Blockchain as a weapon against censorship
One of the key attractions of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is that, once a transaction is recorded on the public blockchain, it’s almost impossible to alter or erase that information. So it makes sense that people and organisations looking for ways to fight censorship see potential in blockchain.
Recently, for example, activists in China have used blockchain to bypass the nation’s ‘Great Firewall’, which blocks online information not approved by state censors. By encoding news reports on the Ethereum blockchain, people have shared information about vaccine fraud and sexual assault in ways that can’t be edited or erased by authorities.
“By sending themselves infinitesimally small amounts of Ether and attaching written memos to their transactions, [activists] were able to permanently imprint their stories on a globally managed ledger, easily viewable with a variety of block explorers — websites that display blockchain transaction information — such as Etherscan,” Mick Hagen wrote in Fortune in July. “One Chinese student defiantly summed up the disruptive power of blockchain in the comment section of a now deleted WeChat post, writing, ‘There is no 404 on blockchain’.”
Hagen is a co-founder and CEO of a five-year-old Silicon Valley-based firm called Mainframe, which bills itself as a decentralised application platform that is “resistant to censorship, surveillance, and disruption”.
“With the exception of a catastrophic asteroid event or an aggressive alien invasion, the Mainframe network is simply unstoppable,” the company says on its blog.
Another blockchain-based initiative aimed at fighting censorship is the Decentralized News Network, an Ethereum-based news platform startup led by co-founders Dondrey Taylor, a blockchain engineer who serves as CTO, and Samit Singh, the company’s CEO.
One of the problems plaguing much journalism today, DNN asserts, is that the shift to digital advertising and the rise of platforms such as Facebook have led to greater rewards for clickbait and sensationalism than for important, fact-driven news. The company seeks to promote an alternative means of funding responsible reporting through a model built on the Ethereum blockchain and supported by a DNN token.
“Each action, which includes the writing and reviewing of an article, will be made possible by these tokens and linked to the Ethereum network,” DNN’s whitepaper states. “DNN’s system works to incentivise writers and reviewers, in a self-sustaining and autonomous environment that leaves no room for corporate bias. Compensation is derived from the community’s engagement, rather than external revenue streams such as native ads. In turn, there is no opportunity for corporate interjection, whether it is through sponsored content or elsewhere.”
The Boston-based startup Inkrypt has a similar vision for its platform, nLIGHTn. It expects to release an alpha version of nLIGHTn “soon”, with a whitepaper due for release sometime in September, according to co-founder Muhammad Ali Chaudhary. Inkrypt is working with partners BTC Media and the decentralised protocol organisation Po.et to develop what it calls a “Web 3.0 solution for media”.
“By providing an IPFS-based [IPFS is the open-source InterPlanetary File System protocol from Protocol Labs] distributed nodal network for content storage and distribution, the Inkrypt protocol will endow journalism with both front-end and back-end censorship resistance while creating a marketplace for storage as renters are compensated with native tokens,” Inkrypt co-founder Farhan Javed wrote earlier this year on Medium. “And because the network is entirely distributed, there is no concentration of network power that can be strong armed by external entities to do their bidding.”
Putting blockchain to such uses could benefit both journalists and consumers around the world, University of Zurich researchers Manuel Schlegel, Liudmila Zavolokina and Gerhard Schwabe recently wrote in a paper for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
“The growth of journalism can be assisted by blockchain,” they wrote. “Due to the immutability and cryptographic properties of the blockchain, articles published on it are resistant to censorship, while keeping readers and journalists anonymous at the same time. Among the audience are magazine/article readers which value high quality journalism free from censorship. Blockchain enables innovative products and services.”
