Why Did Social Networks Ban Inhalation therapy, Brazilian UFO & Creators of Colour? Only Ignite could safeguard our online freedom
Today the only thing spreading faster than the coronavirus has been censorship and the loud calls for more restrictions on free speech. Decentralized microblogging service “Ignite” by the Prometeus labs can reverse this ugly long-term trend
Western world’s cyberspace is under the control of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Reddit & YouTube. They are kicking out good users and taking down countless harmless posts, pages and groups, for example, simply for asking questions about COVID-19 or presenting opinions that differ with those from the company’s executives and authorities. Their moderation policy becomes like Chinese-style censorship where dissident viewpoints and even certain words and phrases are forbidden. A surge in topics being censored by these popular platforms is causing alarm among free-speech experts who say we are rapidly moving toward complete loss of our online freedoms. The Prometeus Labs goal is to stop the tyranny of social networks with the help of distributed storage and blockchain.
At the first part of the article, our team tell you about new themes which were unjustly banned or moderate this spring. You’ll be surprised. Iit is about UFO and even creators of colour. We deliberately did not touch on the video bans related to coronavirus. You can read about this in our previous article.
At the second part, we present our product “Ignite” that could be censorship antidote in the near future.
Part№1: Top 3 most shocking bans & moderations that took place this spring
Too sensational for YouTube
Austin James Wolff, director of research at the Novus Anti-Aging Center, said one of the company’s clips was ban by YouTube recently. There was inhalation therapy treatment in this video.
“We show more graphic treatments on our channel like scalp and knee injections, but someone breathing from a mask was apparently too ‘sensational’ for YouTube,” Austin Wolff commented. “I would call it a violation of free speech, but it’s YouTube’s platform. I guess they can do as they please.”
UFO subreddit was subject to systemic censorship
There was a serious uproar in Brazil the other day: thousands of Pau Grande residents witnessed the “UFO accident”. Or, according to some eyewitnesses, an unidentified object was shot down by the Brazilian air force and it fell into a local lake.
Brazil UFO sighting and crash realfiction Possible
But /r/UFOs — Reddit’s premier gathering place for all things UFO — was automatically deleting any posts about a recent incident in Brazil. The first man who noticed it was /r/UFO moderator axolotl_peyotl. When axolotl_peyotl checked the automod, he found that ‘Brazil’ had recently been added to the list of restricted words.
“I could also see the history of the edits on the spam filter. And not only that, one of the /r/ufos mods had been ‘tweaking’ the automod on a daily basis for a very long time,” axolotl_peyotl said. “Even more surprisingly, included in the spam filter were words like ‘moon’, ‘pentagon’ and ‘navy.’
TikTok and racism
Linasha is a beauty content creator on TikTok with over 4000 followers. She’s 22, Sri Lankan and currently living in London. In the last two months, over seven videos of her applying make-up have been removed because they “violate Community Guidelines”.
TikTok users shared Linasha’s experience of having videos deleted for unfair reasons. As it turned out, there are thousands of such cases on the platform. Users couldn’t see how the videos they were posting were offensive, and the majority felt they were being discriminated against because of their race and/or their weight. Also, TikTok users have complained that their For You pages rarely include creators of colour.
Video from ‘black out’
It was a scandal. May 19 TikTok users partook in a one-day ‘black out’ on the app, in which they changed their profile pictures to the black power symbol, only followed and liked content from black creators, and urged non-black allies to avoid posting videos that day.
The most chilling is the fact that this is just the beginning. So, the Atlantic recently published an article by Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizona law professor Andrew Keane Woods calling for Chinese style censorship of the internet.
Part№2: Ignite as censorship antidote
Prometeus Labs strongly disagree with social network censorship. So our team decided to create our own social platform. Meet the “Ignite”.
Ignite is a nonprofit decentralized microblogging service resistant to any kind of moderations or bans. In other words, nobody can’t ban Ignite as long as can’t ban blockchain itself. Technically, Ignite represents a set of independent and equitable nodes. Core functions of Ignite are similar to Twitter: it allows to post small messages (up to 240 characters) and attach media files to them.
Let us explain how Ignite works.
You authenticate in Ignite through blockchain via your ERC20 wallet and the private key. Another word, Ignite allows signing in it without a centralized user database or any kind of social networking protocols. Then you choose how to blog: openly or completely anonymously without the risk of impersonation. You post any content (text, picture, gif, video) on Ignite. When you are pushing the “Post” button, the post is being encrypted and inserted to a special block. Every 5 minutes Ignite nodes download this block to a distributed data storage called Bittorrent File System (BTFS) via Soter gateway. The block is stored forever and can’t be deleted. Also, each generated block gets an encrypted address (called Hashtag), which is written in Ethereum blockchain by Ignite node. When someone wants to watch your post, another Ignite node uses Hashtag to find the address of video in BTFS and show it to the user. Ignite users can also configure filters so that only thematic posts appear in their feed. For example, If they don’t want to see porno, they will not see it at all.
In our next articles, we show you the best use-cases of Ignite. We can hint at one of them. If you have dirt on a politician, Ignite is the best place to publish it. No censor, not even the Chinese CAC or Russian Roskomnadzor, can delete this post or ban our resource.
Be with us. Read more about Ignite in our next articles. Soon we tell you about Ignite integration with token Prom.
- Telegram Group: https://t.me/promnetwork
- Telegram Announcement Channel: https://t.me/promnetwork_ann
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/prometeusnet
