share, and others.
What decentralized networks propose is the idea of separating the application from that data, for example, when you register in a new social application you will not have to search for your friends list again, that list will follow you wherever you go, meaning that it is part of the Internet and is not limited to this application alone.
The best example of how these networks work is email, because it relies on open protocols used by several applications and services, so although there are many email applications, with various features and levels of quality, you can transfer your contacts in any application. Can you imagine, for example, that you need Hotmail to communicate with colleagues who use the same app, and another Gmail mail for your friends who prefer Google services? Well, that's how social media currently works, and Facebook is the best reverse example of those decentralized platforms.
Your Facebook friends list is your Facebook friends list, and you can't move or use them within another app. If you want to read your friends' posts on Facebook, or want to share what you write there, you'll only have to do so within the Facebook app. Of course, this is excellent if you are Mark Zuckerberg, because this is a fundamental reason why the platform has turned into a formidable money pumping machine for nearly two decades, simply because staying as long as possible inside the platform is the most profitable strategy in this field.
Conversely, on decentralized social media platforms, you can post a photo on Instagram, for your friend to comment on within the Twitter app (currently X). If your friend writes a post on Facebook, you can see it and share it on Telegram, for example.
Of course, the strengths and weaknesses of each application will differ from the other, and the moderation policies and content creation tools available to each application may differ, but in the end the group of friends will own the same, and you can follow the same accounts regardless of the platform you use, just like you can send an email from your Gmail account to your friend who has an account on a Microsoft application. There will be no so-called Facebook friends or Instagram followers, so the social graph, which is here the list of friends, will be separated from the entire product market, and here are the applications of those companies.
In short, the basic idea put forward here is to store and share data across multiple servers, rather than being controlled by a single large company or organization, and these decentralized platforms prioritize user privacy, security and control over their private data. For example, encryption is usually used to secure user data, and often gives the user more control over his information compared to current centralized systems, in addition to another important feature is its reliance on open source code, which means that it is available to everyone, so anyone can review and develop it. They also have no content classification algorithm and therefore no control over what appears in front of the user, along with the promise of giving more freedom of expression than we currently see on Facebook and other social media platforms.
A distant dream
The mission of social media has been to give us the ability to participate for ourselves and make the world more open and connected, but what platforms like Facebook do in terms of blocking, hiding and suppressing voices is in stark contrast to that supposed freedom! (Photo: Shutterstock)
We mentioned that these new platforms are dreamy, and this is simply because they face huge challenges, for example, it is very difficult to create new social networks because of the influence of the network, and this is what prompted Elon Musk to buy Twitter for $ 44 billion instead of establishing a new network, because we join those platforms when our friends and acquaintances are present on them, not because of decentralization.
The existing platforms have evolved and improved over the past years based on the comments and observations of millions of users, to reach this form that we see now, making the task of any new network a competitor almost impossible. Besides, the user does not want to manage or operate an online platform, what he wants is a simple platform with a smooth user interface that can be easily handled.
There is another more important point, which is the sheer size of these platforms, or what is known as economies of scale, as current huge platforms, such as Facebook, have more advantages because they can obtain different resources and technologies, such as storage spaces, at lower prices (5). The platform's huge size also makes it more useful for users, advertisers and others, increasing its size even more in an endless numerical sequence. Even in decentralized systems, such as Bitcoin, there is a tendency to create large market controlling players, such as huge mining pools and large currency exchanges, creating a kind of compelling centralization. So, the dream of decentralization of social media seems really far-fetched, at least for now.
In general, the first mission of social media, such as Facebook, and perhaps what distinguishes it most from traditional media, was to give us the ability to participate ourselves, and to make the world more open and communicated; to work to achieve equality for all without prejudice, and to give those who cannot communicate an opportunity to shout at the top of their voices freely as the powerful do, and to express themselves and tell the world what is happening on their land, and perhaps without the current communication platforms for what the world knew or solidarity with the Palestinian cause as well. It is happening now around the world. But what platforms like Facebook are doing in terms of banning, hiding and suppressing voices and posts is strongly contrary to that supposed freedom!
Even attempts to bypass these algorithms won't work much, such as writing without dots or changing the words the algorithms target, which are only temporary solutions. So looking for other solutions, such as decentralized platforms, may seem logical. In the end, the primary goal of these platforms is to share with others what is happening with you, what is going on in your life, because this is the simplest concept of communication. But what happens when social media platforms prevent you from communicating?
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