{"id":70332,"date":"2021-06-23T14:42:01","date_gmt":"2021-06-23T18:42:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=70332"},"modified":"2021-06-23T14:44:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-23T18:44:37","slug":"oh-really-this-billionaire-is-giving-75-million-to-a-georgetown-institute-to-rebuild-the-foundations-of-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=70332","title":{"rendered":"Oh, really, this billionaire is giving $75 million to a Georgetown Institute to rebuild the foundations of social media?!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Frank McCourt (Patrick Aventurier\/Abaca\/Sipa via AP)<\/p><\/div>\n

Ex-LA Dodgers Owner Pledges $100 Million to Reduce Power of Facebook<\/h1>\n

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Frank McCourt (Patrick Aventurier\/Abaca\/Sipa via AP)<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

NEWSMAX<\/p>\n

Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media.<\/p>\n

The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people\u2019s social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.<\/p>\n

The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies \u2014 and specifically Facebook Inc. \u2014 have amassed over the last decade. \u201cI never thought I would be questioning the security of our underlying systems, namely democracy and capitalism,\u201d McCourt said. \u201cWe live under constant surveillance, and what\u2019s happening with this massive accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, that\u2019s incredibly destabilizing. It threatens capitalism because capitalism needs to have some form of fairness in it in order to survive.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCourt is hardly the only one to feel this way. Others are trying to reform social media by passing new laws or regulations, waiting for the next generation of startups to disrupt the current incumbents, or pressuring Facebook to look inward and revise its business model. McCourt, along with others like Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, say the solution may be blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.<\/p>\n

Project Liberty would use blockchain\u00a0to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone\u2019s digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they\u2019d have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.<\/p>\n

Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website. Woodham had been toying with the idea of building something like DSNP, but didn\u2019t imagine anyone would be interested in investing in it. When he mulled the idea over with McCourt, he says, \u201cI just thought we were talking about our daydreams, I didn\u2019t think it was something we\u2019d actually do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an\u00a0institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward\u00a0pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP.\u00a0McCourt calls this his third attempt to fix social media, after previously investing in tech companies he thought would help transform the way people interact online. His previous attempts convinced him that entrepreneurs must\u00a0be supported by academic thinkers exploring the industry\u2019s biggest ethical questions.<\/p>\n

The blockchain protocol idea echoes a project Dorsey has been pushing at Twitter called Bluesky. Dorsey has been at the center of the fight over how companies like his should police their users. He said after Twitter banned former President Donald Trump that a blockchain-based social graph would reduce the stakes when\u00a0private companies make user decisions.\u00a0\u201cThe reason I have so much passion for Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity,\u201d Dorsey tweeted on Jan. 13. \u201cThis is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the power of social media companies makes many people uneasy, critics also accuse them of not wielding their power effectively, allowing for abusive behavior.\u00a0A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation,\u00a0by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever.<\/p>\n

Before Project Liberty grapples with such problems it has to worry about attracting enough people to matter. The current way of doing things is deeply entrenched, and Project Liberty is proposing that the entire internet start doing things drastically differently.\u00a0 Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an \u201copen, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information.\u201dMcCourt also believes that recent history has underscored the disfunction of the current system, punctuated by the misinformation-fueled riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. What do social media users really have to lose? \u201cLook at the cesspool that\u2019s been created,\u201d he said. \u201cLook at the reality that the internet has become.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Copyright 2021 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n

___
\nhttps:\/\/www.newsmax.com\/finance\/streettalk\/facebook-frank-mccourt-internet\/2021\/06\/21\/id\/1025798\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ex-LA Dodgers Owner Pledges $100 Million to Reduce Power of Facebook<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70332"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70332\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}