VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)

ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

Social Media Using Blockchain

Akash Tripathi1, Riddhi Kadam2, Reethik Thota3, Shoeb Shaikh4
1
(Electronics & Telecommunication, Viva Institute of Technology / Mumbai University, India)
2
(Electronics & Telecommunication, Viva Institute of Technology / Mumbai University, India)
3
(Electronics & Telecommunication, Viva Institute of Technology / Mumbai University, India)
4
(Electronics & Telecommunication, Viva Institute of Technology / Mumbai University, India)

Abstract: The use of social media applications is increasing day in and day out, the most common issue with
this is data privacy and security for the users. The current Centralized social media apps commodify users
personal information for numerous uses, such as targeting ad’s, etc. Hence there arises a need for a Decentralised
Social Media app which will be designed by keeping the User as the central entity. Blockchain technology is the
most reliable solution now for this purpose. We aim to create a Decentralized Social Media App which will allow
the user to have full control over their data, and ensure high security for their personal information. It will also
provide its users free will to express themselves, without any central authority controlling their actions.
Keywords - blockchain, decentralization, network, privacy, security, social media.

I. INTRODUCTION
Social media is now a representation of social beings. According to research, Indians spend about
minimum 2 hours on social media every day. In India, the number of social media users has been growing currently
(i.e., in the year 2021) at a steady rate of 448 million due to deep penetration of internet connectivity among
people. The range of Internet users in India is 624 million that is around 45% of the total population of India.
Whatsapp, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the most widely used social media applications. In
India, YouTube has been the most used social media platform in 2021 having 85.80% of the social media users,
whereas 79% of the users in India have profiles on Facebook making it the second most popular platform.
Instagram has 70.6% of social media users in India. The most popular messenger app in India is WhatsApp,
having 79% of India's total users, followed by Facebook Messenger which has 62%. All these have one point of
commonality - “Centralization”. Centralized Applications are run by a central authority, the ones who have direct
access to our personal information and can control our actions on this network. So, to tackle this we have
Decentralization [3].
“Decentralization” is termed when there is no central authority controlling anybody's action. We do have
such systems available in the world currently, unfortunately it's worth isn't known to all [4]. There are various
components of a decentralized social network that sets it apart from a regular social network site. The first key
difference is that it isn’t a standalone application / website that you can access - it is a combination of various
different communities who each own an instance of the code. Secondly, anonymity depends on the user's
preference [5][6]. For example - you can connect with users on other networks or even cross-platforms. You get
a few common features on any existing social media platforms such as post content, share it with others,
collaborate, comment, use hashtags, and like / dislike [7]. But their UI is not as intuitive compared to the
centralized platforms. It is not as user-friendly as compared to its centralized versions. Their major USPs are -
privacy, freedom of speech, and decentralization [8]. The stand out feature is that they allow users to monetize
and earn incentives equivalent to crypto-currencies. There is a decentralized alternative for each of the big tech
centralized platforms available today. Facebook — Minds, Diaspora, MeWe; YouTube — Minds, DTube;
Instagram — Karma; WhatsApp — Signal, Twitter — Mastodon. There arises a need for a unique ecosystem that
attracts users and the profits to its businesses. There are many decentralized social networking sites joining this
ecosystem such as Mastodon, Minds, Happening among several others [9]. While they are still in the research
phase of the decentralized tech community, for us this is a significant step in the right direction.

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VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)
ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

II. RELATED WORK

Following is the literature survey undertaken on the research papers available:

2.2.1: Blockchain in Social Networking

In this paper we analyzed that Blockchain with reference to Social Networking will combine the benefits of OSN
with central servers and DOSN. Data in this case is saved in a distributed format. Although the customers need to
ask for permission to view anything. The profiles are encrypted and saved in the blockchain therefore secure. It
has separate storage and control services. This paper concludes that a fast boom in the utilization of social
networks affects the production of the potential infrastructure which assures higher privacy and a potential method
to perform more actions with smart contracts and apps [10].

2.2.2: all.me
That's all. me is a virtual ecosystem primarily based totally on a social community with a completely unique
reward method, market and a payment solution. A partner relationship is maintained to set up sharing of
advertising revenue. The community rewards customers through sharing part of advertising revenue and in doing
so indicates appreciation to folks that actively use all.me. Users can earn as much as 50% of advertising revenue
[11]. The platform no longer pressures customers to carry out marketing-associated activities (viewing ads,
clicking on advert links, etc.) and advertising on all.me complies with the widely-generic advert standards for
social channels. At the same time, customers are rewarded for his or her social pastime and popularity within the
platform. The more humans use all.me, the greater interactions and transactions are made with ME. This
contributes to the market value of the currency. To conclude, all.me creates a new economic system primarily
based totally on financial technology, that's a ready-made and working infrastructure that lures the customers and
simplifies their everyday lifestyles in multiple clicks.

2.2.3: Blockchain Based Decentralized Online Social Network

In this paper, they have designed a blockchain-based framework for decentralized OSN termed BCOSN.
Combining smart contracts, they have taken the blockchain as a trusted server to implement the functionalities
which might have once been provided through central servers in conventional OSNs. Compared to the prevailing
DOSNs, the BCOSN can offer efficient, secure and privacy-aware functionalities of authentication, newsfeed
notification, and friend recommendation. Meanwhile, they have also provided users with fine-grained encryption
to protect data privacy. A collection of algorithms has been designed primarily based totally on smart contracts to
assemble a concrete scheme beneath the framework of the BCOSN [12].

2.2.4: Ushare
A conceptual answer for developing a user centric social community that might permit customers to manage, trace
and securely share content material was offered in this paper. It has been argued that the decentralization,
anonymity, traceability and censorship resistance of blockchains may want to help this sort of platform. Ushare,
the proposed platform might permit those and greater. It might also help offsite encryption of data and ways to
share them via the blockchain. The functionalities might be brought via 4 middle components: the blockchain
that might maintain file of ownership of facts objects and wide variety of stocks made, a relationship device that
might permit programmable code to be carried out at the blockchain and manage the wide variety of allowed
shares for a data item, a hash desk that shops encrypted facts that person stocks and, finally, a local personal
certificates authority that manages a person’s circles, encryption keys and controls access to content material [13].

2.2.5: When Blockchain meets Online Social Network

Blockchain era is taken into consideration as one of the most important disruptive technologies of the millennium.
Several fields have attempted to apply it through exploiting its intrinsic characteristics. In this paper, they proposed
a survey of Blockchain based Online social media, through explaining the most important traits of each technical
and social, and we defined the contemporary systems. They listed numerous contemporary issues of those systems
and additionally proposed an answer that's a probable new version which faces the issues indexed above regarding
using the blockchain. They defined how the proposed version represents an extension of the Decentralized Online
Social Networks and the Blockchain, as a device to control access management. They are reading the proposed
version, for you to compare the impact of privacy policies on social media. They plan to assess numerous privacy
rules approaches, and plan to analyze greater in element contemporary BOSNs, consisting of Steemit, through
retrieving facts from the blockchain for you to compare how the social activities of BOSN’s users are a long way
from the contemporary OSN one [14].

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VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)
ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

2.2.6: A Case Study of Steemit

In this paper, they offered an empirical evaluation of Steemit, a blockchain-primarily based totally incentivized
social media platform in which no single entity can take control of the information and users are rewarded for the
contributions they make. They analyzed over 539 million operations performed through 1.12 million customers
all through the duration 2016/03 to 2018/08. The effects confirmed thrilling details about core functions of
Steemit, specifically its decentralized control and its reward system. This study on decentralization in Steemit
indicates the real stage of decentralization in Steemit is far lower than the proper stage, indicating that DPoS
consensus protocol might not be a desirable method for organizing a highly decentralized social media platform.
In Steemit, customers can create and percentage contents as blog posts. Once posted, a blog can get replied,
reposted or voted through different users. Depending on the weight of acquired votes, posts get ranked and the
top ranked posts make it to the front page. All data generated through Steemit users are saved in the Steem-
blockchain. Similar to different blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum, facts saved in the Steem-blockchain are
publicly available and it's far more difficult to be manipulated. At the center of Steemit are its decentralization
and its cryptocurrency-pushed reward system used for rewarding the content creators and curators [15].

III. METHODOLOGY

The first stage of our project is creating a mobile application.

The second stage is creating a database which will store data locally.
The third stage is to integrate an active learning model.
The fourth stage is to integrate the api for blockchain and file sharing.

Fig 1: Flowchart of Social Media Application

The following is the process that will be followed for integrating an active learning model that will
handle the deployment of the application after updates on the basis of consensus.

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VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)
ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

Fig 2: Flowchart on how Active Learning model works

Model based on Active learning:

Active learning is a technique used for prioritizing data which is to be labeled in so as to have the best
possible outcome on training a supervised model. In our application Active learning is used as the amount of data
is simply too huge to be labeled and a few precedence desires are to be made to label the data in a clever way. The
data points that have been selected for labeling and training a model are optimized using active learning. After
feeding some manually labeled data the model will train itself on it. Once the best technique has been selected to
prioritize the labeling, this process may be iteratively repeated. A new model can be trained on the newly labeled
data set, which has been based on the priority score. The model will be further deployed on the basis of consensus
from the users.

IV. RESULTS & DISCUSSION

(a) (b) (c)

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VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)
ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

(d) (e) (f)

Fig 3: App comprises above screens : (a) Landing Screen ; (b) Login Page ; (c) Home
Screen ; (d) Conversation Page ; (e) Profile Page; (f) Feed.

The name of our application is “Social App”. The person will first of all need to sign on and upload
his/her very own info and all this info will be saved in a database locally. Since there's no unique host of that
server, there will be no case of centralization. The consumer thereafter can log in if he/she has already registered.
The Home Screen of the app has the feed wherein the user is updated about the latest posts of friends and those
they follow; they could like and comment on the posts as well. Home Screen also includes a chat segment wherein
the customers may have a one-on-one communication with anyone. With the help of the search segment provided
in our app they could search numerous different users and build their connections. In the Profile segment the
customers can get a summarized view of the posts, followers, and following.

V. CONCLUSION
We see conventional social media growing because of the heightened advertising and experience it
provides to its customers. However, on the other side, there are growing concerns over the facts and privacy
breaches to which those platforms are regularly associated. For such issues the most ideal approach would be
Blockchain based social media, along with its decentralized and distributed networks. Among different things,
they allow customers to claim more control over their data. Moreover, in the absence of any centralized authority,
users have the privilege of accessing privacy. In turn, this upholds the liberty of speech and expression, relieving
customers of the misery of being prosecuted for his or her thoughts on social media. Our decentralized social
media platform will offer the customers safety of their data by keeping the customers on the center, offering a
platform wherein they could express freely and put-up numerous contents of numerous sorts and additionally
allow the customers to earn cryptocurrencies upon posting and interacting. However, in spite of the various
advantages, such uncensored platforms are rife with possibilities for criminal activities, which undermine the
motive of ensuring freedom. That said, policies can also additionally be vital to make sure that decentralized
blockchain social media’s beliefs are actualized to offer advantages and now no longer harm.
In all, this domain’s potentialities are numerous and with right handling, those can also additionally
remodel the way we engage on the internet.

Acknowledgements

This project would not have been possible without the kind support and help of many individuals and organizations. I would like to extend
my sincere thanks to all of them. I am highly indebted to the EXTC department for their guidance and constant supervision as well as for
providing necessary information regarding the project and also for their kind cooperation, encouragement and support which has helped us in
completion of this project. Our thanks and appreciation also goes to my colleague in developing the project and people who have willingly
helped me out with their abilities.

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VIVA-Tech International Journal for Research and Innovation Volume 1, Issue 5 (2022)
ISSN(Online): 2581-7280
VIVA Institute of Technology
10th National Conference on Role of Engineers in Nation Building – 2022 (NCRENB-2022)

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