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SAN FRANCISCO – Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, wrestled in public this month with the question of whether his social media service has exercised too much power by cutting off Donald J. Trump’s account. Mr. Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to the power imbalance was new technology inspired by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
When YouTube and Facebook barred tens of thousands of Trump supporters and white supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative programs like LBRY, Minds and Sessions. The sites felt that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin.
The twin developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the internet’s fundamental building blocks in a way that would be more difficult for technology giants like Facebook and Google to control.
To do this, they are increasingly focusing on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, built on top of an online network, designed at the most basic level to decentralize power.
Unlike other types of digital money, Bitcoin is not created and moved around by a central bank or financial institution, but by a broad and diverse network of computers. This is similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than a single publisher. The underlying technology is called the blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all of Bitcoin’s records are kept.
Businesses are now finding ways to use blockchains and similar technologies inspired by them to create social media networks, store online content, and host websites without any central authority in charge. Doing so makes it much harder for any government or enterprise to ban accounts or remove content.
These experiments are newly relevant after the largest technology companies have recently exerted their influence on questions that have arisen about their power.
Facebook and Twitter have Mr. Trump barred posting online after the January 6 Capitol disaster, saying he had broken their rules against incitement to violence. Amazon, Apple and Google have stopped collaborating with Parler, a social networking site that has become popular under the right wing, saying the app has not done enough to curb violent content.
While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies’ actions, they were criticized by conservatives, scholars of the First Amendment and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private institutions could decide who could stay online and who could not.
“Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I do not trust the people who make the decisions to make universal good decisions,” said Jeremy Kauffman, the founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized video streaming service.
This led to a scramble for other options. Dozens of new businesses now offer alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon’s web hosting services, all in addition to decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to data company SimilarWeb.
“This is the biggest wave I’ve ever seen,” said Emmi Bevensee, a computer scientist and author of The Decentralized Web of Hate, a publication on the movement of right-wing groups toward decentralized technology. “It has been discussed in niche communities, but now there is a discussion with the wider world about how these emerging technologies can affect the world on a large scale.”
Bitcoin first emerged in 2009. The creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, said his central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and keep the money in a way that no government could prevent or does not regulate.
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For a few years, Bitcoin gained little traction as a small number of online admirers and people wanted to pay online for illegal drugs. But as the price has risen over time, more people in Silicon Valley have taken note of the unusual technical features underlying the crypto-currency. Some have promised that the technology can be used to redesign everything from product tracking to online games.
The hype has fallen over the years as the underlying technology has been slow, flawed and not easily accessible. But more investment and time has led to software that people can actually use.
Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project for the permanent storage and display of websites, created an archive of websites and documents of the protests in Hong Kong 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 personalities and neo-Nazis launched from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups in other countries targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar ventures are funded by prominent venture capital firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.
One of the biggest proponents of the trend was Mr. Dorsey, 44, who spoke on Twitter about the promise of decentralized social networks and promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a financial technology provider.
His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related designs dates back to about 2017. At the end of 2019, Mr. Dorsey Blue Sky announced a project to develop technology aimed at giving Twitter less influence over who may and may not use the service.
After the closure of mr. Trump’s bill this month, Mr. Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with Twitter’s power by pursuing the vision Bitcoin outlined. On Thursday, Blue Sky the findings published of a task force that considered potential designs.
Twitter did not want Mr. Dorsey did not make himself available for an interview, but said he plans to share more soon.
Blockchains are not the only solution for those looking for alternatives to the power of Big Tech. Many people have recently migrated to the encrypted messaging programs Signal and Telegram, which do not require a blockchain. Signal creator Moxie Marlinspike said decentralization makes it difficult to build good software.
However, experimentation with decentralized systems has increased over the past month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it will begin integrating a blockchain-based system, known as IPFS, into its software to make web content more reliable when major service providers go down or try to ban websites.
“The IPFS network provides access to content, even when censored by corporations and nation states,” said Brian Bondy, a co-founder of Brave.
At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people subscribing daily has increased from 250 percent, the company said. The newcomers were apparently largely a furious crew of Trump supporters, white supremacists and proponents of gun rights who violated YouTube’s rules.
When YouTube removed the latest videos from white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, he tweeted: “Why are we wasting our time on this globalist froth? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, without censorship! “
Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks faced obstacles because the underlying technology made it difficult to exercise any control over the content.
“As a technology, it’s very cool, but you can’t just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think all information will be free,” she said. “There will be racists, and people will shoot each other. This is going to be the total package. ”
Mr. Kauffman said LBRY was prepared for these situations. Although anyone can set up an account and register content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot remove – similar to the way someone can create an email address and send emails, most people will have access to videos get via a website on top. . This enables LBRY to apply moderation policies, just as Google can filter spam and illegal content in email.
Still, Mr. Kauffman said no one will lose basic access to online conversations.
“I would be proud of almost any kind of marginalized voice that uses it, even if I do not agree with it,” he said.