Censorship & Social Media, why we need Steemit more than ever.

williambanks (69)in #steemit • 8 years ago (edited)

On the off chance you've missed it somehow...
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman finds himself forced to apologize for tampering with user accounts and editing their comments.

Here's the truth of what happened.
As the head honcho of Reddit, he of course has the ability and the right to censor messages.
He was tired of the flood of criticism, and so he went through and edited numerous postings that were critical of himself and his decisions.

This isn't a matter of simple censorship. It is inarguable that as CEO that his job is to act at all times in the best interests of the shareholders.
There is nothing wrong at all with him having complete control over what does and does not run on his site, he's in charge and websites can be held responsible for libel.

But this needs to be a binary. It needs to be clear
"THIS POST WAS CENSORED!"

That's not what he did. He literally edited the comments of the users.

He put words in the mouths of people!
He had no right to do this!
NO ONE DOES!!!

This is a dangerous precedent. Many people's careers and reputations are tied to their social media accounts.
Criminals are tracked all the time by their social media postings and prosecutors have won convictions on the basis of evidence gathered from social media accounts.

All of this is based on the idea that only the user has the right to say whatever the user says on behalf of said user, ergo the user owns it.
It's their speech, it's their words. They own it and they are liable for every word of it.

In his case he limited it to only people critical of himself.
He started flamewars by changing the target from himself to whoever the topic instigator was.
This isn't some silly practical joke and it's unclear how he could have thought it would be.

These were hateful, hurtful things, literally cyberbullying and rather than deleting it, he made someone else feel it. As I said on Reddit and few other places.

More importantly, the act of editing and hitting submit, meant that he felt that same malice about his targets, but wasn't man enough to own his own words. Deciding to put them in the mouth of someone else instead. The CEO hit submit, to my mind that means the CEO approved that message. Is another read even possible here?

It's abuse plain and simple and speaks volumes about the man himself and his suitability for leadership.
If I were a shareholder, I'd be hitting the sell button on those shares as quickly as possible right now.

Yet this is a problem with every social media platform. Sure you can say something, but once you say it, it can be edited because it's just a string of text sitting in a database somewhere and anyone with DB access has the ability to change what's in there.

This is a problem for nearly all computer storage systems, eVoting has the same flaw, but votes don't generally tie a person to an idea or a concept.

Social Media ties you to a series of thoughts, ideas and concepts that define WHO you are to the rest of the online world.
If you say something ignorant, hurtful or stupid, well that's on you. I know I have more than my fair share of those.

But if someone is putting words in your mouth, what recourse do you have? In a society where you are guilty until proven innocent, how do you prove you didn't say something?

The internet never forgets, and these things are going to follow you your whole life.
Having your digital artifacts tampered with is the electronic equivalent of being set up or framed.

Satoshi Nakamoto realized this and it's why he created Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is money that cannot be tampered with!

It's money that can't be tampered with because it uses a concept of digitally signed messages

In the bitcoin world, these messages all amount to "I am Bob and I'm sending 1BTC to Alice".
The content of this message is then fed to an algorithm called ECDSA and ECDSA takes the message content and signs it with Bob's private key.
Once the message is signed, anyone who knows Bob's public key can then use that public key to verify that Bob actually signed the message.

As long as Bob maintains exclusive control of his private key then Bob maintains exclusive control over his bitcoin.

Bitcoins are just messages.
The bitcoin blockchain limits what content those messages contain to strictly financial looking data.

However if Reddit or Facebook or any other social media platform just used ECDSA or the newer EdDSA cryptographic signature algorithms, then it would be impossible to edit a message after the fact. At most a user could send a signed message that says "x replaces y", it's easy to prove the user who sent it and it's considered mathematically impossible to fake.

And this is what makes steem such a powerful tool for social change.

If you read the whitepaper you'll see that steemit is intended to be a flagship for the steem blockchain.
One that is intended for other social media platforms to adopt and use as well.

Tamper resistance is exactly why they SHOULD!

You could still have the ability to censor a person or a message. Just like we do here.
When you flag a post you're just sending a message saying, "I don't like that, so don't display it to the others."
People interested in seeing can still see it.

It's still present on the blockchain, but it's not in your face on the website.
There's no way to edit a user's content though and no way to shadow ban anyone.
Any site can run any subset of the information on the blockchain and display it however they want.

Steemit is unique in the social media world. Because it is backed by the steem blockchain, but it has a set of rules that permit a little bit of community moderation and censorship. Yet this censorship isn't totalitarian. Steemit's censorship can be completely avoided simply by using Tor and pointing your Tor browser to usteempccoapgood.onion or if you don't have Tor you can visit it by going to usteempccoapgood.onion.to This service is provided to you courtesy of @someguy123

From either place you can see and use steem completely uncensored.

This freedom to say what you believe is vital. Censorship is always a tool of oppression. It should never be illegal to speak up about abuse from anyone no matter who they are, no matter how powerful or well connected they or their friends are. No one has the right to silence the voice of another, but while I can accept that some things are just inappropriate and offensive to common sensibility, what we cannot continue to tolerate is the free for all of profit driven moderation, curation and editing that is going on in the broader internet.

Soon it will be a jail-able offense to say anything that hurts the feelings of others.
I would love to see laws like that go away, maybe we can't fight that law right now.
But at least we can make sure that the person doing time for "saying things" actually said those things.

Steemit provides you something you don't get with other social media platforms, a choice.
The real question at this point is why Reddit, Facebook, Twitter etc don't move their infrastructure over to steem.

While that might sound ludicrous at first, it actually makes perfect sense. There is a real value proposition for them.

Yes under the hood is the steem blockchain, the same blockchain as steemit.
But they maintain their site and their service exactly as-is and just have far less infrastructure they need to pay for. For any social media network the choice should be clear.

So here's the deal...

If the mountain will not come to Muhammad, then Muhammad must go to the mountain.

Let's do what we can to bring our friends, family and followers over from "other" social media platforms.
Share this, resteem it, tweet it, copy and paste it. I don't care how you get the message out there, but get the message out.
Your social media is broken, come here because we've fixed it!

#steem #censorship #news