The drive to take back control of the narrative by “Big Gov” and “Big Tech” is making ever wider circles.
What started out with the ban of the channels of controversial political commentators like Alex Jones from Youtube back in 2018 or Milo Yiannopoulus from Twitter back in 2016 and creeped over the years to hit other more or less prominent public figures challenging the existing dominant narrative of Western societies, struck in the newest crackdown this week a whole range of large “Crypto” related channels on Youtube.
While some people on “Crypto” Twitter expressed satisfaction with the move by Youtube to remove “ICO scammers” (in which certainly a fair amount of the targeted people fall, but not all of them) from their platform; other people called for challenging Youtube via legal means or advocated for the certainly more promising option to find ways to make centralized gatekeepers obsolete in the future.
“I never bought into the conspiracy theory that Google/YouTube is scared of crypto. In the end it turned that it was an algo that went a little overboard but the algo wasn’t necessarily wrong. I find that many (if not the majority) of YouTubers in Crypto promote scams like ICO’s & other ponzi’s. In addition YouTube is dealing with some heavy regulations & the combination of enforcing and cracking down on the following 3 things has made it challenging for YouTube Creators:
- Content that can be perceived as directed to Children (13 & Under) must be labeled as such
- Content that could be perceived as harassing others (aka being too critical of others, but this is very subjective)
- Promotion or sale of Regulated Goods (like Tobacco or Alcohol are obvious, but does this include promoting Derivative Trading?)
My Assumption is that YouTube decided to enforce all 3 at once with an algo and it banned way more videos & channels than they expected but it does not mean it was 100% wrong. Also there is so much ambiguity in all 3 of these new policies that Content creators don’t know if they are in violation or which one they are in violation of.
YouTube needs to be more clear on this”
“YouTube’s brutal censorship of Crypto Influencers last week is a nasty reminder to everyone that we desperately need a decentralized censorship resistant social media platform without overlords on their elitist, moral high horses dictating what we can and can not say.”
It seems that the “powers that be” start to fully grasp what damage the enhanced free speech discourse enabled by the global penetration of the Internet has done to their ability to control the narrative and therefore their capacity to cling to power unchallenged. Following that crucial moment of “enlightenment” they made it since 2016 a priority to gain back control over what can and can not be said on centralized “Big Tech” platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Twitter & Co.
While challenging the centralized/state monopoly on money issuance is one of the pillars of centralized power to be taken down if the world shall march towards a more prosperous future, the ability to freely spread and exchange information is another basic fundamental cornerstone which allows society to organize itself outside centralized gatekeepers with all the troubles, corruption and exploitation these centralized power structures will bring with it.
To build viable alternatives which are truly censorship-resistant and also achieve mass scale due to reasonably well-designed UX will be one of the main tasks and challenges for the upcoming decade which will decide if the world is moving closer to freedom or slavery.
We will commit to report and provide exposure in some of our future and upcoming reporting to people working on such alternatives.
