Project Veritas Proves Shadow Banning -- This is Great News for Steemit

James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas caught Twitter employees red-handed on the issue of shadow-banning. And while it’s well-known within the Right and Libertarian communities that this practice has been going on for a long time, now we have Twitter employees on tape telling us how it’s done.

I know I’ve been shadow-banned. I stopped trying to use Twitter as a brand-builder months ago. Instead I’ve went back to building an audience through other distribution channels to build readership.

By showing up every day and writing something people want to read and share with others, I get around the shadow-ban by having my audience do the work for me indirectly.

Now I get more interactions with people who read my work spontaneously and copy me onto Twitter from the places where my work is published than I ever did from trying to squeeze it into the Twitter pump.

Instead of spending valuable time trying to game Twitter’s stupid employees, I’d rather let the power of ideas build my audience. There is more than one way to build organic growth.

I’ve always maintained that there are two rules to being successful on the internet.

1. Quality sells itself
2. Be interesting or be ignored

In fact, those are the basic tenets of being an entrepreneur of any kind. Quality product sells itself. It needs to be unique in some way to grab someone’s attention.

After that its simply a matter of scale.

Twitter believes it has a unique thing with its platform. It doesn’t. Anyone can build what they’ve built. What they have is market share.

But, they are rapidly losing something far more valuable, mind share.

They are losing the trust of the people who use their platform. They’ve already lost it with the alt-right, who they didn’t want in the first place. And that’s fine as far as it goes. But, shadow-banning has gone far beyond just persecuting a bunch of neo-Nazi social justice warriors.

Twitter is Stupid and Evil

No, it continues to expand its reach into all forms of political expression not in accordance with that of its ultra-liberal employees and monetary benefactors. Because, make no mistake, Twitter doesn’t actually make any money.

So, it is dependent on outside funding to keep its lights on.

It’s massive market share in the micro-blogging space is a mirage with reports of up to one-third of its ‘users’ being bots and not real people.

O’Keefe’s expose only confirms what we already knew. But, it confirms it for those that refused to believe it previously; those still in denial that the media isn’t horrifically biased and who have only a passing interest in politics anyway.

By the way, those people vote too.

And when it becomes obvious to them that Twitter (and Facebook and Google) are openly stifling not just speech, but the ability of a person to make a living because they engage in wrongthink that sets off the average American’s over-developed sense of fairness.

Censorship is the lowest form of control. It reveals a fundamental weakness not only of your position but also your character. Twitter’s company ethos is evil. And it’s the worst kind of evil.

It’s evil that grows from intellectually laziness and fear.

The employees O’Keefe’s people interviewed betray their basic inhumanity, their hatred of the other. And the company will never recover those that have left it behind.

Twitter is setting itself up for failure. Because, you can’t silence someone who people want to hear speak. If you do, then people will naturally gravitate away from your platform.

I’ve been telling my readers to drop Twitter for over a year now. Nearly all of them are <a href=https://tomluongo.me/2017/10/11/post-facebook-world-value/">post-Facebook. But, why not Twitter? Because while Twitter spends a lot of money it doesn’t make erecting barriers to communication it consistently fails to be effective at it.

So, not only are Twitter’s employees evil, they are also incompetent.

And yet, I still ask the question, “Why support a platform that doesn’t want you?”

The response is invariably, “But that’s exactly what they want? So, we should fight them.”

No. We shouldn’t. We should abandon the platform en masse for one that is incapable of censorship.

Full STEEM Ahead

The main objection to cryptocurrencies at this point is wondering what real-world problems are they solving?

In my mind, censorship and creator rights are two of the most important issues of this information age.

<a href=https://www.steemit.com/">Steemit and its underlying cryptocurrency STEEM solve those issues by guaranteeing not only your voice will be heard, but it will also be remunerated based on your efforts, not the agenda of advertisers who stand behind all of these so-called social media networks.

Governments in Europe are now criminalizing free-speech. In the U.S. we allow public-private partnerships (a hallmark of Fascism) like Twitter, Facebook and Google to un-person us in the name of civility.

This is pushing us towards something new. There are a lot of new social media platforms out there – Minds, Gab, Medium – but only Steemit is built from the ground up to be owned by those that use it and profit them directly.

And it is as censorship-proof as it can be. Why? Because once your content is written to the STEEM blockchain it can’t be censored. You own it.

It can be down-voted. But your voice can’t be silenced.

This is the true power of decentralized communication.

They can’t take your blog down by putting pressure on your ISP or your DNS provider. They can’t shadow-ban you because someone doesn’t like what you say.

You can still write all the drivel you want but it likely won’t get people’s attention.

You still have to be interesting or you will be ignored.

The Scarcity’s the Thing….

Because you only have so much voting power per day. There are diminishing returns to both posting and voting. So, people don’t waste it on superfluous twaddle like they do on Facebook and Twitter, where your votes are endless.

Once there is some amount of scarcity, people’s behavior changes for the better.

If your audience likes it, they ‘resteem’ it and upvote it, just like on Twitter. But with the added benefit that those votes and resteems are worth money.

That’s right. Money. And that makes all the difference in the world.

People’s natural discrimination takes over when something is worth something. They start thinking in terms of, “Is this irrelevant comment really worth $0.25 or $1.00?”

And so, you have to earn people’s votes. Just like in real life, not the fake one promulgated by stake-free social media.

Steemit’s value proposition is completely opposite of Twitter’s. Put the content creator in touch with their audience directly and incentivize both to form communities.

And in aligning incentives this way it destroys Twitter. The more I watch their control attempts unravel, the more I believe these companies are whistling past their own graveyards.

Twitter could have kept that ethos, but they decided not to. They felt it was more important to suppress “the shitty people” than to allow their words to hang themselves.

Every day it becomes more important for the future of our society that we free information from the shackles of those in control of the means of its distribution. Right now that’s governments and big corporations with vested interests in using you to sell you shit you don’t need.

That model is broken. It’s corrupt and it’s destroying our society. And, thankfully, due to the endless creativity of human beings, will eventually end because of projects like Steemit.