How Blockchain is Key to Eradicating Twitter Bots and Finalising Elon Musk’s $44bn Acquisition

Elon Musk

Elon Musk sent Twitter’s share price spiraling last week when he announced plans to abandon his $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant.

Musk is concerned that Twitter has more bot accounts than it claims and has accused the social media platform of failing to provide up-to-date statistics on fake accounts.

If the deal were to go ahead, Musk would clamp down on bots and false profiles and make users verify their identity. This could be achieved through a blockchain solution like Concordium, which embeds encrypted ID into every on-chain transaction and makes ID credentials available to smart contracts.

Lars Seier Christensen, chairman of the Concordium Foundation and co-founder of Saxo Bank, explains: “Musk’s wish to eliminate bots and false profiles and insist on user verification is very honourable.

The first big SoMe platform to do so will have a major competitive advantage.If you have a fully credible environment, you can begin to develop many commercial applications around it.

“What went wrong for Facebook and the Libra project was the regulators’ justified concern that they would control the world’s biggest marketplace completely and that, as of yet, they haven’t proved their ability and real desire to manage the many issues they have – around security, fake profiles, scams etc.

The solution to this is separating the SoMe activity and the commercial activity Infrastructure. The “Libra” part should be provided by an independent third party, suited for ID and with a scalable Infrastructure supporting an independent token.

“This would still enable Twitter to make very good commercial results from facilitating business projects and assisting them by developing many supporting tools for setting up the right businesses in a controlled environment. The combination of Twitter and Concordium would be ideal for such a project. Thousands, even millions, of projects would see the benefit of this.

“I believe Facebook’s idea was spot on. The access to huge numbers of customers for online businesses is extremely valuable and could have made Facebook the most valuable company on the planet. But if they can control all aspects of what would be, in effect, a monopoly, it will not fly.

“A well designed partnership between the SoMe platform and an external Provider for ID and economics would be less controversial but could still make the SoMe platform extremely valuable because of the ownership of the users.”

African Eye Report

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