Despite being beneficial, social media platforms experience many cyberattacks regularly. When it comes to data protection and privacy, blockchain technology is rapidly expanding to provide better security on these social media platforms.

There are over 3.6 billion social media users in the world and the number is likely to increase to 4.41 billion by 2025. Social media platforms initially started as a means of establishing and nurturing personal connections. With time, these platforms evolved to become powerful marketing tools, allowing companies to reach larger audiences, drive traffic to their websites, and increasing brand recall.

What is blockchain?

A blockchain is a decentralized database or public ledger consisting of all transactions that have taken place among participating parties. Blockchain uses a group of participants to verify each transaction in the database or public ledger.

When it comes to social media, blockchain does not put verification responsibilities on a single entity. Instead, a group of entities verifies and maintains the collection of databases and records.

How blockchain can transform social media?

Incorporating blockchain technology in social media platforms can be extremely beneficial from a security standpoint.

Some of the benefits that social media platforms can reap from including blockchain technology include:

Authentication

A lot of active social media users turn to social media platforms for news. According to research, nearly 52% of Americans prefer to get news from a digital platform. However, social media platforms also have thousands of fake accounts that propagate fake news.

The use of blockchain technology in social media platforms can prevent the transmission of fake news and propaganda by using a blockchain distributed ledger system.

Defense system

The use of blockchain technology decentralizes the entire social media network. Decentralization makes it extremely difficult for cybercriminals to hack into a social media network and then into a user’s account. The reason is that data is distributed all over the network and stored in multiple systems. Since there is no single point of attack, blockchain technology offers a robust defense system.

Secured transactions

54% of people use social media platforms to research products. By using blockchain technology, these platforms can be converted into online market portals. People would be able to use cryptocurrency to buy or sell on these platforms as blockchain ensures that the transactions are secured.

Earlier, blockchain was synonymous with cryptocurrency. Increasing research in the field of blockchain has started revealing its benefits for other industries as well. The use of blockchain technology is all set to revolutionize social media in the coming years.