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Facebook on blockchain? A real estate mogul is pouring US$100 million into decentralising social media

  • Frank McCourt, former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is investing in Project Liberty to create the Decentralised Social Networking Protocol
  • The idea, similar to one endorsed by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is to increase social media competition by making it easy for users to hop between services

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Photo of social network homepages on a monitor. Billionaire real estate mogul Frank McCourt is investing in Project Liberty, which aims to put internet users’ social graphs on blockchain, allowing them to easily hop between different social networks. Photo: Shutterstock
Bloomberg

Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring US$100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media. The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps. 

The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies – and specifically Facebook Inc – have amassed over the last decade. “I never thought I would be questioning the security of our underlying systems, namely democracy and capitalism,” McCourt said. “We live under constant surveillance, and what’s happening with this massive accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, that’s incredibly destabilising. It threatens capitalism because capitalism needs to have some form of fairness in it in order to survive.”
McCourt is hardly the only one to feel this way. Others are trying to reform social media by passing new laws or regulations, waiting for the next generation of start-ups to disrupt the current incumbents, or pressuring Facebook to look inward and revise its business model. McCourt, along with others like Twitter Inc chief executive officer Jack Dorsey, say the solution may be blockchain, the technology underpinning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 

Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralised Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone’s digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they’d have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet. 

Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website. Woodham had been toying with the idea of building something like DSNP, but didn’t imagine anyone would be interested in investing in it. When he mulled the idea over with McCourt, he says, “I just thought we were talking about our daydreams, I didn’t think it was something we’d actually do.”

Instead, McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put US$75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his US$100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilise the DSNP. McCourt calls this his third attempt to fix social media, after previously investing in tech companies he thought would help transform the way people interact online. His previous attempts convinced him that entrepreneurs must be supported by academic thinkers exploring the industry’s biggest ethical questions.

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The blockchain protocol idea echoes a project Dorsey has been pushing at Twitter called Bluesky. Dorsey has been at the centre of the fight over how companies like his should police their users. He said after Twitter banned former president Donald Trump that a blockchain-based social graph would reduce the stakes when private companies make user decisions. “The reason I have so much passion for bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity,” Dorsey tweeted on Jan. 13. “This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be.”
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