Freedom Advocates Seeking Better
Connections
Health Freedom,
Vaccine Choice and other social reform advocates need to face the facts: it’s
not just governments that seek to censor Internet expression.
The “big boys” of
the World Wide Web actively seek to restrict expressions of opinion that do not
meet current “standards” of Political Correctness and Identity Politics[1]. It’s not just the “Great Firewall of China”
that restricts worldwide political expression: the imposition of “community
standards” by private companies simply as a cover to arbitrary, and maybe
politically motivated, decisions by anonymous corporate hacks somewhere in some
Internet boiler room out there... but, there may be a technical fix for this
political problem.
Blockchain
technology, which is the basis for Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, is a
secure system of decentralized information distribution and verification.
“The easiest way to think about
blockchain is a massively distributed network that can’t be controlled by any
entity and has no single point of failure. Every time there is a transaction or
event in this network, every single node in the network is notified and
updated. Each update is a “block” of data, creating a massively distributed
ledger of data that is shared by every member of the network.”[2]
Its business model
is not like that of the centralized social media systems such as Facebook and
YouTube, which rely on profiting from user-provided content. The new social
media developing on the Blockchain, like Minds.com, Synero, Yoyow[3]
or Steemit[4],
recognize that the users are the
content providers.
Though “the medium
is the message” it is the content that
is monetized. Currently companies like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram or Snapchat
profit by selling advertising that appears along with user-generated content,
offering “relevant” commercial information to the consumers of that
user-generated content.
The corporate
social media owners reap the advertising revenue reward while the volunteer
content-makers create the value that the users seek. The Blockchain social
media model proposes, instead, to reward the user-content-creators without the
intermediation of corporate owners -- or at least with a much bigger share of
the advertising pie.
“In its purest form, such a network would
lack a central body creating profit from the platform and therefore be
unrestrained by the goal of appeasing advertisers. Like Bitcoin, it could be
modelled on a system where those who invest most time and effort in the network
have the greatest influence on its evolution.”[5]
The model proposed
by the now-in-beta-testing Minds.com, for example, rewards user/contributors
with a new crypto currency, the Minds Token, which can be used to boost
postings, purchase at the Minds.com store, and, after the beta period, be
converted to Bitcoin.
Minds.com
founder Bill Ottman commented,
“I always knew that an open-source social network was
inevitably going to emerge and become competitive with the top establishment
social network... It also became clear that the mainstream social networks were
not rewarding people — were not incentivizing people. They weren’t giving
revenue opportunities. They’re restricting people’s reach — they’re spying on
people! So it became sort of obvious that there’s a market requirement for this
space that we’ve filled.”[6]
The economics of
the social media is becoming a struggle between these two visions:
[1] Corporate advertising built on the intellectual efforts of (mainly) volunteer
contributors, versus
[2] Decentralized systems where the advertising revenue is distributed,
via the Blockchain, to the users.
At the same time,
the propensity of the corporate sponsors to engage in “private” censorship of
social media content is becoming of ever greater concern to the users of the
media. After all, the purpose of engaging in the social media is to communicate
ideas and information. That use is at odds with corporate censorship.
I’ve previously written
about Privatizing Tyranny, the efforts of various governments to empower
private entities in restricting the ideas which may be expressed openly.[7]
Those private entities act “under color of law” as arms of government when
blocking, down-throttling or down-grading the expression of certain ideas to
which the governments object. If no one can see your comment your right to
freedom of communication is meaningless.
Blockchain-mediated,
decentralized social media are unable to be so manipulated. The would-be
tyrants have no technical means to impose restrictions on such content.
This is a real
threat to the centralized media, which appear to have been created, or at least
boosted by government intelligence agencies (consider DARPA-connected, Facebook
investor James Breyer).[8]
Once the powerful
financial link between the corporate overseers and the social media is broken
by Blockchain decentralization, the ability of governments to use their
corporate proxies to censor social media expression will begin to fade.
Will the Blockchain
build a social media stronger than the controls even the most powerful of
governments impose? Does it matter to
you as an advocate that you are being censored by government or by what claim
to be “private” companies?
“Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram are prohibited by the Chinese
government. Why does the Chinese government cut off its citizens' channels of
communications with the outside world? What is it afraid of?” [9]
Freedom advocates
must join in that question: “What are the huge social media corporations afraid
of?” To ask this question is to answer it. They
fear free people capable of asking that question!
The answer implies
how we can Push Back and break free: boycott the “official” social media, whether
directly government-affiliated as, for example, Yoyow may be[10],
or whether corporate creatures of the state that pretend to be independent,
like Facebook or YouTube. But boycotting is just the first step.
To be able to utilize
the extraordinary power of the social media to protect freedom and effectuate
change, you must patronize the Alt Social Media, and that means relying on the
Blockchain for the privacy protection that it offers.
I’ve begun to shift
my attention from Facebook and YouTube to Minds.com and other Blockchain Alt
Social Media. It is my attention that
profits the centralized social media, so ultimately, it is my choice.
We each have that
choice.
Ralph Fucetola JD
is a retired lawyer, consultant – www.ProfessionalSafetyDossier.com – President of the Institute for Health Research – www.InHeRe.org – and VP of the Natural Solutions Foundation
– www.GlobalHealthFreedom.org
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