When Blockchain meets Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become one of the most popular application of the daily life of users in the worldwide. Today the number of Social Media users is about 3 billion, and this trend increases year per year with high impact on the privacy issue. During the last years, decentralization of social services has been considered a big opportunity to overcome the main issues in OSNs. Blockchain technology represents today the most well known decentralized technique, which has been taken into account to develop the new generation of decentralized social platforms. Nevertheless, the real benefit of the introduction of blockchain technology in real social platforms is still unknown. In this paper we propose an overview of the main Blockchain-based Online Social Media platforms. We describe in detail these platforms by highlighting the main features and services they offer, but also the common drawbacks of these platforms. Finally, we propose a new model of Blockchain-based Online Social Network, which takes into account the role of the user as the center of the system, instead of the role of the content as in current proposals. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.