The good news is that the continued censorship will fuel adoption of crypto and speed up the demise of parasitic middlemen who take a cut off every transaction
Once upon a time people wondered why people would do online shopping or use credit cards when cash got the job done. Crypto will eventually become the most logical option for most companies, it won't happen over night but it will eventually. Accept payment in any cryptocurrency and then convert them to a stablecoin so you aren't affected by price changes due to speculation
as others have pointed out, the problem of accounting/taxation is important to solve before cryptos can become the cash of the web. and it might not be solvable
Given the current climate where vast swathes of people actively support and encourage this type of de-platforming and censorship, I believe it's far more likely that we'll find ourselves in a situation akin to those in China than the libertarian paradise you've alluded to.
Edit: Silently downvoted, no disagreement voiced. Welcome to the new Reddit.
God forbid the vast majority of people in the world don't want to listen to a bunch of racist nut jobs ramble on about various ill founded conspiracy theories.
I don't see any jack booted government goons walking around burning books, do you?
I just see a private company choosing to not do business with another private company. Isn't that what the whole "free market" thing supposed to be about?
Unfortunately it is not clear that crypto will be able to prevent this. To allow for participation from people in the legacy economy, at some point an exchange between cash and crypto must be made. This is the weak point that can be easily attacked by governments and the banking oligarchy. Additionally, if disfavored entities begin using crypto and thriving on it, the government will simply find an excuse to sieze it under money laundering or terrorism laws, or will make something else up on the spot. Look at what happened to the Liberty Dollar for an example of what can happen to alt currencies when they start to gain real traction.
Remember, all that you have to do is make alt currencies inconvenient enough to use for normal payment needs, and this will discourage people from getting involved. Lower participation deprives the alt economy of goods, services, and the ability to exchange currency for "real" cash.
That doesn't mean that crypto is totally useless, just pointing out that there is not a technical "silver bullet" solution to this problem. Technical solutions must be part of the answer, but these must be backed by political force.
>fuel adoption of crypto and speed up the demise of parasitic middlemen who take a cut off every transaction
Most business owners do not have the technical ability, interest, or logistical overhead to actually accept "crypto" (or cash) without "parasitic middlemen". This is why Coinbase, BitGo, et al. are very successful in this area, and account for virtually all cryptocurrency commerce. The function of Coinbase or BitGo is not parasitic; no business wants to cope with the arduous requirements to be able to accept and store cryptocurrencies.
No it does not. The principle of free speech says nothing about who you are forced to do or not do business with. It only affects expression after all.
I do not agree with "Yes it does" (and thus that "Free speech means no one is forced to do business with nazis"), I agree with the rest however (which is basically the same as what dmerfield said).
In general, you are right (excluding the usage of word "Nazi"): private entity can deny services to other entity. However, in legal practice there are exceptions to to the rule, e.g. when the entity which denies is a monopoly (even locally defined), or services are too essential. I'm not in position to decide if it applies to the situation described, but worth keeping in mind that there are limits.
It looks like you've reverted to using HN primarily for ideological battle, and worse things like race trolling. If you keep doing that, we're going to ban you, so please stop.
I guess I crossed a line. I swear im not racetrolling, but even I know that AIPAC is pretty infuental, its in the name that its zionist, its not even a conspiracy theory really. I will refrain from anything politics related on this site in the future, even if many subjects on here are political in nature.
i think you mean "free trade". Hmm in this case, some users want to trade with the content producer, but it seems the entire market is hellbent to not allow them to do so. How do you justify that situation as "free"?
This is a great example of how 'just set up your own platform' may not be the best solution to issues of censorship and what not. Because if you do, then the platforms you need for things like payment processing are also likely to ban your service for much the same reasons as before, and neutral alternatives to them are few and far between.
Still, I guess this does provide a good use case for cryptocurrencies and what not.
The platform they were attempting to replace is youtube.
How do you replace one platform when all the others conspire to prevent you from doing so? You can't just bootstrap your own internet... at some level you're using other's stuff
I believe "platform" in this context refers to the content platform. (just a fancy way of saying host your own website instead of distributing via Youtube)
edit: Looks like they're more than just a "website", but both this site and the platform site really don't do a good job of explaining that.
the platform is incomplete. It's pretty obvious nowadays that any platform that makes free speech its main selling point will be ousted by every payment processor.
the main ways to censor seem to be DNS, payments and hosting. I have not heard yet about cutting people's fiber. So, a platform that wants to be resistant to censorship should probably provide all 3
> This is a great example of how 'just set up your own platform' may not be the best solution to issues of censorship and what not.
It's more like "don't depends on Silicon valley's ecosystem" these days. Because all these tech corporations went crazy since Trump got elected and clearly decided they'll use their audience and market shares for political goals... which they have all the rights to do by the way, and it's actually a good thing, if leads to a more diverse landscape of tech services. There are opportunities for competition but still a lack of VC that can fund that competition...
EDIT: I obviously do not support violent or "racist" views. But since now even radical feminists get booted out of social media and what not because they don't subscribe to a specific ideology, it proves that at the end of the day it has nothing to do with "fighting Nazis".
It's a bit more than that. The top decision makers at Visa and Mastercard have been threatening anyone who does business with certain people. That's where this is coming from.
And if you aren't terrified of that you damn well should be.
Ironically I think that Trump would LOVE to deploy this against his enemies. Perhaps he will at some point.
That's why we need to strengthen political and financial "common carriage".
"Set up your own platform" is actually "set up your own Internet". Because otherwise you'd need DNS, hosting, payment processing, CDN, certificates, etc. And given how rapidly this sphere is politicized and weaponized by people with an ax to grind, if you're doing something that somebody vocal objects to - or allow somebody that does to use your resources - or allow somebody that allows somebody, etc. - then you'd better build your own Internet. Because this one is fresh out of freedom.
What part of "anyone can force you to do business with them" sounds like freedom to you? Don't payment vendors and hosting platforms have freedom?
Part of freedom is the responsibility to accept consequences of your actions. If you choose to say such vile things that people quit doing business with you, that's just people exercising their freedom. If you think it's unfair, you are valuing your freedom higher than everyone else's.
When you complain about "deplatforming" you aren't asking for more freedom. You're asking for the freedom of others to be removed.
> What part of "anyone can force you to do business with them" sounds like freedom to you?
The part where activist mobs can force you not to do business with people targeted by the mobs.
> Part of freedom is the responsibility to accept consequences of your actions.
That's a meaningless platitude - being personally destroyed or run out of business merely because somebody set a hate mob on you is not "consequences of your actions". This is creating climate of hate and intolerance, and that's in substantial the climate we're living in now. Some time ago, it was "if you don't like it - don't read it". Now it's "if you don't like it - destroy his life, his business, and anybody he is associated and does business with". Describing it as "accept consequences" is either extremely naive or disingenuous. I certainly do not want and will not accept such climate of permanent war as something proper.
> You're asking for the freedom of others to be removed.
No I did not. My comments are just above that, and anybody reading them can clearly see I have not asked for any freedoms to be removed. If you're going to distort my opinions, it's probably not smart to do it right next to it - too obvious.
So your counter-argument to my argument that Internet freedoms are being destroyed is "well, you can still mail out DVDs"? Are you sure it's the strongest counter-argument you could master? In fact, how long did you work on it before considering it's a counter-argument at all? Because for me it certainly looks like confirming my point.
> Back when 9/11 conspiracies were still quasi-mainstream
You mean, never.
> somebody in our neighborhood went door to door and gave every house a copy of Loose Change.
And this connects to my argument... how exactly? I was talking about specifically the Internet.
theoretically cryptos may solve the payments part one day. CDN and certificates are not requirements (yet). DNS remains one sore point of centralization for the internet.
> Because this one is fresh out of freedom.
Let's not be so pessimistic, but instead marvel at the how cool it is that the internet was built from the get-go to be decentralized
DNS replacement is one of the most practical applications of the blockchain database. What database would you have on nearly EVERY machine ever, a name=>ip mapping fits that niche really well. ENS is going to do major work here.
Except in this case it isn't censorship. Nobody can be forced to do business with BitChute if they don't want to. That is just as much of a right as anything else.
BitChute is still more than able to host all the trash it wants. They will just have to find another payment provider. And they do exist. I mean, porn sites manage to figure out how to collect payment. It's expensive as hell because people constantly chargeback porn and virtually every porn hoster is sketchy as fuck too.
Even then they could just get a PO box and have people mail in checks or hell, even cash. It might be old school, but that is how it was done back when all the wackos and conspiracy newsletters were actual things you got in the mail.
Exactly. Somebody's freedom of speech does not override a service provider freedom of association. Freedom of speech is not a right to distribution and payment.
These are not merely service providers. They are de-facto utilities. Just because Verizon does not like your politics, does not mean they can cut you off from their services. Same with Wells Fargo denying you a checking account (although they certainly did try in the past, if they thought you were a labor organizer).
Patreon, and other payment processors (like Stripe.com) are having their arms twisted from the highest levels by Visa and Mastercard.
Think for a moment if it would be ok with you if Visa and Mastercard were doing this because they wanted to silence people who advocated for women's rights. Would you still be so libertarian about it?
Verizon is a monopoly, and should be tightly regulated. Patreon is definitely not. And there's no particular reason here to think that Patreon is doing this under pressure from Visa. They were under plenty of pressure from their user base.
I think there's also a fundamental difference between an organization that bans people who increase the rights of marginalized groups and one that bans people that are looking to further marginalize people, so your analogy doesn't do anything for me.
I was referring to the credit card companies as being a monopoly. They use their top-down power to impose their politics on people.
It's not just Patreon. If anyone sets up a similar service, and does business with someone that Visa does not want, they will use their monopolistic power to shut you down.
Imagine if they were doing this about a cause you disagreed with. Imagine if our financial industry was run by Trump supporters, and they were slowly squeezing their critics out financially. This is bad.
We already lack freedom of association. In the United States, a business is not free to discriminate against certain classes of people, or on the basis of certain things.
The only question is what is the precise coefficient of friction on that slippery slope.
You can argue that wedding cakes should be baked for gay couples but that websites should not be hosted for nazis for reasons A, B, and C. But claiming that businesses have some sort of broad right to free association is not merely specious, but completely and obviously wrong.
Businesses do, in fact, have a broad right of free association, limited only by statutory (and possibly State constitutional) limitations that comport with the high federal Constitutional bar for such limitations.
No freedom is perfectly available. Freedom of speech, for example, doesn't allow you to commit perjury or fraud, and it doesn't entitle you to harass someone. Freedom of association doesn't let you stalk somebody, or let felons on parole talk to one another. All rights must be balanced against other rights.
Businesses do have a very broad right of freedom to serve who they please. The one exception is when historically many businesses have used that power to participate in oppression against specific downtrodden groups. So a business can happily decline to serve US congressmen, freemasons, and people who have thrown up on their floor previously. But they can't decline to serve black people as a group.
Unless we live in a 100% free market, then what you are saying is totally invalid. We actually ARE forced to use the established banks and payment processors, we have no choice. The government provides all sorts of privileges and protections to them that make it impossible to just build your own.
When the government strips payment processors of all of their privileges, and when the Communications Decency Act no longer protects media companies masquerading as communications platforms (eg Twitter, YouTube and Facebook), then and only then will your assertions begin to make any sense.
Unless you are trying to send money to ISIS, then payment processors should be obligated to support you.
And indeed, payment processors and banks are far more worried about you donating money to people who's politics they disagree with than actual violent terrorists or child pornographers.
What protections is stripe or square provided that a payment processing business I set up tomorrow isn't? The government doesn't actually give any specific payment processors special privileges.
Yes, all payment processors have special privileges, but so to would the one you start tomorrow. But instead you want to force another to serve you. Why?
I was referring to financial companies higher up, like Visa and Mastercard. Banks implicitly have government protections and privileges.
But in addition to that, the barriers to entry are extreme, to the point where they are essentially monopolies. And they are using their disproportionate powers to play politics.
> Even then they could just get a PO box and have people mail in checks or hell, even cash
Would it be okay for the US postal service to deplatform them as well?
I’m always curious about this argument that “just mail it” because the freedom to send anything though the postal service has not always been some sacrosanct right (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws ). And in other countries that don’t have such a permissive First Amendment I imagine it may still be okay for the post office to censor mail.
Pretty sure they were banned for taking on a public political stance supporting disinformation peddlers like Alex Jones. Payment processers don't want to be associated with this kind of content for obvious reasons.
Why don't payment processors want to be associated with someone calling for violence in the streets while peddling conspiracy theories they know to be untrue?
OK, how about this: he's a polarizing nutcase who has adopted controversial and unsupportable standings on several calamitous events in the past two decades.
Most people that see a mainstream business supporting him assume that business adopts those same ideas, rightly or wrongly. So, the perception of supporting Alex Jones can be incredibly damaging to the reputation of a business.
I m sure paypal or patreon are doing business with many criminals or even terrorists who are unknown. The reason is the bad PR and negative publicity they get from these channels.
They don't want to become liable for any illegal behavior and end up having to pay a fine.
They don't want to be associated with any political stance that might not agree with the vast majority of the population because they want to have as many clients as possible.
Is/was it the platform maintainers applying their own morals, or is it the money (advertisers) who don't want to be associated with these topics?
The walled gardens are already quite ridiculous, with FB censoring Michaelangelo's David and the Napalm Girl, giving us a kindergarten version of the Internet (although funnily enough, they can't censor fake news, so the "children"'s minds got brainwashed there).
I'm just going to leave a PeerTube link here as I think it is a better example of a decentralized youtube. https://joinpeertube.org/
BitChute annoys me because the video streaming is decentralized through bittorrent tech, but the repository of videos is totally dependent and centralized with BitChute.
BitChute is a YouTube replacement made for people who are "Very Worried About YouTube's Censorship". It uses WebTorrent for distribution to solve the upfront server costs of running a video service. Cute idea.
You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute.
Which is why when you check the front page you get and click popular you get... FOX News clips for posting on Voat (a far-right reddit clone), conspiracy theories about the magnetic poles, conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation, conspiracy theories about the Mexican border, a far-right news source complaining about Jeff Flake, neo-nazi videos, Brazilian spam, anti-semitism, people complaining about YouTube censorship, etc.
I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content.
I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives.
* I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.
Reddit only banned anime porn that depicted characters under the age of 18. Regular anime porn is very much still there.
There was a lot of scaremongering around the time that voat was launched, the "under 18" part was often left off when people were using that ban in an argument.
Actually it banned anime porn that depicts characters that look under the age of 18, that excludes characters like Oshino Shinobu and most Touhou characters for example. Only a very small minority of anime porn portraits characters that are and look over 18. Saying that Reddit banned anime porn is as correct as saying that a byte is 8 bits: while wrong in theory it is basically true for the vast majority of the CPUs.
Let us argue the point including the "under 18" part, then. If it was legally an issue I can understand the ban. Otherwise I see little justification in the decision.
Well, your impression was wrong. Goat was created by racists and sexists to be racist and sexist and anti-semitic. If they fooled you with a veneer of grandios cries of all-caps censorship than you are easily fooled, or willfully ignorant.
There were three major exoduses of reddit people to voat and similar sites, years apart. The first was when reddit cracked down on paedophilia, the second when it nuked fatpeoplehate and associated subreddits, the third when it banned and/or hid some of the more egregiously Nazi-oriented subreddits. The third was probably the largest and most influential, but yeah, there’s other horrible stuff on there.
Of course, all of this makes for a charming community.
Regardless of what it is now you should be happy it exists, look at present day Turkey and 1960s Iran to see how fast freedoms can be stripped by changes in government. Tomorrow it could be leftists being censored. The Communist Control Act is still around in the US, just hasn't been enforced. There's effectively nothing to stop Trump from calling his enemies communists and throwing them in jail and with his stacked Supreme Court who knows if they would rule it unconstitutional?
First they came for the Gab, and... I was actually pretty pleased because I didn't think the sort of web host that would stand behind forums run by the sort of people that gloated about how many hits their association with a synagogue shooting brought them were actually potential allies in fighting fascism...
Bitchute isn't the home of people posting Trump critiques. It's the home of people explaining why all criticisms of Trump must be dismissed as conspiracies initiated by the real enemy: Jewish New World Order reptilians https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that there's a inexaustable supply of blatantly evil assholes for oppressive laws to be first aimed at and establish precedent against; by the time they come for you, everyone is too desensitised to care.
It's ironic that you are alluding to the quote by pastor Martin Niemöller that was making a point completely opposite to yours. Free speech is not about protecting popular opinions. I cannot believe how many comments hostile to free speech are on this thread. It's almost like people are begging for oppression.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Niemöller was admonishing his past self and German intellectuals in general for thinking Naziism was something that could be accommodated and compromised with if it didn't affect them directly, not admonishing those corporations that declined to publish their propaganda...
> I cannot believe how many comments hostile to free speech are on this thread
It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.
All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
> It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.
Jack booted thugs most certainly will point guns at anyone who tries setting up a payment processing system to compete with the company that blocked them.
> All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
BitChute is NOT free to find another way to seek payment, because of a state-enforced monopoly on the payment market.
It would be like if your water company decided to cut off water to your house, to compel you to stop speaking, at the behest of activists. Sure, you're "free" to carry buckets of fresh water to your house, I suppose.
No, this is not some business decision, this is systematic economic pressure intended to coerce someone into silence. And frankly I think it is good grounds for a RICO case.
> Free speech is not about protecting popular opinions.
It's also not about protecting any opinions (popular or unpopular) from private refusal to assist in propagating them.
Free speech is not the same as anyone else being obligate to provide assistance with distributing your speech, in fact, such an entitlement would violate freedom of speech for those compelled to participate in speech they disagree with.
Is it the freedom of banks to not offer checking accounts to minorities? Why can't a bank express itself in the form of denying service to some people? Must they be compelled to?
Yes. If these platforms and payment processors want to continue to enjoy the state-enforced privileges they receive, then they must, within reason, offer their services to all.
Twitter enshrines the most vile antisemitism out there[1]. Right after the Pittsburgh shooting, Twitter reviewed Farrakhan's comments where he called Jews "termites", and gave him the all clear.
What makes Twitter far worse than Gab is that Twitter actually took the time to have a human review it, and gave it the green light. Gab at least is not attempting to police its content. That makes Twitter much worse.
This is all hypocrisy. The "outrage" of Gab is completely fake. There is no legitimate argument against Gab that does not include Twitter.
I mean, I'm far from the biggest fan of Twitter's ludicrously inconsistent moderation policy, but their raison d'etre isn't signal-boosting the far right (actively from their own social media accounts as well as passively from running an unmoderated forum) and they don't gloat about how synagogue shootings affect their traffic.
That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.
There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.
I don't want to participate at all. What I'm saying is that I'm pro free speech and decentralization, but if all the content is just racist shit, then what draw does the community have for me in the first place?
Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice.
I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.
I don't publish videos. I watch them. I'm not gonna bother flipping through 90% nonsense on the off chance there's something interesting available. There's nothing technical that prevents sane people from uploading videos on BitChute, but there's not as strong as an incentive for them to do so.
The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds.
To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.
You're right about that. It's easy to think in terms of broad morals when you're not a target. It's also why I don't buy liberalism even though I'm defending a liberal practice in this specific instance.
I want to say that it's rooted in practicality rather than idealism. I'm uncomfortable with for-profit entities being arbitrators of acceptable content, because various "divisive" or "extreme" viewpoints outside of racism are threatening to their bottom lines as well. A distributed, censorship-proof network would have the side effect of allowing racism to propogate, but it could also protect viewpoints that lie outside of the stifling pro-market center-right consensus that grips most mainstream media platforms. The problem is that these alternatives only attract assholes for the time being.
It's a definite tradeoff where I can't stand behind any one position definitively yet.
It seems reasonable to judge for-profit entities by what they allow on their platform. Certainly this has downsides - the "free the nipple" would agree with your position on this.
Nobody forces anybody to be part of that community. And, frankly, neither Youtube nor Patreon not any other giant platforms are any kind of "community" anyway. Youtube is not a community, it's just a communication medium by now. It's like talking about community of people speaking English and trying to ban bad people from using the language (fortunately not yet possible, but if it were?)
I agree with this. I believe one of the biggest reasons public opinion switched to support gay marriage so quickly was because of public exposure of extremists like the Westboro Baptist Church. If ideas are that stupid and extreme, it helps people understand the real reality (sometimes at least)
>There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society,
I was thinking today about the high costs of the stupid idea of anti-vaccinations, in this case children that are not at fault will die because of this ideas, should we block them or we should put billions of dollars into educating this people instead of using this money for better things.
it is not a black or white problem but in this case I personally think is better to block this idea.
I would argue that the billions of dollars needing to be spent on education is indicative of just how badly underfunded education is in society. You see knock-on positive and negative effects of that at basically every level of analysis and observation.
Pretty much. If you think people believing and sharing false narratives is bad then you need to be speak out and support funding education. All other avenues are just going to be whack a mole, chasing the symptom not the cause.
Fixing education will not help people that are already out of school.
Instead of blaming the actual bad party you are trying to blame the schools and the idiots that belive the stupid thing, I am not arguing putting people in jail , I want to have a discussion of ways to keep the "expensive stupid ideas" down, it could be a solution that does not involve laws and governments.
There is a saying in Romanian I am not sure if there is an English equivalent:
"An idiot drops a stone in the lake and 10 geniuses are struggling to find a way to get it out"
It's a good point, although I think it's more about people waving the banner of free speech. As the variety of material available shows, we live in the best era in history for free speech. But it's not like people need to talk about that; they just talk about what they want.
Those banned from one distributor or another will of course wave the banner of free speech, because that sounds much nicer than, "Why won't people just leave me alone to organize purging society of all the Jews?" But it's not like the government is suppressing them; it's just that distributors have decided that they don't want to associate with a very small number of people. And that banner-waving has always struck me as a bit false; it's not like, e.g., Nazis are known for their tolerance of dissent, so I have to suspect that their fondness of "free speech" would evaporate the moment they had any real power.
> That's the weird thing about free speech. Any community explicitly built upon it tends to exclusively attract those in _immediate_ need of it: conspiracy theorists and racists for the most part.
Which is why it's better when giant platforms themselves allow free speech rather than relegating it to niche communities. Of course, good luck convincing them of that.
Sounds like the early days of YouTube, Reddit and others. Fringe groups are always the first to seize on new platforms where they can get in front of new eyeballs and aren’t yet drowned out by quality or truthful content.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare the content on a startup platform to a well-established corporate behemoth.
That being said I checked out bitchute for videos on fringe chemistry demonstrations that wouldn’t survive on YouTube. Some pretty cool stuff in that category. But still haven’t been back there because the production values of most are just terrible and painful to watch.
Sounds like YouTube right now if my recommendations are to be believed.
I don’t know why YouTube thinks I want to watch nutcase conspiracy theorists and alt-right whackjobs and compilations of “SJWs getting owned” but it seems to have plenty of them to show me.
I'd argue that "early adopters" are not the same as fringe groups. There's an important distinction.
As an extreme example, it would be the same as saying 4chan and voat attracted the same type of users in the beginning (as much as 4chan involves some fringe groups)
Corollary: a known, named extremism will have an opposite extremism that can be as bad as the thing it purports to oppose, though it will operate in an orthogonal way and it might not be always have a specific name.
I won't evaluate whether or not your claim is true, but I waited 6 years to join reddit (and when I did, I immediately blocked and unsubscribed from all the main subreddits) and never made an account on YouTube. So I feel like I should be able to criticize platforms until they reach a stage that I want to use them, right?
One presumes that people are not in any way obligated to use garbage platforms they don't like to consume content they don't want in service of some higher commitment to a platform that does not exist but might emerge later under ideal circumstances. Rather it is typically the platform operator's job to manage the platform in a way that attracts content of interest, right?
And surely interesting content emerging is not a given. Voat is 4 years old (older than reddit and YouTube were when I started using them, at a point where most of their content was not fringe stuff). The front page is: Far-right politics, libertarian politics, some weird political thing about the french, a guy complaining about YouTube censorship, MAGA memes, MAGA memes, a picture of a cute cat cuddling with Nazis, an attempt to bandwagon someone who wrote a code of conduct, a meme about how George HW Bush is in hell because he doesn't support Trump, PewDiePie, Linux is over because of code of conduct, a meme about how there are only two genders, a meme about how liberals don't believe in fumigating ant hills because they're weak, a video about how George HW Bush is a piece of shit because he likes Israel, a post rhetorically asking why anyone is sad about George HW Bush dying, a Washington Times article about "illegal immigrants", a conservative article alleging Hollywood are all pedophiles, a nazi webcomic, an article about how Democrats stole all the California house seats, a post about how it would be good if someone lynched Emmanuel Macron and how that would be enjoyable, and a meme about how right-wingers should ironically wear burqas to own liberals while they are beating liberals up, a meme of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she's a stupid idiot (this is a "parody" -- not actually clear what it's a parody of, but whatever).
There are a couple I didn't copy-paste here because the titles have racial slurs in them and I couldn't figure out a way to summarize the content without repeating them. So I hope you'll provisionally yield that Voat has not yet grown beyond what you call the "startup platform" phase.
I guess it's possible that Voat is just about to turn the corner, but if I had to guess...
Many right-wing Youtube personalities are civic nationalists, identitarians and (actual) classic libertarians or regular conservatives who are repeatedly de-monetized and have strikes put on their channels. https://i.imgur.com/29qnxka.jpg
If you actually hear what they have to say you'll realize all they are doing is criticizing the status quo, disagreeing with leftist positions and covering racial statistics that the mainstream media wont do. It's a stretch and really extreme to call anyone a Nazi which doesn't even make sense cause it just means someone who is a German supremacist and national socialist.
Easy to brush off things you disagree with as conspiracy theories but it's not intelligent.
It's the same issue any service or platform dedicated to freedom of speech has. The people you find there are the types who get banned or blocked elsewhere for controversial views outside of the mainstream.
But hey, that's true of any right protecting service or platform. The initial adopters will usually be the people who need that protection earliest, which often translates to criminals, extremists and nutcases. See also most privacy focused tools and platforms (like Tor) which attract the exact same audiences.
It's one reason marketing a service or platform based on privacy or free speech is usually doomed to fail.
But it's not an unsurmountable obstacle. These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That way, while the nutcases will still join en masse, you'll attract enough 'normal' people that people's perceptions will be of you as a neutral provider rather than crazy fringe community.
> These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority.
That isn't possible unless you filter out the bullies and nutcases. If you don't filter out those folks, the place will eventually get taken over by them. The irony is, if you filter them out those very same people will cry about "censorship" and "FREE SPEECH".
You can't have Truly True Free Speech on the internet. It is too cheap for a few folks to spoil things for everybody else. In order to keep a good level of discourse, some people, some times, just have to get lose their right to access certain platforms.
I mean, what is spam filtering besides "censorship"? Everybody filters spam... Thriving communities with good, open content have to filter out bullies and troublemakers the same way.
> Conservatives are the only ones who pose a serious threat to their plans. We have to be doped up & silenced first. Thank the gods they can’t taker away our guns. 87 muslims were given jobs & positions of power this mid term election. The news media has done a good job hiding that fact.
This comment on the linked post nicely sums up BitChute’s niche.
As always, seems to be full of right-wing anti-semitism, fake news and outlandish conservative conspiracy theories. Just check the 'popular' tab: "Welcome to "Your" Zionist Occupied Government", "EXPOSED: Jewish Donors Granted "Access To NYPD HQ", "How the Globalists Stole Our Home". All uploaded within the last hour.
It's kind of funny, but your position (and other experiences with uncensored platforms) suggests that left wing ideas can only prosper when supported by censorship and thought supression.
Any service that strongly supports free speech will naturally attract the extremists which have been displaced from elsewhere. Right or left doesn't matter, it's just the result of the current political climate.
> It's just the result of the current political climate.
It has nothing to do with the "political climate". It has everything to do with the fact most people don't want to listen nut-jobs all day. In fact, in a free market it would appear people seem to prefer platforms that banish the nut jobs.
it has everything to do with the current political climate, and the fact that extremist views on one side are tolerated, while ones on the other are actively being fought against
if you don't want to listen to "nut jobs", you don't have to, nobody's shoving Alex Jones in your face, but banning people you find objectionable sets up a dangerous precedent
I'm sorry you feel that way but maybe the invisible hand of the free market has decided that it just isn't profitable for large companies to provide platforms for people like Alex Jones. You should be happy to live in a world where a business is allowed to make decisions that act in their rational best interest instead of being forced by government to do something that doesn't make sense to their bottom line.
Maybe Mr. Jones can build his own content distribution channels? If he can't, maybe his ideas just aren't that popular and his business should fail?
And for what it's worth, Alex Jones supporters spread like a cancer through sites that allow it. The community surrounding him and those like him are often more toxic then the founders.
what did you expect , travel vlogs? i believe youtube has cornered that market. Or are you suggesting that bitchute specifically excludes other kinds of content?
What is BitChute and why should I care that it's being suspended by Patreon? If I go to the front page of this site I just see a default Wordpress sidebar; there is one post that shows upon the front page, and it is password protected.
The problem with any platform that bills itself as "uncensorable" is that it will always attract the people that everyone else wants to keep as far away from them as possible. The repulsion people feel for those "deplorables", for lack of a better term, easily and automatically transfers to any platform that appears to tolerate them.
For this type of platform to succeed it must focus on self-replication rather than too-big-to-fail uncensorability, propagating through a hydra effect that makes it easy to clone and re-spin when major hubs get brought down.
This is basically what happened with BitTorrent. The trackers and indexes come and go, as whenever one obtains too much prominence the hammer comes down, but the core platform remains and it's reasonably easy for any interested party to pick up the pieces.
If someone really cared, they'd run the most blase service on top of such technology and actively kick off anyone slightly controversial. As they obtained mainstream acceptance, they'd be able to focus on developing the resiliency and portability of the underlying technology. With some work into ensuring this tech becomes known and depended upon primarily for its association with positive things, associations with undesirables can be written off as an unintended side effect, but the ultimate outcome would still be free publication without requiring the control or approval of any breed of censorious supervisor.
> If someone really cared, they'd run the most blase service on top of such technology and actively kick off anyone slightly controversial.
You'd first have to define controversial, a difficult task when dealing with the 'net:
* Communism - fine in Sweden, frowned upon in former Soviet satellite states
* Marihuana - forbidden in Sweden, allowed in Canada and parts of the US, tolerated in the Netherlands
* Women in revealing clothing - fine in western Europe, forbidden in islamic countries (for a recent example see [1])
* Antisemitism - forbidden in most of western Europe, daily fare on TV in many islamic countries
* ...
This list goes on, where do you draw the line? It would end up being a very bland service when everyone who is even slightly controversial is kicked off. So bland, actually, that the service would never obtain mainstream acceptance.
maybe a good compromise would be to base frontpage content on regional broadcast standards as that seems to be a pretty reliable measure for what is considered acceptable and then simply relegate the other content within it's own 'after dark' category, available to registered users. this is essentially how we handled things back in the era of video stores and it still seems applicable imo; keep the content, just bring back the curtain.
This just moves the problem, it does not get rid of it. You'd still have to draw a line somewhere or you'd be just as lambasted - if not more so - by the ravenous hordes of Twitter etc: "odessacubbage.video hides nazis / commies / porn / jihadis / furries / whathavenots behind a smokescreen, get him!". They'll be calling your advertisers, scream murder at your registrar, boycott your hosting company, petition the government to do an inquiry and do all those other things the hordes do to quiet a dissenting voice. Those Twitter hordes did not exist in the days of video stores...
I don't understand why BitChute can't moderate how the site itself appears to the casual viewer without sacrificing Free Speech.
Free Speech does not mean they have to promote the content that is uploaded, only that they do not censor it. Allow conspiracy theorists and extremists (right or left) to post what they want.. but you don't have to feature all recent uploads on the front page. You actually don't have to feature popular or recent uploads on the front page at all.
> I don't understand why BitChute can't moderate how the site itself appears to the casual viewer without sacrificing Free Speech.
When you decide that a private platform deciding what is acceptable and worthy of promotion on their own platform violates free speech (which is the basis for the “free speech” challenge against YouTube that justifies BitChute), then exercising editorial control of what is given prominent placement on your own platform would be a violation.
So, yeah, they are being consistent with their own (boneheaded) concept of free speech when they are hands off with their platform recommendations.
Even if patreon & friends are ok with it, they still need to avoid businesses that visa & friends do not want on their payment networks or will only allow them for a large cost. And by derivative what major regulators do not want on payment & banking systems or without a lot of onerous paperwork and gotchas.
The classic example in this is porn, and now it's fringe right wing things.
> The classic example in this is porn, and now it's fringe right wing things.
Consider that porn was gone after and deplatformed because of it's legal grey area in many jurisdictions. I guess that means right wing things are now up to be declared illegal now?
What? No. Porn is the lifeblood of many industries.
The problem with porn is two-fold:
- Some classes of advertisers don't like it (don't want their ads associated with porn). Removing porn from your platform might be necessary depending on your business model and target audience.
- Websites that will commonly have minors will usually avoid the risk and outright ban porn. Still, it's not like they wouldn't take it if they could. Steam for example has recently started approving porn games.
Payment processing is so heavily regulated and dependent on networks, it's hard to make the case that they are a normal businesses. When you have KYC obligations, you have to collect intelligence on your customers and supply it to the government, and that's not something a hotdog stand or a bookstore needs to do. Payment companies are different.
Patreon may well be within its rights and contracts to sabotage business partners it disagrees with, but the artificial barrier to market entry of a license for processing payments makes their righteous posturing a bit vainglorious.
I get these people don't do principle, but it's worth considering the broader impact of dispensing with it.
168 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadThe good news is that the continued censorship will fuel adoption of crypto and speed up the demise of parasitic middlemen who take a cut off every transaction
Edit: Silently downvoted, no disagreement voiced. Welcome to the new Reddit.
God forbid the vast majority of people in the world don't want to listen to a bunch of racist nut jobs ramble on about various ill founded conspiracy theories.
I just see a private company choosing to not do business with another private company. Isn't that what the whole "free market" thing supposed to be about?
Remember, all that you have to do is make alt currencies inconvenient enough to use for normal payment needs, and this will discourage people from getting involved. Lower participation deprives the alt economy of goods, services, and the ability to exchange currency for "real" cash.
That doesn't mean that crypto is totally useless, just pointing out that there is not a technical "silver bullet" solution to this problem. Technical solutions must be part of the answer, but these must be backed by political force.
Most business owners do not have the technical ability, interest, or logistical overhead to actually accept "crypto" (or cash) without "parasitic middlemen". This is why Coinbase, BitGo, et al. are very successful in this area, and account for virtually all cryptocurrency commerce. The function of Coinbase or BitGo is not parasitic; no business wants to cope with the arduous requirements to be able to accept and store cryptocurrencies.
If you’re genuinely interested in understanding the principle of free speech, I recommend this as an introduction:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/
If you want to express something I don't like, then I'm not gonna try to silence you, but other than that you're on your own.
I'm sorry, but I don't see where @dmerfield says what you are arguing against.
Quoting @dmerfild for posterity:
> No it doesn’t. Free speech means allowing nazis to express themselves so you and others can understand nazism.
---
Interestingly, in most of Europe, "Free Speech" does not include this right. It is pretty uniquely American.
> Free speech means no one is forced to do business with nazis.
Actual free speech would, quite obviously, not depend on the content of the speech.
No it does not. The principle of free speech says nothing about who you are forced to do or not do business with. It only affects expression after all.
Just like I can freely say that any self-proclaimed "empath" is with all likelyhood just another sociopath.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Still, I guess this does provide a good use case for cryptocurrencies and what not.
How do you replace one platform when all the others conspire to prevent you from doing so? You can't just bootstrap your own internet... at some level you're using other's stuff
edit: Looks like they're more than just a "website", but both this site and the platform site really don't do a good job of explaining that.
It's more like "don't depends on Silicon valley's ecosystem" these days. Because all these tech corporations went crazy since Trump got elected and clearly decided they'll use their audience and market shares for political goals... which they have all the rights to do by the way, and it's actually a good thing, if leads to a more diverse landscape of tech services. There are opportunities for competition but still a lack of VC that can fund that competition...
EDIT: I obviously do not support violent or "racist" views. But since now even radical feminists get booted out of social media and what not because they don't subscribe to a specific ideology, it proves that at the end of the day it has nothing to do with "fighting Nazis".
And if you aren't terrified of that you damn well should be.
Ironically I think that Trump would LOVE to deploy this against his enemies. Perhaps he will at some point.
That's why we need to strengthen political and financial "common carriage".
Part of freedom is the responsibility to accept consequences of your actions. If you choose to say such vile things that people quit doing business with you, that's just people exercising their freedom. If you think it's unfair, you are valuing your freedom higher than everyone else's.
When you complain about "deplatforming" you aren't asking for more freedom. You're asking for the freedom of others to be removed.
The part where activist mobs can force you not to do business with people targeted by the mobs.
> Part of freedom is the responsibility to accept consequences of your actions.
That's a meaningless platitude - being personally destroyed or run out of business merely because somebody set a hate mob on you is not "consequences of your actions". This is creating climate of hate and intolerance, and that's in substantial the climate we're living in now. Some time ago, it was "if you don't like it - don't read it". Now it's "if you don't like it - destroy his life, his business, and anybody he is associated and does business with". Describing it as "accept consequences" is either extremely naive or disingenuous. I certainly do not want and will not accept such climate of permanent war as something proper.
> You're asking for the freedom of others to be removed.
No I did not. My comments are just above that, and anybody reading them can clearly see I have not asked for any freedoms to be removed. If you're going to distort my opinions, it's probably not smart to do it right next to it - too obvious.
Nobody stole your freedom. People just don't want to interact with you. That is okay though, it is their right to elect to avoid interaction.
Why not just mail out a DVD of all these wacko videos to subscribers instead?
Back when 9/11 conspiracies were still quasi-mainstream, somebody in our neighborhood went door to door and gave every house a copy of Loose Change.
Because he wants to talk on the internet? Is that not allowed anymore because you don't like it?
So your counter-argument to my argument that Internet freedoms are being destroyed is "well, you can still mail out DVDs"? Are you sure it's the strongest counter-argument you could master? In fact, how long did you work on it before considering it's a counter-argument at all? Because for me it certainly looks like confirming my point.
> Back when 9/11 conspiracies were still quasi-mainstream
You mean, never.
> somebody in our neighborhood went door to door and gave every house a copy of Loose Change.
And this connects to my argument... how exactly? I was talking about specifically the Internet.
> Because this one is fresh out of freedom.
Let's not be so pessimistic, but instead marvel at the how cool it is that the internet was built from the get-go to be decentralized
Except in this case it isn't censorship. Nobody can be forced to do business with BitChute if they don't want to. That is just as much of a right as anything else.
BitChute is still more than able to host all the trash it wants. They will just have to find another payment provider. And they do exist. I mean, porn sites manage to figure out how to collect payment. It's expensive as hell because people constantly chargeback porn and virtually every porn hoster is sketchy as fuck too.
Even then they could just get a PO box and have people mail in checks or hell, even cash. It might be old school, but that is how it was done back when all the wackos and conspiracy newsletters were actual things you got in the mail.
Patreon, and other payment processors (like Stripe.com) are having their arms twisted from the highest levels by Visa and Mastercard.
Think for a moment if it would be ok with you if Visa and Mastercard were doing this because they wanted to silence people who advocated for women's rights. Would you still be so libertarian about it?
I think there's also a fundamental difference between an organization that bans people who increase the rights of marginalized groups and one that bans people that are looking to further marginalize people, so your analogy doesn't do anything for me.
It's not just Patreon. If anyone sets up a similar service, and does business with someone that Visa does not want, they will use their monopolistic power to shut you down.
Imagine if they were doing this about a cause you disagreed with. Imagine if our financial industry was run by Trump supporters, and they were slowly squeezing their critics out financially. This is bad.
The only question is what is the precise coefficient of friction on that slippery slope.
You can argue that wedding cakes should be baked for gay couples but that websites should not be hosted for nazis for reasons A, B, and C. But claiming that businesses have some sort of broad right to free association is not merely specious, but completely and obviously wrong.
Businesses do have a very broad right of freedom to serve who they please. The one exception is when historically many businesses have used that power to participate in oppression against specific downtrodden groups. So a business can happily decline to serve US congressmen, freemasons, and people who have thrown up on their floor previously. But they can't decline to serve black people as a group.
The specific groups who have been legally recognized for this are called protected classes, and it's pretty settled law in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group
Unless we live in a 100% free market, then what you are saying is totally invalid. We actually ARE forced to use the established banks and payment processors, we have no choice. The government provides all sorts of privileges and protections to them that make it impossible to just build your own.
When the government strips payment processors of all of their privileges, and when the Communications Decency Act no longer protects media companies masquerading as communications platforms (eg Twitter, YouTube and Facebook), then and only then will your assertions begin to make any sense.
Unless you are trying to send money to ISIS, then payment processors should be obligated to support you.
And indeed, payment processors and banks are far more worried about you donating money to people who's politics they disagree with than actual violent terrorists or child pornographers.
Yes, all payment processors have special privileges, but so to would the one you start tomorrow. But instead you want to force another to serve you. Why?
But in addition to that, the barriers to entry are extreme, to the point where they are essentially monopolies. And they are using their disproportionate powers to play politics.
Would it be okay for the US postal service to deplatform them as well?
I’m always curious about this argument that “just mail it” because the freedom to send anything though the postal service has not always been some sacrosanct right (e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws ). And in other countries that don’t have such a permissive First Amendment I imagine it may still be okay for the post office to censor mail.
to bake the cake or not to bake it? that is the question
Isn't that pretty self explanatory...?
Hell, antifa have a patreon account and they are classified a terrorist organisation by the US government https://www.patreon.com/intlantifadefence
Has alex jones been classified a domestic terrorist? Is infowars a domestic terrorist organisation?
Source?
Really?
OK, how about this: he's a polarizing nutcase who has adopted controversial and unsupportable standings on several calamitous events in the past two decades.
Most people that see a mainstream business supporting him assume that business adopts those same ideas, rightly or wrongly. So, the perception of supporting Alex Jones can be incredibly damaging to the reputation of a business.
They don't want to be associated with any political stance that might not agree with the vast majority of the population because they want to have as many clients as possible.
Wasn't there a scandal a few months ago where YouTube was classifying videos talking about LGBTQ issues as adult content, and demonetizing them? https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17424472/youtube-lgbt-demo...
Is/was it the platform maintainers applying their own morals, or is it the money (advertisers) who don't want to be associated with these topics?
The walled gardens are already quite ridiculous, with FB censoring Michaelangelo's David and the Napalm Girl, giving us a kindergarten version of the Internet (although funnily enough, they can't censor fake news, so the "children"'s minds got brainwashed there).
This has turned to a bit of a pointless rambling.
BitChute annoys me because the video streaming is decentralized through bittorrent tech, but the repository of videos is totally dependent and centralized with BitChute.
You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute.
Which is why when you check the front page you get and click popular you get... FOX News clips for posting on Voat (a far-right reddit clone), conspiracy theories about the magnetic poles, conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation, conspiracy theories about the Mexican border, a far-right news source complaining about Jeff Flake, neo-nazi videos, Brazilian spam, anti-semitism, people complaining about YouTube censorship, etc.
I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content.
I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives.
* I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.
There was a lot of scaremongering around the time that voat was launched, the "under 18" part was often left off when people were using that ban in an argument.
Of course, all of this makes for a charming community.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
As opposed to, you know, the New York Times or even the Supreme Court.
Bitchute isn't the home of people posting Trump critiques. It's the home of people explaining why all criticisms of Trump must be dismissed as conspiracies initiated by the real enemy: Jewish New World Order reptilians https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/
It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.
All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
Jack booted thugs most certainly will point guns at anyone who tries setting up a payment processing system to compete with the company that blocked them.
> All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
BitChute is NOT free to find another way to seek payment, because of a state-enforced monopoly on the payment market.
It would be like if your water company decided to cut off water to your house, to compel you to stop speaking, at the behest of activists. Sure, you're "free" to carry buckets of fresh water to your house, I suppose.
No, this is not some business decision, this is systematic economic pressure intended to coerce someone into silence. And frankly I think it is good grounds for a RICO case.
It's also not about protecting any opinions (popular or unpopular) from private refusal to assist in propagating them.
Free speech is not the same as anyone else being obligate to provide assistance with distributing your speech, in fact, such an entitlement would violate freedom of speech for those compelled to participate in speech they disagree with.
Yes. If these platforms and payment processors want to continue to enjoy the state-enforced privileges they receive, then they must, within reason, offer their services to all.
What makes Twitter far worse than Gab is that Twitter actually took the time to have a human review it, and gave it the green light. Gab at least is not attempting to police its content. That makes Twitter much worse.
This is all hypocrisy. The "outrage" of Gab is completely fake. There is no legitimate argument against Gab that does not include Twitter.
[1]: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/twitter-won-suspend-louis-...
There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.
Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice.
I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.
If you want to publish non-racist videos, you can publish them on BitChute without endorsing the racist videos.
The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds.
To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.
Perhaps because the videos that get censored are only shitty to people who aren't you?
I want to say that it's rooted in practicality rather than idealism. I'm uncomfortable with for-profit entities being arbitrators of acceptable content, because various "divisive" or "extreme" viewpoints outside of racism are threatening to their bottom lines as well. A distributed, censorship-proof network would have the side effect of allowing racism to propogate, but it could also protect viewpoints that lie outside of the stifling pro-market center-right consensus that grips most mainstream media platforms. The problem is that these alternatives only attract assholes for the time being.
It's a definite tradeoff where I can't stand behind any one position definitively yet.
It totally is! Stupid ideas are very dangerous. You don't want to hear about them from people with pitchforks at your door.
I was thinking today about the high costs of the stupid idea of anti-vaccinations, in this case children that are not at fault will die because of this ideas, should we block them or we should put billions of dollars into educating this people instead of using this money for better things.
it is not a black or white problem but in this case I personally think is better to block this idea.
Instead of blaming the actual bad party you are trying to blame the schools and the idiots that belive the stupid thing, I am not arguing putting people in jail , I want to have a discussion of ways to keep the "expensive stupid ideas" down, it could be a solution that does not involve laws and governments.
There is a saying in Romanian I am not sure if there is an English equivalent:
"An idiot drops a stone in the lake and 10 geniuses are struggling to find a way to get it out"
Those banned from one distributor or another will of course wave the banner of free speech, because that sounds much nicer than, "Why won't people just leave me alone to organize purging society of all the Jews?" But it's not like the government is suppressing them; it's just that distributors have decided that they don't want to associate with a very small number of people. And that banner-waving has always struck me as a bit false; it's not like, e.g., Nazis are known for their tolerance of dissent, so I have to suspect that their fondness of "free speech" would evaporate the moment they had any real power.
Which is why it's better when giant platforms themselves allow free speech rather than relegating it to niche communities. Of course, good luck convincing them of that.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare the content on a startup platform to a well-established corporate behemoth.
That being said I checked out bitchute for videos on fringe chemistry demonstrations that wouldn’t survive on YouTube. Some pretty cool stuff in that category. But still haven’t been back there because the production values of most are just terrible and painful to watch.
I don’t know why YouTube thinks I want to watch nutcase conspiracy theorists and alt-right whackjobs and compilations of “SJWs getting owned” but it seems to have plenty of them to show me.
As an extreme example, it would be the same as saying 4chan and voat attracted the same type of users in the beginning (as much as 4chan involves some fringe groups)
Corollary: a known, named extremism will have an opposite extremism that can be as bad as the thing it purports to oppose, though it will operate in an orthogonal way and it might not be always have a specific name.
One presumes that people are not in any way obligated to use garbage platforms they don't like to consume content they don't want in service of some higher commitment to a platform that does not exist but might emerge later under ideal circumstances. Rather it is typically the platform operator's job to manage the platform in a way that attracts content of interest, right?
And surely interesting content emerging is not a given. Voat is 4 years old (older than reddit and YouTube were when I started using them, at a point where most of their content was not fringe stuff). The front page is: Far-right politics, libertarian politics, some weird political thing about the french, a guy complaining about YouTube censorship, MAGA memes, MAGA memes, a picture of a cute cat cuddling with Nazis, an attempt to bandwagon someone who wrote a code of conduct, a meme about how George HW Bush is in hell because he doesn't support Trump, PewDiePie, Linux is over because of code of conduct, a meme about how there are only two genders, a meme about how liberals don't believe in fumigating ant hills because they're weak, a video about how George HW Bush is a piece of shit because he likes Israel, a post rhetorically asking why anyone is sad about George HW Bush dying, a Washington Times article about "illegal immigrants", a conservative article alleging Hollywood are all pedophiles, a nazi webcomic, an article about how Democrats stole all the California house seats, a post about how it would be good if someone lynched Emmanuel Macron and how that would be enjoyable, and a meme about how right-wingers should ironically wear burqas to own liberals while they are beating liberals up, a meme of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she's a stupid idiot (this is a "parody" -- not actually clear what it's a parody of, but whatever).
There are a couple I didn't copy-paste here because the titles have racial slurs in them and I couldn't figure out a way to summarize the content without repeating them. So I hope you'll provisionally yield that Voat has not yet grown beyond what you call the "startup platform" phase.
I guess it's possible that Voat is just about to turn the corner, but if I had to guess...
If you actually hear what they have to say you'll realize all they are doing is criticizing the status quo, disagreeing with leftist positions and covering racial statistics that the mainstream media wont do. It's a stretch and really extreme to call anyone a Nazi which doesn't even make sense cause it just means someone who is a German supremacist and national socialist.
Easy to brush off things you disagree with as conspiracy theories but it's not intelligent.
But hey, that's true of any right protecting service or platform. The initial adopters will usually be the people who need that protection earliest, which often translates to criminals, extremists and nutcases. See also most privacy focused tools and platforms (like Tor) which attract the exact same audiences.
It's one reason marketing a service or platform based on privacy or free speech is usually doomed to fail.
But it's not an unsurmountable obstacle. These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That way, while the nutcases will still join en masse, you'll attract enough 'normal' people that people's perceptions will be of you as a neutral provider rather than crazy fringe community.
That isn't possible unless you filter out the bullies and nutcases. If you don't filter out those folks, the place will eventually get taken over by them. The irony is, if you filter them out those very same people will cry about "censorship" and "FREE SPEECH".
You can't have Truly True Free Speech on the internet. It is too cheap for a few folks to spoil things for everybody else. In order to keep a good level of discourse, some people, some times, just have to get lose their right to access certain platforms.
I mean, what is spam filtering besides "censorship"? Everybody filters spam... Thriving communities with good, open content have to filter out bullies and troublemakers the same way.
Surely you meant the actual conspiracy theory Mueller is investigating?
This comment on the linked post nicely sums up BitChute’s niche.
- https://www.bitchute.com/channel/white-genocide/
- https://www.bitchute.com/channel/zionistreport/
- https://www.bitchute.com/channel/wayoftheworld/
It has nothing to do with the "political climate". It has everything to do with the fact most people don't want to listen nut-jobs all day. In fact, in a free market it would appear people seem to prefer platforms that banish the nut jobs.
if you don't want to listen to "nut jobs", you don't have to, nobody's shoving Alex Jones in your face, but banning people you find objectionable sets up a dangerous precedent
Maybe Mr. Jones can build his own content distribution channels? If he can't, maybe his ideas just aren't that popular and his business should fail?
And for what it's worth, Alex Jones supporters spread like a cancer through sites that allow it. The community surrounding him and those like him are often more toxic then the founders.
What is AIPAC?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofpbDgCj9rw
Thanks!
For this type of platform to succeed it must focus on self-replication rather than too-big-to-fail uncensorability, propagating through a hydra effect that makes it easy to clone and re-spin when major hubs get brought down.
This is basically what happened with BitTorrent. The trackers and indexes come and go, as whenever one obtains too much prominence the hammer comes down, but the core platform remains and it's reasonably easy for any interested party to pick up the pieces.
If someone really cared, they'd run the most blase service on top of such technology and actively kick off anyone slightly controversial. As they obtained mainstream acceptance, they'd be able to focus on developing the resiliency and portability of the underlying technology. With some work into ensuring this tech becomes known and depended upon primarily for its association with positive things, associations with undesirables can be written off as an unintended side effect, but the ultimate outcome would still be free publication without requiring the control or approval of any breed of censorious supervisor.
Not unlike the internet itself, really.
What's the appeal to users of a more inconvenient version of YouTube that has even more draconian moderation policies?
The appeal of BitChute is precisely its lack of censorship.
You'd first have to define controversial, a difficult task when dealing with the 'net:
* Communism - fine in Sweden, frowned upon in former Soviet satellite states
* Marihuana - forbidden in Sweden, allowed in Canada and parts of the US, tolerated in the Netherlands
* Women in revealing clothing - fine in western Europe, forbidden in islamic countries (for a recent example see [1])
* Antisemitism - forbidden in most of western Europe, daily fare on TV in many islamic countries
* ...
This list goes on, where do you draw the line? It would end up being a very bland service when everyone who is even slightly controversial is kicked off. So bland, actually, that the service would never obtain mainstream acceptance.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/12/01/egyptian-actress... - not exactly revealing to 'western' standards, enough for 5 years in prison according to the Egyptian prosecutor
Free Speech does not mean they have to promote the content that is uploaded, only that they do not censor it. Allow conspiracy theorists and extremists (right or left) to post what they want.. but you don't have to feature all recent uploads on the front page. You actually don't have to feature popular or recent uploads on the front page at all.
When you decide that a private platform deciding what is acceptable and worthy of promotion on their own platform violates free speech (which is the basis for the “free speech” challenge against YouTube that justifies BitChute), then exercising editorial control of what is given prominent placement on your own platform would be a violation.
So, yeah, they are being consistent with their own (boneheaded) concept of free speech when they are hands off with their platform recommendations.
The classic example in this is porn, and now it's fringe right wing things.
Consider that porn was gone after and deplatformed because of it's legal grey area in many jurisdictions. I guess that means right wing things are now up to be declared illegal now?
The problem with porn is two-fold:
- Some classes of advertisers don't like it (don't want their ads associated with porn). Removing porn from your platform might be necessary depending on your business model and target audience.
- Websites that will commonly have minors will usually avoid the risk and outright ban porn. Still, it's not like they wouldn't take it if they could. Steam for example has recently started approving porn games.
Patreon may well be within its rights and contracts to sabotage business partners it disagrees with, but the artificial barrier to market entry of a license for processing payments makes their righteous posturing a bit vainglorious.
I get these people don't do principle, but it's worth considering the broader impact of dispensing with it.