An Overview on Blockchain-based Social Media

Social Media (SM) platforms allow users to create and share multimedia content characterized by interaction among the users through profile creation, messaging systems, communities, etc. Blockchains can improve the security and ethical aspects of SM due to their innate security characteristics. We overlook countless blockchain-based SM schemes, where we perceive 9 duties of blockchain-based SM abstraction and dissect them intensively, rooted in SM- and blockchain-linked traits in contrast to existing reviews that do not review in broad scope and lack a critical analysis to show ways to focus on practical implementation. We heaped a preparatory sample of 93 works by sieving the studies for leaching rules and delving into E-repositories by employing a mixed-method systematic review with a narrative synthesis and quality assessment approach. Built upon the scrutiny, in blockchain-based SM, blockchain can assist by providing social media platforms (G1), social DApps (G2), copyright protection (G3), harassment prevention (G4), ensuring privacy and security (G5), fake/vicious news prevention (G6), data/user behavior/event processing and analysis (G7), proper incentivization (G8), and user migration (G9). Critical analysis uncovers that from blockchain-based social media, an overall 40% harness 20% from G6 and G7 each, 82.5% harness conventional blockchain, and 22.5% harness DPoS consensus. Next, we critically analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the reviewed works, focusing on performance and characteristics. Furthermore, we identified lack of empirical validation, under-exploration of ethical concerns and biases in detection models, and non-assessment of decentralization risks as gaps in the study. Eventually, we reveal the opportunities and discomforts of the abstraction of blockchain-based SM, state the study’s limitations, and then bestow solutions to resist them with future directions emphasizing practical implications.