Censorship

[theskillzdatklls]

I'm more and more bothered by the centralization of Big Tech and the power of censorship between the private-public partnership between Big Tech and governments.

"They" get to control the narrative so many ways. Blasting you with their message. Shadowbanning users. Banning power users with messages they don't like. Making users self-censor themselves so they don't get strikes or demonetized.

I find all of this to be incredibly bothersome. I want there to be an open platform / open protocol, similar to Bitcoin, but for the spread of information and discourse. Kind of like how the internet used to be pre-2015, give or take. The worst thing, from my perspective, is that I think the trend line for this kind of behavior from these powers that be will only continue to degrade, not remain neutral or improve, making things even worse next year than presently.

Thoughts? Do you like the current level of censorship? Want more? Want less censorship? How would you deal with a censorship-proof protocol? How would this impact politics on a local/global level for better or worse?

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[PrimeNumber7]

The various major social media companies have become a de-facto public square due to the massive amount of public discourse on their platforms, and as such, I believe there to be a strong argument that their censorship is illegal. The Biden administration has previously "reported" certain posts to Facebook whose views they did not agree with, asking Facebook to take down said posts, and if Facebook had complied, such censorship would almost certainly be illegal due to the coordination with the government.

I don't think it is possible to build a social media network that operates in ways similar to bitcoin. The amount of data stored, and transferred in a single day by YouTube is orders of magnitude greater than the total size of bitcoin's blockchain since the geniuses block.

[dbc23]

If the government can't embrace proof-of-work protocol is it censorship-proof protocol that will be much easier to implement? The big Tech guys aren't autonomous , their information and messages aren't self willed they too have regulatory agencies that decides on what information the want the public to have and share.

Building a social network with censorship-proof protocol can be achievable but it might be more expensive than the proof of work algorithm.

[theskillzdatklls]

The various major social media companies have become a de-facto public square due to the massive amount of public discourse on their platforms, and as such, I believe there to be a strong argument that their censorship is illegal. The Biden administration has previously "reported" certain posts to Facebook whose views they did not agree with, asking Facebook to take down said posts, and if Facebook had complied, such censorship would almost certainly be illegal due to the coordination with the government.

I don't think it is possible to build a social media network that operates in ways similar to bitcoin. The amount of data stored, and transferred in a single day by YouTube is orders of magnitude greater than the total size of bitcoin's blockchain since the geniuses block.

I agree completely with the public square comment. At some point, when a platform has more than 100M users, getting deplatformed from these things stops becoming a private company making a choice but banning a user from self-expression / freedom of speech.

If a platform or venue is "small", as in under 10M users, I'm much more sympathetic to a platform doing whatever it wants for censorship to curate things how they want to curate things.

I disagree that a censorship proof protocol is impossible. It depends on how you want to build it and what kind of trade-offs you want or don't want. Or using what's out there.

I think money (Bitcoin) and finance (Ethereum) have been two proven winners in the game so far, but another one (information / socials / identity) will prove to be a third winning blockchain at some point. That's my hypothesis.

[arielbit]

fact checkers or thought police

tells you what to think.

[TheNineClub]

I'm more and more bothered by the centralization of Big Tech and the power of censorship between the private-public partnership between Big Tech and governments.

"They" get to control the narrative so many ways. Blasting you with their message. Shadowbanning users. Banning power users with messages they don't like. Making users self-censor themselves so they don't get strikes or demonetized.

I find all of this to be incredibly bothersome. I want there to be an open platform / open protocol, similar to Bitcoin, but for the spread of information and discourse. Kind of like how the internet used to be pre-2015, give or take. The worst thing, from my perspective, is that I think the trend line for this kind of behavior from these powers that be will only continue to degrade, not remain neutral or improve, making things even worse next year than presently.

Thoughts? Do you like the current level of censorship? Want more? Want less censorship? How would you deal with a censorship-proof protocol? How would this impact politics on a local/global level for better or worse?

There is a strong push towards mass adoption and that means more centralisation, control snd censorship, and all of that goes against the core principles. But people barking about mass adoption seem to only care about their "investment" portfolio going up then what early crypto really stood for.

[BADecker]

You can find this kind of censorship all over the place. It's in science and archaeology and certainly medicine/nutrition. How are we ever going to change things? One idea might be to crash the money system so that the Big Shots won't see any value in continuing their changing of history. But if we do that, how will people even live? Bitcoin with an actual encrypted, real, physical, coin working with it?


Just like the Ministry of Truth, Big Tech is seizing control over HISTORY and rewriting it to suit current regime

A writer and political activist by the name of Danny Haiphong was suspended from Twitter for questioning the official story about the Tiananmen Square massacre incident of 1989.

It is apparently now an offense to speculate that perhaps the mainstream narrative about historical events such as this might be inaccurate, which Haiphong learned the hard way when he was told by Twitter that he had violated the platform’s “rules against abuse and harassment.”

About a year ago in conjunction with the Biden regime’s ongoing censorship efforts, Twitter quietly put new rules in place that prohibit “content that denies that mass murder or other mass casualty events took place, where we can verify that the event occurred, and when the content is shared with abusive intent.”

In a statement, Twitter added that the rule applies to references that insinuate a historical event was a “hoax,” or that its victims or survivors might be “fake or ‘actors,'” the statement said.

“It includes, but is not limited to, events like the Holocaust, school shootings, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters.”

NewsGuard and Wikipedia also function as Ministries of Truth

Haiphong is hardly the first person to dispute the Tiananmen Square incident. Many have presented contrary evidence and asked poignant questions about this and other historical incidents – and this is a good thing because it helps refine our understanding of such events by either verifying or debunking their details.

A free and open society is built on this type of inquiry, and yet the Biden regime with the help of Big Tech seeks to dismantle this American value and bury it in the annals of rewritten textbooks – or make it disappear entirely.

Silicon Valley really is doing all it can to act as a Ministry of Truth on behalf of the regime, which will in effect stamp out the First Amendment if we let things continue down their current course.

...

[PrimeNumber7]

I disagree that a censorship proof protocol is impossible. It depends on how you want to build it and what kind of trade-offs you want or don't want. Or using what's out there.

I think money (Bitcoin) and finance (Ethereum) have been two proven winners in the game so far, but another one (information / socials / identity) will prove to be a third winning blockchain at some point. That's my hypothesis.

With bitcoin, the issue of traffic overload was more or less solved with LN, which allows p2p payments to be done essentially via a mesh network, as long as both participants are online. No similar solution would be possible for social networks because the person posting should not need to be online in order for the reader to view their posts. If this was a requirement, the social media site would essentially be a self-hosted website.

There is also the issue of spam on social media sites. Spam is generally not covered under freedom of speech principles. There are tons of spam attempts on social media sites, and these sites devote a lot of resources to 'censoring' spam. Any censorship-proof social media site would have difficulty with spam.

[theskillzdatklls]

I disagree that a censorship proof protocol is impossible. It depends on how you want to build it and what kind of trade-offs you want or don't want. Or using what's out there.

I think money (Bitcoin) and finance (Ethereum) have been two proven winners in the game so far, but another one (information / socials / identity) will prove to be a third winning blockchain at some point. That's my hypothesis.

With bitcoin, the issue of traffic overload was more or less solved with LN, which allows p2p payments to be done essentially via a mesh network, as long as both participants are online. No similar solution would be possible for social networks because the person posting should not need to be online in order for the reader to view their posts. If this was a requirement, the social media site would essentially be a self-hosted website.

There is also the issue of spam on social media sites. Spam is generally not covered under freedom of speech principles. There are tons of spam attempts on social media sites, and these sites devote a lot of resources to 'censoring' spam. Any censorship-proof social media site would have difficulty with spam.

I don't think that anything that you are saying is an unsolvable problem.

Front-ends can filter for whatever they want so long as the back-end/protocol is censorship proof. This allows users to interact with the protocol easily and however they want to. And various front-ends could deal with spam as easily as any other Big Tech platform.

There also could be minor costs associated with spam. These could be incurred by a front-end so long as they were net positive through advertising or other means of monetizations.

[BADecker]

Any website that censors stuff is kinda a dangerous site to be following. It is attempting to do indoctrination of its viewing audience.

To be honest, all websites have to do is make a section for stuff they don't agree with. Then find out what the people think by what they view.

[theskillzdatklls]

Any website that censors stuff is kinda a dangerous site to be following. It is attempting to do indoctrination of its viewing audience.

To be honest, all websites have to do is make a section for stuff they don't agree with. Then find out what the people think by what they view.

I agree with this sentiment completely. But the problem is more so to do with core technology/infrastructure. Many websites I believe started out with the best of intentions like YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. And look at them now, they are steaming piles of horse shit.

Why is that?

Because their core infrastructure allows them to be taken over by governments and corporate greed. You need a fair protocol that cannot be altered that things are bootstrapped off of.

If you have a platform based on promises using the identical technology as Big Tech - an example being Rumble vs YouTube, I'd argue that Rumble is doomed to fail one day, sooner or later, because promises are useless in this world.

[jrrsparkles]

I'm more and more bothered by the centralization of Big Tech and the power of censorship between the private-public partnership between Big Tech and governments.

"They" get to control the narrative so many ways. Blasting you with their message. Shadowbanning users. Banning power users with messages they don't like. Making users self-censor themselves so they don't get strikes or demonetized.

I find all of this to be incredibly bothersome. I want there to be an open platform / open protocol, similar to Bitcoin, but for the spread of information and discourse. Kind of like how the internet used to be pre-2015, give or take. The worst thing, from my perspective, is that I think the trend line for this kind of behavior from these powers that be will only continue to degrade, not remain neutral or improve, making things even worse next year than presently.

Thoughts? Do you like the current level of censorship? Want more? Want less censorship? How would you deal with a censorship-proof protocol? How would this impact politics on a local/global level for better or worse?

You call it censorship? I think we are invaded more because we already have no privacy at all since everyone hold their smartphone in their hand all the time and you know it see and even listen everything the surrounding people and everything. Maybe we can have a platform which is completely gives the freedom of speech but it can't be full fledged one because your ISP can ban it because literally no government is willing to give such freedom to their citizen so if we want to make one then we need a place to start.

[theskillzdatklls]

I'm more and more bothered by the centralization of Big Tech and the power of censorship between the private-public partnership between Big Tech and governments.

"They" get to control the narrative so many ways. Blasting you with their message. Shadowbanning users. Banning power users with messages they don't like. Making users self-censor themselves so they don't get strikes or demonetized.

I find all of this to be incredibly bothersome. I want there to be an open platform / open protocol, similar to Bitcoin, but for the spread of information and discourse. Kind of like how the internet used to be pre-2015, give or take. The worst thing, from my perspective, is that I think the trend line for this kind of behavior from these powers that be will only continue to degrade, not remain neutral or improve, making things even worse next year than presently.

Thoughts? Do you like the current level of censorship? Want more? Want less censorship? How would you deal with a censorship-proof protocol? How would this impact politics on a local/global level for better or worse?

You call it censorship? I think we are invaded more because we already have no privacy at all since everyone hold their smartphone in their hand all the time and you know it see and even listen everything the surrounding people and everything. Maybe we can have a platform which is completely gives the freedom of speech but it can't be full fledged one because your ISP can ban it because literally no government is willing to give such freedom to their citizen so if we want to make one then we need a place to start.

Separate issue, that's privacy. Part of it you can control, part of it you cannot. I'd argue they could be solved to a degree under the same umbrella.

Kind of like how (open sourced) Bitcoin makes money free and open but also move private.
You could have a social (open sourced) protocol that makes speech open, free, maintained and fair, but also private.

Especially when you get the option to easily choose between front-end providers and can change between them if their values change.

[jrrsparkles]

I'm more and more bothered by the centralization of Big Tech and the power of censorship between the private-public partnership between Big Tech and governments.

"They" get to control the narrative so many ways. Blasting you with their message. Shadowbanning users. Banning power users with messages they don't like. Making users self-censor themselves so they don't get strikes or demonetized.

I find all of this to be incredibly bothersome. I want there to be an open platform / open protocol, similar to Bitcoin, but for the spread of information and discourse. Kind of like how the internet used to be pre-2015, give or take. The worst thing, from my perspective, is that I think the trend line for this kind of behavior from these powers that be will only continue to degrade, not remain neutral or improve, making things even worse next year than presently.

Thoughts? Do you like the current level of censorship? Want more? Want less censorship? How would you deal with a censorship-proof protocol? How would this impact politics on a local/global level for better or worse?

You call it censorship? I think we are invaded more because we already have no privacy at all since everyone hold their smartphone in their hand all the time and you know it see and even listen everything the surrounding people and everything. Maybe we can have a platform which is completely gives the freedom of speech but it can't be full fledged one because your ISP can ban it because literally no government is willing to give such freedom to their citizen so if we want to make one then we need a place to start.

Separate issue, that's privacy. Part of it you can control, part of it you cannot. I'd argue they could be solved to a degree under the same umbrella.

Kind of like how (open sourced) Bitcoin makes money free and open but also move private.
You could have a social (open sourced) protocol that makes speech open, free, maintained and fair, but also private.

Especially when you get the option to easily choose between front-end providers and can change between them if their values change.

We are under surveillance 24/7, so the open source platform really makes any difference when the device we are using it to access itself collect all those data and sending it to whoever they wanted it?

Maybe we need a decentralized ecosystem as well so there we may experience the complete freedom.

[Moneyprism]

censorship nowadays is a mass deception.. for example in my country the government censors cow's nipples on television.. like bro, it's only cow's nipples, who else is stimulated by cow's nipples? and many other stupid things that are censored by the government and other big tech companies.. so I think that censorship is necessary but don't overdo it

[PrimeNumber7]

I disagree that a censorship proof protocol is impossible. It depends on how you want to build it and what kind of trade-offs you want or don't want. Or using what's out there.

I think money (Bitcoin) and finance (Ethereum) have been two proven winners in the game so far, but another one (information / socials / identity) will prove to be a third winning blockchain at some point. That's my hypothesis.

With bitcoin, the issue of traffic overload was more or less solved with LN, which allows p2p payments to be done essentially via a mesh network, as long as both participants are online. No similar solution would be possible for social networks because the person posting should not need to be online in order for the reader to view their posts. If this was a requirement, the social media site would essentially be a self-hosted website.

There is also the issue of spam on social media sites. Spam is generally not covered under freedom of speech principles. There are tons of spam attempts on social media sites, and these sites devote a lot of resources to 'censoring' spam. Any censorship-proof social media site would have difficulty with spam.

I don't think that anything that you are saying is an unsolvable problem.

Front-ends can filter for whatever they want so long as the back-end/protocol is censorship proof. This allows users to interact with the protocol easily and however they want to. And various front-ends could deal with spam as easily as any other Big Tech platform.

There also could be minor costs associated with spam. These could be incurred by a front-end so long as they were net positive through advertising or other means of monetizations.

The front-end mechanism could potentially go beyond "spam" when deciding what to censor. My email provider often will classify "legitimate" emails as "spam" -- these emails are often advertising emails, which, although I am not interested in them, I did agree to receive said emails.

[paxmao]

I am unhappy about any level of censoship, but unfortunately most of the socities do want to have some cap or limit on the expression of others and that cannot be easily fixed. At least, there should be some consideration to what the majority of people wants, while allowing a good level of divergenge to those who have different views and are respectfull of others.

[theskillzdatklls]

We are under surveillance 24/7, so the open source platform really makes any difference when the device we are using it to access itself collect all those data and sending it to whoever they wanted it?

Maybe we need a decentralized ecosystem as well so there we may experience the complete freedom.

You're correct but that's kind of a self-defeatist point of view. I think as of say the past 6 years or so, it's not a question of giving all of your information to powers that do not care about you or going completely off the grid, but rather one of limiting information when possible and within your tastes.

For example, if 1/10 is living in the woods and 10/10 is putting a literal human tracking device on your beaming every single action you make directly to your government and Big Tech, you can choose to say be a 3/10 or a 7/10.

This can be done through multiple different actions. Perhaps someone chooses to use a cellphone a lot but uses a quality phone with quality apps. Or perhaps someone else avoids Big Tech and uses open source options when possible. At least they have the option to do whatever. How much of an impact does that all have? It's hard to say, but it certainly can't be bad.

And if people don't stand up for decentralized technologies, then you eventually lose the ability to even discuss optionality like this. Money has been fought for with BTC and ETH. But social media has not been fought for. And I hope that that barrier is crossed one of these years when people start waking up to the nonsense brought on to them by governments and Big Tech.