Hundreds of media accounts were just deplatformed. The need for a decentralized web is greater than ever.

Over the past few days Facebook and Twitter have deplatformed hundreds of accounts with millions of followers in total under the guise of fighting “clickbait” and “spam”. The Washington Post reports:

Facebook said on Thursday it purged more than 800 U.S. publishers and accounts for flooding users with politically-oriented spam, reigniting accusations of political censorship and arbitrary decision-making.

In doing so, Facebook demonstrated its increased willingness to wade into the thorny territory of policing domestic political activity. Some of the accounts had been in existence for years, had amassed millions of followers, and professed support for conservative or liberal ideas…

Just one day after the Facebook purge, Twitter followed suit, deplatforming the accounts of alternative media outlets Anti-Media and The Free Thought Project. Sputnik International reports:

Anti-Media and TFTP aren’t automated bot accounts or spammers. They are run by US citizens who used the internet applications Twitter and Facebook to exercise their First Amendment rights. For that they have been punished — first by Facebook, now by Twitter.

I have friends who were caught up in these purges. Their audiences have been significantly reduced because of this deplatforming. I am generally opposed to “censorship” by media platforms, preferring that readers use their power to mute or block content they do not like rather than have their web browsing experience curated by paternalistic algorithms and “content moderation” teams.

That said, we have to recognize the reality of the situation we find ourselves in: Facebook and Twitter are platforms owned by private companies who have the freedom and the right to deplatform any content they do not like.

The alternative is website owners being forced by the State to host content they disagree with, which seems even worse than the status quo. Hypothetical Lockean squatters rights aside, today’s legal regime supports a company’s right to moderate content off of their platform. So what can we do to protect ourselves from sudden deplatforming by social media administrators?

We get rid of social media administrators.

The future of social media, and the web itself, is decentralized. The same way bitcoin is a decentralized, open protocol that enables anyone to send and receive money without intermediaries, social media platforms will become decentralized protocols that enable anyone to publish and read without intermediaries. The web gets us most of the way there, but there are still vulnerable choke points, such as centralized servers that host content and the ICANN-owned domain name system that routes web requests.

The decentralized web is removing these choke points and replacing them with open protocols that advance the vision of the web’s inventors and early pioneers. Platforms like Blockstack and Ethereum are taking the vision of the web and building in censorship resistance that is stronger than anything possible with the technology of prior generations.

Using BNS and ENS, you can own a domain name that no corporation or government can take away from you. Using Gaia and Swarm you can self-host and back up your content on multiple geographically diverse hosts, preventing take-down by would-be censors. And rather than rely on the good graces of payment processors like PayPal to earn your keep on the web, you can get paid for your content directly by your fans using Lightning and Connext.

Putting this all together, what does the decentralized social media platform of the future look like? It could look like Afari, a Twitter-like application built on Blockstack:

Or it could look like Akasha, a Medium-like application built on Ethereum:

To be sure, it’s early days for these platforms, so they’re not quite ready for prime time yet. And in all likelihood, they could go the way of previous decentralized platforms that attempted to take on the centralized social media giants: at best a niche curiosity, at worst abandon-ware that gets buried in the graveyard of failed projects.

But what this new breed of open protocol-based platforms represents is a turning technological tide, where users don’t have to be sysadmins to take control of their data, where interfaces are familiar and functional, where censorship and deplatforming are nearly impossible. In this world, publishers can post without fear and have a direct relationship with their audience, secure in the fact that no third party can unilaterally take away their online voice and reach.

If you have any motivation to help — whether with design, development, documentation, or testing skills, or even just providing moral or financial support to these projects — I urge you to get involved. The decentralized web wasn’t mature enough yet to save the hundreds of accounts that were just purged by Facebook and Twitter and the many that have been purged before. But maybe, with your help, we can prevent something like this from ever happening again.

Reach out any time through my contact page or the comment section below, let me know how you’d like to help, and I’ll try to point you in the right direction. You can also click through any of the links to projects mentioned above to get in touch with them directly.

Thanks to all involved with organizing and supporting the Decentralized Web Summit.

This post was originally published on lightco.in.