FTX Founder Wants More Collaboration Between Social Media Platforms

FTX chief Sam Bankman-Fried has announced plans to use blockchain technology to fix “broken” social media and improve interoperability between platforms. 

“It’s a really messy system where there is no interoperability between different platforms. There’s no ability to see a tweet on Facebook. if you message someone on Facebook, Whatsapp can’t read it and that’s the same company,” Bankman-Fried told Bloomberg.

But the CEO of FTX wants to change the narrative by drawing inspiration from the cryptocurrency space which has made impressive strides in interoperability. 

FTX CEO wants seamless collaboration

Crypto projects connect with others seamlessly and Bankman-Fried is confident that he can replicate that sort of collaboration with Web2 companies. 

However, he questions the moderation policy of the leading platforms and expressed disappointment with the current model. 

He likened the policy to being run by “three guys” and is “a broken model. “It’s the people who run three companies who choose what does and doesn’t get censored,” he said.

“This would be a really, really interesting, important innovation in social networks,” he added. His new model would allow different platforms to access the same pool of data to make independent decisions on censorship that would be consistent across the board. 

But it would also have the advantage of allowing newer platforms to close the gap with their already established contemporaries.

Bankman-Fried told interviewers that yet to speak to Elon Musk about his plans but said he will be “excited” to have the conversation. The Tesla chief recently submitted a bid to buy Twitter at a valuation of $43 billion.

The reason for his takeover bid stems from his dissatisfaction with the platform’s direction on censorship. Musk believes that Twitter has the “potential to be the platform of free speech around the globe” and to achieve this, the company needs to be private.

“All these culture and discourse and democracy considerations fall by the wayside because that’s not going to benefit shareholders anymore,” argued Ann Lipton, Professor at Tulane Law School.