Socialization and Decentralization: Insights After Trump's Account Was Banned

The election has settled in the past few days, but just over ten days ago, the collective banning of Trump's social media accounts by American internet platforms was still fresh in memory.

It's hard to imagine that this is a measure taken by internet platforms against a sitting U.S. president. Although Twitter CEO Jack posted to explain that their actions were justified, these actions have also sparked renewed attention to the power of internet companies. Where should their authority lie?

Since the event has already occurred, the potential impacts that may arise afterward are even more important. We also chatted with Suji, the founder of Mask Network, about how this situation might evolve.

Here’s a brief introduction to Mask Network. When we first got to know them, they aimed to protect internet users' privacy, data, and sovereignty under the shadow of social network giants. Later, they evolved into a bridge connecting Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, helping users better access a more open internet.

If you want to learn more about Mask Network, you can check out our previous interview with them: “Data Belongs to the People,” and “Mask Network Interview: Letting More People Experience a More Open Internet.”

Here are the main points of the conversation:

X-Order: Recently, regarding the banning of Trump's account, this matter is essentially related to the philosophy that Mask Network advocates. I’d like to know your views on this issue. Of course, I’m also very interested in your latest developments.

Suji: Our main business is something that everyone understands. We have previously collaborated with some great projects, and Twitter has also been in touch with us.

However, back in 2019, Twitter planned to form the Bluesky team to establish a decentralized network community. Many executives and important employees at Twitter joined this initiative.

But unexpectedly, Twitter directly banned Trump's account this time. My understanding is that they might not have been able to withstand the pressure from the authorities; they did what they were told. The ban was quite coordinated, with many social networks like Twitter and Facebook acting together. Perhaps because Trump himself particularly liked using Twitter, it made him the most prominent target, and the stock price also dropped significantly.

I honestly didn't expect that our offhand comments would come true. Many investors previously asked us what we would do if Twitter banned Mask Network. I jokingly said that Twitter might first ban the account of the U.S. president, and it turned out to be prophetic. However, upon closer examination, this situation might actually be a good thing for decentralized social platforms like ours.

In the past, many media and promotional organizations didn't care about decentralized technology. They believed that even if Twitter or Facebook banned their accounts, they could simply register a new account or even create their own social network. However, this time, the social network Parler, established by Trump's supporters, was directly taken down by AWS, which is equivalent to having the server unplugged. For them, this was a significant shock.

Friends who have been following Arweave may have noticed that AR has recently surged again, which is based on the same reason. Arweave is a decentralized storage project and is also a great partner of ours. The decentralized file sharing and storage on Mask products is done in collaboration with Arweave. Using this feature allows users to share more content on social platforms like Twitter or Facebook, but unlike directly sharing content on Twitter, these files are permanently stored in a decentralized manner on Arweave, so even after an account is banned, you can still find the previous content.

In addition, we also observed another incident where a well-known piracy academic paper site, Sci-hub, was banned by Twitter. This site has actually helped many researchers. But now that it has been banned, aside from Twitter itself, no one has a backup of this site. This means that once the posts are deleted, they will never be seen again.

Therefore, we previously thought of a feature where users can not only use Mask to view Twitter and send encrypted content, but also permanently save it. This way, even if others delete your posts, you can restore them in the original place, which is what we refer to as defending your data sovereignty. Implementing this feature requires linking different decentralized storage networks. Mask Network has already partnered with Arweave, Sia, and Filecoin to provide different options, allowing users to choose the network they trust.

In the long run, this feature can help users access a lot of historical information. For example, if I want to see posts from someone ten or twenty years ago, I can use this feature to achieve that.

This time, it’s not just social accounts that have been banned; we also noticed that Trump was denied service by some banks, which has made personal asset security a concern. Currently, Mask Network is embedding more stablecoins deeper into social networks, hoping to protect users comprehensively, whether it’s privacy, data, or personal assets. Recently, we have collaborated with Loopring on this front.

Additionally, in October last year, we co-hosted the 2020 Fifth Annual Conference on Network Society "Practicing the Wisdom of the Web" with the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. This conference invited many people, including author Glen Weyl, Vitalik, GUN founder Mark Nadal, and NYM founder Harry Halpin. Harry was originally a professor and had a good relationship with the World Wide Web Foundation. Recently, he suddenly announced that he would join Bluesky, which surprised us all.

The recent large-scale recruitment by Bluesky may be a sign that the internal team believes that being forced by the authorities to delete and ban some accounts is not a good thing. Therefore, they hope Bluesky will give them more power and accelerate the project’s progress. In fact, Bluesky has been established for nearly two years but has not been very active until recently when they started recruiting some impressive people.

In the past, people may have thought of Bitcoin as Open Money and Ethereum as programmable Open Money, with Open Finance built on top of it. But now it must evolve into Open Web or Open Data. A significant reason for this is that the evolution speed of our decentralized industry has not been fast enough. Relying solely on Stable Coins and DeFi is not enough; many U.S. money fund managers have already understood these innovations within our circle. Therefore, the entire Web must be decentralized, and the process of decentralization must evolve to encompass the entire Web. This task is quite daunting, but the opportunities are vast, and many companies can showcase their capabilities within it.

Of course, people always ask me a few questions. The first is why users on these social networks don’t move elsewhere? In fact, some people have already started to move. For example, leaders of many small countries are quite savvy; they have opened a channel on Telegram and announced that they will no longer update Twitter.

Another question is why Twitter or Facebook don’t decentralize themselves? We all know that Facebook previously wanted to create Libra, but later changed its name and delayed it. Twitter also mentioned wanting to decentralize but can only fund Bluesky now, seeking talented people to help think of solutions. However, I believe these solutions will still be delayed due to government reasons. Right now, only native decentralized solutions like ours are useful.

X-Order: What if Trump uses your Mask Network technology to continue posting on Twitter?

Suji: The results might not be very good for him now. However, we at Mask Network will gradually use decentralized storage entirely. At that time, users might think he is posting on Twitter, but in reality, the data is not on Twitter. This is akin to using Netscape Navigator to surf the internet on a Windows system, but the user's internet experience has nothing to do with Microsoft; it’s just that the entry point to the internet is within the Microsoft system.

In fact, Twitter's deletion of 70,000 accounts has also caused significant harm to themselves, and they must continue to delete. In the short term, Twitter will not feel how severe this damage is. Let me give you an example: the mobile internet has encountered similar situations before, where operators charged extra fees for users chatting on WeChat. However, WeChat was not afraid and directly issued SIM cards to allow users to access the internet and use WeChat.

So even if such restrictions arise in the future, we are not too worried about competition.

X-Order: Have there been any changes in various countries' attitudes toward decentralization?

Suji: It's still quite difficult in the U.S. because people there have a naive idea: can we create a social network that doesn’t allow Trump to use it? I think that’s impossible.

However, many European countries reacted quickly. For instance, German Chancellor Merkel first condemned Trump for supporting violence but then criticized Twitter, saying they shouldn’t delete posts. After that, Merkel proposed using EU Treasury funds to support some decentralized projects, such as Matrix, a peer-to-peer chat protocol, and many other projects.

Over the past two years, Europe has funded many projects, and we have interacted with various European funds. They feel that while encrypting emails is relatively easy to understand, why should we directly compete with Twitter and Facebook? However, now they also feel that banning Trump's account is not a good thing.

This also includes an overall distrust of the U.S. dollar. Some small countries have chosen to directly exchange their dollars for Bitcoin. If I lose trust in the entire U.S. system, I won’t hold dollars or gold; I will hold Bitcoin. If I lose trust in the entire U.S. network system, I should fund more decentralized projects. This is a gradual change that is starting to happen in Europe.

X-Order: Are there any good projects that you think individual investors should pay attention to?

Suji: I believe there will be great opportunities in the decentralized field. As before, I am still very optimistic about Ethereum; I think it has already established its dominant position in the decentralized field.

For example, regarding the recent Twitter account bans, there is a Swarm project in Ethereum that has made a statement. Swarm is similar to a storage protocol on Ethereum, funded by the Ethereum community. The founder has stated several times on Twitter that he does not support Trump, but he thinks banning accounts is problematic. Being able to say such things shows a lot of confidence; it feels like Ethereum itself has evolved.

Ethereum's market value and the distribution of its holders are complex, which is the best thing. In contrast, Bitcoin is relatively pure.

This is also why I think Ethereum has a promising future. Once Layer 2 is launched, users can choose different Layers. For instance, if users find it strange to use a Layer 2 from Europe or another region, they can choose another. Even if they don’t want to use Layer 2 in the future, they can move all their funds back to Layer 1 and switch chains. However, the entire user experience is not affected by any centralized factors.

That's all.

Additionally, on January 22, 2021, the Bluesky team released an important message on Twitter, announcing the release of an assessment report on the decentralized network ecosystem and expressing their hope to find team leaders within a few months.

In this report, Twitter evaluated various known distributed systems and analyzed how these systems handle key elements of social networks.