By Sandra Quinn
On March 21, twelve years ago, Twitter first entered the realm of social media, revolutionising the way people communicated with each other, and achieving this with a mere 140 characters per post.
Did you know that approximately 500 million tweets are sent out into the abyss every 24 hours?
Another random, yet interesting Twitter fact, is that the hashtag was not invented by Twitter, it had been in use from the late 80’s when internet chat rooms were rife, but it really came into its own on Twitter #twitterrant #strangefact #didyouknow.
Nowadays, with people spending an average of nine hours a day on social media, Twitter has earned an important place in our lives.
Many of us refer to that little blue bird icon to find out news of the world, share a witty comment or to find other like-minded people with which to share an observational quip.
However, Twitter isn’t all roses and laughter – there are scams out there and people who want to take your money and cause you to fall into a pit of despair for being caught out by one of these internet tricksters.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey in an address to congress at the beginning of September revealed that the company are looking into how to use blockchain for the greater good of the social media platform.
He brought up the topic in response to being asked about privacy protections, misinformation, content moderation and alleged bias against political conservatives on the platform by Doris Matsui.
“First and foremost, we need to start with the problems that we’re trying to solve and the problems we’re solving for our customers and look at all available technology in order to understand if it could help us accelerate or make these outcomes much better.
“Blockchain is one that I think has a lot of untapped potential, specifically around distributed trust and distributed enforcement potentially,” Jack Dorsey replied.
Twitter users have been affected by scams with some being defrauded out of their cryptocurrency holdings, when they were scammed into sending coins to a con artist, while others have been the victims of identity theft.
Twitter also admitted earlier this year that 5% of all Twitter accounts are spam related and according to information from crytposlate.com, to date more than $5 million has been sent to cryptocurrency wallet addresses linked to Twitter scams.
Twitter have yet to make an official announcement in relation to incorporating the use of blockchain technology into the company’s daily operations, but doing so could hold significant advantages for their users and their protection.