Can Web3 Help Social Media Win The War Against Bot Accounts?

Traditional social media is waging a never-ending war against so-called “bots,” or fake accounts that can cause havoc with advertising campaigns and the spread of misinformation. The fact that Web2 social media platforms have failed to win this war leads many to conclude they never will, and that could ultimately play into the hands of next-gen Web3 alternatives, such as Phaver. 

Social media’s bot problem has been highlighted multiple times, and it isn’t going away. For instance, Facebook reportedly shut down around 1.3 billion fake accounts over a six-month period from late 207 to early 2018, a huge number. But while that may seem encouraging, a 2019 study by NATO’s Strategic Communication Centre of Excellence found that 95% of reported bot accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube remained active three weeks after the platforms in question were notified. 

More recently, Instagram revealed that it took down 95 million fake accounts in a single quarterback in 2021, while Twitter shut down 20 million at around the same time. TikTok has also admitted a growing bot account problem, with a 2023 report indicating it deactivated 54.4 million fake users between October and December 2022, up from just 6 million in the same period a year earlier. And Facebook still continues to battle the bots, most recently deleting over 690 million of them in the fourth quarter of 2023. 

Bot accounts need to be taken down because they’re one of the main sources of fake news on the web today. Last September, the Guardian reported that 1,305 bot accounts were discovered on X, formerly Twitter, that were engaged in the spread of disinformation during a key debate among Republican presidential candidates.

They also cause massive headaches for advertisers. Data from Statista shows that as much as 47% of the internet’s total traffic in 2021 was generated by bots, with 30% of them identified as being malicious. One of the prime purposes of these bot accounts is to click on ads on websites owned by the creators of those bots to generate advertising revenues.

Superior Verification 

Web3 social media platforms have been touted as potential rivals to the traditional social media giants for a good couple of years now due to their decentralization, which means they’re owned by their users rather than the platforms themselves. The primary advantages of Web3 are cited as greater privacy and user control over their data, but that’s not all. 

One differentiating factor is that Web3 social platforms can make use of newfangled identity tools to verify that user accounts are real and not generated by malicious actors. 

Leading the charge here is Phaver, which has built a gamified verification system based on the idea of reputation. The way it works can be likened to loyalty programs offered by brands, with users required to complete various tasks and slowly earn points, known as “Creds.”

These Creds later become the basis of each user’s reputation, giving them stronger credentials than users who don’t have any points for their activity on the platform. 

Phaver has instituted a system that rewards positive engagement while penalizing negative actions. So other users can judge them not by the number of followers they have but by their good behavior on the platform. It has also come up with a system to disincentivize abuse, thereby promoting a much healthier network overall. 

As an example, a Phaver user can boost their reputation by linking different NFTs held in different wallets to their profile, as this kind of activity shows there’s likely to be a real human operating that account (though their actual identity remains private). 

Incentivized Engagement 

As users build up their Creds and boost their reputations, they can obtain a number of benefits such as additional “Phaves”, which are a kind of “super-like” that immediately gets noticed by others, or the opportunity to post sponsored content that will be more noticeable by other platform users. External rewards, such as access to airdrops and whitelists, are also offered for positive engagement with the platform. 

In addition, the platform has come up with ways to prevent infiltration by AI-powered bots that might be able to engage with the platform and build up fake reputations. For instance, its Anima “proof-of-personhood” feature stores a novel, privacy-safe facial scan in the user’s wallet. The user simply connects their wallet, scans their face, and they can claim an NFT to prove their personhood, without revealing how they look to anyone. 

Phaver’s user base seems to be taken by the idea, with more than $100 million worth of NFTs held in over 100,000 wallets currently linked to its profiles. Among profiles with higher reputations, it boasts a 99.99% uniqueness rate, which is strong evidence of the legitimacy of its most active users. 

Phaver plans to improve on its existing reputation system with the support of decentralized social graphs such as FarCaster and CyberConnect while expanding its Creds system to cover more engagement metrics. Its vision extends to the forthcoming launch of NFT-gated topics, where only users who hold a certain kind of NFT will be permitted to engage, further cementing trust in those exclusive environments. To drum up interest in its platform, it recently announced Season 1 of a new airdrop campaign that will see 3% of the total supply of its native $SOCIAL token distributed to early adopters.

Web3 Builds Trust & Credibility

The inability of existing social media platforms underscores the inadequacy of Web2’s outdated, centralized architecture, which makes it very challenging for companies to properly combat bots and fake users. Web3, on the other hand, is uniquely able to leverage its decentralized roots to root them out.  

The mission of Web3 social platforms like Phaver is to build an environment for engagement and interaction that’s based on the principles of trust and credibility, free from the manipulation and fraud perpetrated by automated bots. In this way, they are laying the foundation for a more authentic and genuine social media experience that will benefit everyone who participates