Steemit and the importance of it's censorship resistance angle.. Steemit could stop intruding governments...

in #steemit8 years ago (edited)

This seems to be one of the more glossed over angles of Steemit since everyone is so excited about how fast its growing and the price of Steem, but censorship resistance comes built into Steemit, and thats wonderful news. Let me explain why..

We're all familiar with gag orders, whistleblowers such as the recent Mr. Edward Snowden and we've all seen a social media platform here and there "disable" accounts or "delete" content at alarmingly higher rates than in the past. I remember a time when tech companies stood up to the government, but that time has long since passed. 

Imagine how many people around the world could benefit from Steemit simply as a way to subvert gag orders, censorship, horrible laws and so forth. These people have had their entire lives turned upside down simply for standing on for their beliefs, and that is so wrong.

In comes Steemit with a Blockchain based approach to social, one that no government can censor. A social platform that outperforms the competition in more ways than one.

No longer can Uncle Sam send an email to Mr. Zuckerberg threatening to shut him down and extort him for life unless he complies with these *legal* requests from the government. You can email @dan and @ned all you please, but even they cannot censor a blockchain, and that is groundbreaking.

We now have a platform where all information is public, everything is permanent and there is no way to "delete" chunks of the blockchain without everyone knowing what you did. There is always a  record. And some may say that is anti privacy, but when you can make anonymous accounts and post information that is going to become public forever, no matter what, that is a very powerful tool for anyone. Just consider the possibilities... 

No more...

• Intrusive NSA, because whats the point when you can't shut anyone down anyways?

• Overreaching laws, because how can a simple law stop a network and/or blockchain?

• "Promoted Posts" the people decide the content that is promoted, not someones checking account.

• Shutting down of accounts from 3rd parties such as a company who complains about you or someone who dislikes you or anything else.

And so on... what ways can you see Steemit turning society on its head for the better?

If you would like to read about Facebook and or others known censorship practices, a quick google or duck duck go search shows plenty of results:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=facebook+censorship&t=hc&ia=web

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=facebook%20censorship


This is one of the most forward thinking humanitarian tools built to date, and its getting better every single day. #LongLiveSteemit #CensorshipResistance #SeeYaUncleSam 


Oh and this would also be PERFECT for cannabis companies as well:

https://steemit.com/steem/@thedashguy/how-steemit-could-transform-cannabis-marketing-and-force-others-to-play-along-instead-of-deleting-accounts

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Nice post! Freedom of Speech ftw

Thanks man I thought it be good to bring up since everyone is so focused on the price of Steem and Polo and such..

Facebook and others have a new model! They must come with something similar until is not too late!

They don't need to. Have you seen the millions of smartphone zombies, glued all day in front of their smartphone, fb, instagram, etc? And these people are actually paying their ISP (in bandwidth) to do that.

While I agree to a certain extent, the core networking effect of FB is slowly but steadily dying.

  • The average time spent per person is getting less and less.
  • The number of original posts is shrinking, people simply repaste links from other places.
  • It's becoming a farm for advertising agencies and is losing user appeals.
  • The younger people are moving away from FB coz their parents are on it too and thus it's not as "cool" as some of the other new apps like snapchat.

When these kids realize their college degrees won't get them a good job and are staring into a lifetime of debt repayment, I think they'll be compelled to make the move to steem.

Thank you for posting. Hope you get this to snowball to the top!
I up-voted you too... BTW, should steemit let us steemers advertise using steem? Be sure to tell everyone you know to come vote here at: https://steemit.com/steemit/@kingtylervvs/if-steemit-ever-does-decide-to-advertise-there-is-only-1-way-it-could-work-in-my-opinion-debate

This is a democratic community decision.


LOL, I just got done asking my friend whos visiting russia for "the best putin shirt you can find" so this is epic. Have an upvote.

Pretty hilarious that people upvote and comment in the first few seconds as if they read the whole article. Gotta love SteemIt :)

they voted just for curation revard, without reading. unfortunately((

Yea it's funny that they don't see it backfiring LOL

I was just bout to say damn these guys read fast... LOL

Hehe watch @bola on steemitx.com to see how active this bot is. Non-stop upvoting and commenting lol

Edit: Oh wait, maybe he isn't a bot, sure is REALLY active though =P

Knockoff Wangbot?

Interesting -- censorship resistance in a social media platform is definitely attractive. A concerning thing about the platform though is privacy (all balances and transactions publicly available). Surprised more ppl aren't talking about this https://steemit.com/steemit/@ntomaino/does-the-steem-community-care-about-privacy

Steemit is creating a platform where the government isn't the one with the power, it's the people who have it. Each individual person. Distributed among the masses. That's a pretty bright future.

@thedashguy - SO very much "this". In fact, the payment ensures that good journalism (as judged by the audience) actually occurs. Every few hours, I realize another way in which this is a fairly earthshaking platform.

I wrote a similar piece, let me know what you think:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@faddat/steemit-a-free-as-in-speech-content-platform-that-fights-unspeakable-evils-by-allowing-us-to-expose-them

But the NSA can easily make the founders to downvote a post to the ground.

Right but it gets hard when you need to convince all the whales! Dan alone won't matter if two other whales upvote

So just to clarify all posts made on steemit on the blockchain and not stored on a server?

Yes. But the author incorrectly uses the word steemit which means this particular web-client of actual blockchain, steem. Steemit is very easy to shutdown forever. Steem, however, is not, and more clients would appear if this one is blocked (steemd.com for example). You do need to store your keys in a safe place though, in case you will need them on a new client.