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SAN FRANCISCO – Jack Dorsey, Managing Director of Twitter, fought publicly this month, when asked if his social media service exercised too much power in cutting Donald J. Trump’s account. Mr Dorsey wondered aloud if the solution to this power imbalance was new technology inspired by the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
When YouTube and Facebook banned tens of thousands of Mr. Trump’s white supporters and supremacists this month, many flocked to alternative apps like LBRY, Minds and Sessions. What these sites had in common is that they were also inspired by the design of Bitcoin.
Both of these developments were part of a growing movement by technologists, investors and everyday users to replace some of the Internet’s fundamentals in ways that would be more difficult for tech giants like Facebook and Google to control.
To do this, they are increasingly focusing on new technological ideas introduced by Bitcoin, which has been built on top of an online network designed, at the most basic level, to decentralize power.
Unlike other types of digital currency, Bitcoins are created and moved not by a central bank or financial institution, but by a large and disparate network of computers. It’s similar to the way Wikipedia is edited by anyone who wants to help, rather than just one publisher. This underlying technology is called blockchain, a reference to the shared ledger on which all Bitcoin records are kept.
Businesses are now finding ways to use blockchains and similar technologies inspired by them to build social media networks, store content online, and host websites without any central authority in charge. This makes it much more difficult for any government or business to ban accounts or remove content.
These experiences are newly relevant after the biggest tech companies recently exerted their influence in ways that raised questions about their power.
Facebook and Twitter blocked Mr. Trump from posting online after the Capitol rampage on Jan.6, claiming he broke their rules against incitement to violence. Amazon, Apple and Google have stopped working with Parler, a social networking site that has become popular with the far right, saying the app hasn’t done enough to curb violent content.
While liberals and opponents of toxic content praised the companies’ actions, they were criticized by conservatives, First Amendment academics and the American Civil Liberties Union for showing that private entities can decide who can stay in. line and who wouldn’t.
“Even if you agree with the specific decisions, I don’t put a second trust in the people who make the decisions to make universally good decisions,” said Jeremy Kauffman, founder of LBRY, which provides a decentralized service to streaming videos.
This caused a rush for other options. Dozens of start-ups are now offering alternatives to web hosting services from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Amazon, all in addition to decentralized networks and shared ledgers. Many have gained millions of new users over the past few weeks, according to data company SimilarWeb.
“It’s the biggest wave I’ve ever seen,” said Emmi Bevensee, data scientist and author of “The Decentralized Web of Hate,” a post about the shift of right-wing groups to decentralized technology. “This has been discussed in niche communities, but now we have a conversation with the whole world about how these emerging technologies can impact the world on a fairly large scale.
Bitcoin first appeared in 2009. Its creator, a dark figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, said his central idea was to allow anyone to open a digital bank account and hold the money in. in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.
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For several years, Bitcoin gained little ground beyond a small coterie of online admirers and people who wanted to pay for illegal drugs online. But as its price rose over time, more and more people in Silicon Valley noticed the unusual technical qualities underlying the cryptocurrency. Some have promised that the technology could be used to rethink everything from product tracking to online gaming.
The hype has fallen flat over the years as the underlying technology has proven to be slow, error-prone, and not easily accessible. But more and more investment and time began to result in software that people can actually use.
Last year, Arweave, a blockchain-based project to permanently store and display websites, created an archive of sites and documents from the protests in Hong Kong that angered the Chinese government.
Minds, a blockchain-based replacement for Facebook founded in 2015, has also become an online home for some right-wing and neo-Nazi figures who were started from mainstream social networks, as well as fringe groups, in many. other countries, which have been targeted by their governments. Minds and other similar start-ups are funded by prominent venture capitalists like Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.
One of the biggest supporters of the trend was Mr Dorsey, 44, who spoke about the promise of decentralized social media via Twitter and promoted Bitcoin through the other company he runs, Square, a provider of financial technology.
His public support for Bitcoin and Bitcoin related designs dates back to around 2017. At the end of 2019, Mr Dorsey announced Blue Sky, a project to develop technology to give Twitter less influence over who could and couldn’t. use the service.
After shutting down Mr Trump’s account this month, Mr Dorsey said he would hire a team for Blue Sky to address his discomfort with the power of Twitter by pursuing the vision stated by Bitcoin. Thursday, Blue Sky published the results of a working group that reviewed potential designs.
Twitter declined to make Mr Dorsey available for an interview, but said he intended to “share more soon.”
Blockchains aren’t the only solution for those looking for alternatives to the power of Big Tech. Many people have recently migrated to Signal and Telegram encrypted messaging apps, which don’t need a blockchain. Moxie Marlinspike, the creator of Signal, said decentralization made it difficult to create good software.
However, experimentation with decentralized systems has accelerated over the past month. Brave, a new browser, announced last week that it would begin to integrate a blockchain-based system known as IPFS into its software to make web content more reliable in case large service providers would break down or attempt to ban sites.
“The IPFS network provides access to content even though it has been censored by businesses and nation states,” said Brian Bondy, co-founder of Brave.
At LBRY, the blockchain-based alternative to YouTube, the number of people signing up daily was up 250% from December, the company said. The newcomers appear to have been largely a motley team of Trump fans, white supremacists and gun rights advocates who have broken YouTube rules.
When YouTube pulled the latest videos from white supremacist video blogger Way of the World last week, it tweeted, “Why are we wasting our time with this globalist scum? Come to LBRY for all my videos in HD quality, without censorship! “
Megan Squires, a professor at Elon University who studies new computer networks, said blockchain-based networks face obstacles because the underlying technology makes it difficult to exercise any control over content.
“As a technology it’s very cool, but you can’t just sit there and be a Pollyanna and think that all the information is going to be free,” she says. “There will be racists and people will shoot each other. It will be the complete package. “
Mr. Kauffman said LBRY had prepared for these situations. While anyone can create an account and save content on the LBRY blockchain that the company cannot delete – the same way anyone can create an email address and send emails – most people will have access to videos through a site above. . This allows LBRY to enforce moderation policies, just as Google can filter spam and illegal content in emails, he said.
Even so, Mr. Kauffman said, no one would lose basic access to online conversation.
“I would be proud of almost any type of marginalized voice that uses it, no matter how much I disagree with it,” he said.
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