Thiruvananthapuram, Nov 12 : A social media expert, who recently launched a blockchain technology powered, decentralised social networking platform - Freebits.app, said there is a social media censorship crisis across the world. Speaking at an international seminar here on Friday, Shiva Kintali, an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur, said social media platforms controlled by technology companies are becoming spaces of censorship and control. "There is a social media censorship crisis across the world. Journalists, politicians, global leaders, creators and even satire accounts are getting de-platformed. A couple of technology companies are controlling the global social media communications and censoring, shadow banning and de-platforming opinions without any transparency," said Kintali. He said that democracy is impossible without freedom of speech, cross-pollination of ideas and a common understanding of what is true and what is false. "Freebits is a new social networking platform built on blockchain technologies and is a radically new kind of social media, which has built-in support for decentralised identity, Metaverse integration, AI-powered news aggregation, tamper proof photos, videos, credentials and many more," added Kintali, who before launching his own business, was a faculty in the Computer Science department, Princeton University. The event titled 'International Conference on Social Media and Developing Societies' was organised by the Media Studies Department of Christ Nagar College, in association with two other organisations based outside India. Manju Rose Mathews, the head of media studies and organiser of the conference, said the social media in the pandemic and post-pandemic age has diverse issues to be studied by researchers. /IANS