Crypto and Twitter: A Toxic Combination, a Troubling Future

It got me thinking about how financial self-interest, which has always skewed people's perceptions of the media they consume, is being taken to a new level when crypto tokens are involved.

The second is that social media is now the primary means by which market-relevant information is distributed.

Social media, for better or worse, is essentially anarchy.

Combine these two and you end up with something worse than the troll armies that already cause such public angst around social media.

Bailey Reutzel's great little survey of some classic spam bot moments in "Crypto Twitter" shows how distorting the combination of crypto and social media can be.

Just as ICOs have shown how access to capital might be democratized, one could argue that social media has also created a potentially more democratized model of access to publishing systems.

Worse, there's a broken feedback loop in which metrics such as the market cap of a token or the followership of a social media account reinforce and confirm people's biases.

Any functioning society maintains a vigorous critique of media organizations.

So it's disturbing that we've gone from discovering Facebook's #fakenews problem to the appropriation of that term by those who peddle the view that mainstream media is the main source of disinformation, to the even more extreme scenario in which a market for information is composed of participants with tokens whose value they want to protect.

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