Social media has a large global user base that spans various age groups, socioeconomic status, religion, ethnicity, and other factors.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Whatsapp, and others not mentioned in this article have replaced newspapers, television, and postal services as the primary means of communication for the majority of people.

Without a doubt, this media has served as a trustworthy and practical tool for communication, information dissemination, etc. It has also become more popular in education, where the majority of e-learning websites now have social media accounts set up specifically for educational purposes. Security and medicine have followed suit.

However, certain activities and practises of social media users have raised concerns. I understand that we live in a modern era marked by rapid technological advancement and improvement, but should we become technological slaves? It is fine to own a technology; however, being owned by technology is problematic.

Many users are being controlled by social media through overuse and addiction.

The majority of people have abandoned television news, postal services, radio broadcasting, and newspapers in favour of social media. They believe that they can always find information and news on social media. This misconception has given social media more access and power in that it now regulates the type of news, time of availability, originality, and what they say, see, or hear. This encourages censorship. The news presented on social media platforms may be tainted, manipulated, fabricated, or engineered to serve management interests rather than the interests of the masses. As a result, there is a lack of freedom of expression and fake news/reports.

On Facebook, for example, it is very easy to come across many untrue stories and unpleasant events that are considered fake. This scenario occurred once in 2018, when I was present at the scene of an event, with a good view and ideas of what had occurred during the day’s events. I was astounded to my bones when I watched media coverage of the same event and discovered that many scenes and pictures reported were false and biased. Also the dependency and addition on these web2 platforms have led to data leakage and privacy issues. The most recent data leakage on social media was on the 3rd of April, 2022 after 533 million Facebook users in 106 countries got their personal data leaked and published for free online by hackers. Having this information leaked isn’t very surprising to me, but what I am concerned about here is that; how did they have hold of these data if not due to the incompetence of these web2 platforms. This could be connected to the high level of dependency and trust on social media that users would feel very comfortable uploading a full life’s history of theirs on the social media.

The solution to these seemingly endless challenges is to embrace the new generation of web; web3, which is decentralised and allows users control over their activities and data.

Solcial emerges from this, acting as a mediator and initiator of web3 functionalities and power to users. This is demonstrated by its ability to limit censorship, promote moderation, and promote free speech.