Censorship Resistance is Fundamental

Good Morning Everyone,

In the early hours of the Australian morning while most were still sleeping, big tech, specifically Google’s video platform Youtube, were busy maintaining their horrific record in relation to censorship.

The Bitcoin Magazine channel was deleted mid-livestream overnight.

Youtube’s apparent reason for deleting the channel was that to educate people to buy bitcoin is “encouraging illegal activities”.

I haven’t seen the livestream, so I have no idea what was being discussed, and while there are obviously rules relating to financial advice, it would appear wildly inappropriate, beyond extreme cases, to simply delete a channel in this way without first communicating with the other party, providing clear and specific feedback about the issue and giving an opportunity for them to correct it.

Perhaps in severe cases a warning in the form of a strike needs to be issued, or rare cases of instant deletion may be warranted, but for most cases it is fairly straight forward and is solved through a basic level of communication.

It’s important to acknowledge that while people that create channels on these platforms are not owners of the platform, they are in many cases best considered business partners to these companies. Creating content is the basis for platforms like Youtube to exist, and it is off the back of content creators that Youtube are able to sell advertising and profit from this work, and it is the very feature of allowing anyone to create and broadcast content that created the platforms network effect in the first place.

The trend of censorship on big tech platforms, like Google/Youtube, Twitter and Facebook is absolutely out of control, and continues to demonstrate the need for censorship resistant platforms, and as will become increasingly obvious to more and more people over time, the need for censorship resistant money.

No single entity can be trusted with wielding this power. It is simply too great.

While there is every chance that the channel gets reinstated, due to the fact they have a reasonably large following, the bigger issue is that we do not have an adequate structural framework established with theses platforms that maintains a reasonable and fair balance of power. The relationship is completely asymmetric in favour of the platform and against the content creators.

While they will get away with this in the short term, due to their dominant market share and the giant tail wind that is the network effect, it’s in the interest of these businesses to address this, or be super-seeded over time by a superior technology platform that addresses this issue and demonstrates a level of respect for their business partners, or better yet, simply does not have the ability to censor in the first place.

With each new instance, more and more users are being exposed to the problem and will subsequently seek alternatives. While the problem is not going away immediately, with each passing day we get closer to a solution.

Hope you have a great day, and i’ll speak to you tomorrow.

AK

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