Decentralized Technology Can Assist In Protecting Democracy
Recent political incidents in the United States have illustrated the critical problems which were posed to democracy as a result of centralized technology platforms. For example, centralized platforms were used by the political as well as social leaders to amplify false agendas like White nationalism, to promote violence. Proud boys planned social events by using decentralized social media platforms. These events have eventually resulted in producing fear in the minds that decentralized or peer to peer technology will become a more powerful source for domestic terrorists; in reality, that is just one side of the coin, but on the other side of the coin, there is a fact that the use of decentralized technology can keep us away from the centralized platforms while ultimately protecting the democratic framework.
There is a point to be noticed that, unlike the other centralized platforms, the peer-to-peer technology does not target the whole audience with a particular purpose by providing them specific content of their interest. It can provide us a safer way to control the social impact of technology on the public. This is not much different from the conventional way of sharing a message by phone calls, emails, and speeches.
A decentralized framework can provide a better alternative to centralized technology platforms because its inductive stimulant is different. If you design a private application with a decentralized framework, it will be difficult for the designer to compile more data in the limited resources. Also, he cannot send the information quickly to more people. The reason is that, in the peer-to-peer design, outreach is very limited.
The decentralized platforms cannot replace the centralized ones completely; therefore, in order to encounter the false content, there is a need to regulate the centralized platforms accordingly. However, democracy can be protected by the fact that there is a very limited chance for mass sharing by the decentralized systems because the outreach to the target audience has been removed to prevent the spread of harmful content in this case. The difference between centralized and peer-to-peer platforms can be summarized in one line as; it’s illegal to yell `fire` in the public if there isn’t, but it’s not illegal to secretly lie to the neighbor that there is fire.