Can IPFS Bring An End to the Facebook Era?

Many against freedom of speech ran to twitter to celebrate Alex Jones being terminated from major social media platforms earlier this week. But I am not celebrating, as I see it as a loss for our personal freedoms. Dirty games being played by the centralized big tech companies often entail large amounts of money being pumped into the political system. Making for a vicious cycle that can spiral Internet censorship out of control if not checked.

Source: NASA

Companies and governments utilizing different propaganda tactics can often shape the public consciousness into believing things that are not based within reality. If a whole group of people have their claims dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" while at the same time not allowing anyone else to have the ability to debunk them, who is to say what is a conspiracy and what isn't? In the current age of social media, it is common for YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to censor even run of the mill everyday people.

You can test this for yourself by posting something hateful or even by misspelling one word. Facebook disabled many accounts for that simple action. Another concern I have with that practice is humans are not even being involved with the overseeing of the review process. Many cases of censorship happen for no other reason than Facebook's bot misunderstanding a word. This makes for a dangerous combination of censorship and a fear of speaking up in lieu of being banned.

One of the best example that I can think of is Facebook banning mechanics for using the word trans to describe transmissions. Trans can trigger as an unacceptable word to Facebook's machine learning programs. Using this word in reference to a transmission caused many accounts to be suspended and some even deleted. Making it clear to users that it really does not matter what the original content or meaning was.

Revolutionary technologies like IPFS aim to solve many problems we are facing now with online censorship. IPFS stands for Interplanetary File System. IPFS is Utilizing a special database called the IPFS Dag. In laments terms, IPFS is similar to a secure distributed database. Because of the nature of peer to peer technology, IPFS can be more efficient than the usual way big tech does things. As it combines file sharing with using a secure database similar to a Blockchain's.

IPFS when fully implemented into the end-user applications will provide many features that will prove to be an unlikely feat for the traditional big tech companies to solve. One of those being the ability to host files for one's own neighbor down the street. In theory users could even make money for hosting files in this way. The limits for decentralized networks like IPFS and Steem are truly endless. Internet Pioneer Vint Cerf stated back in 2007 at a Google conference that he thought peer-to-peer technology would be future of Internet communications.

Technologies like IPFS have the potential to grow quickly as both speed and reliability can improve as time goes on. Hopefully making Facebook less relevant in the future and the business less profitable. In my opinion, IPFS based solutions are one of the prime candidates to pull people away from Zuckerburg's centralized ring of control.