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:
Nice post! Freedom of Speech ftw
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Thanks man I thought it be good to bring up since everyone is so focused on the price of Steem and Polo and such..
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Facebook and others have a new model! They must come with something similar until is not too late!
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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.
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While I agree to a certain extent, the core networking effect of FB is slowly but steadily dying.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Haha, thanks :)
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I upvoted this purely for access to this link:
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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Pretty hilarious that people upvote and comment in the first few seconds as if they read the whole article. Gotta love SteemIt :)
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they voted just for curation revard, without reading. unfortunately((
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Yea it's funny that they don't see it backfiring LOL
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LOL
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I was just bout to say damn these guys read fast... LOL
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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
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Knockoff Wangbot?
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lol
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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
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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.
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@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
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But the NSA can easily make the founders to downvote a post to the ground.
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Right but it gets hard when you need to convince all the whales! Dan alone won't matter if two other whales upvote
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So just to clarify all posts made on steemit on the blockchain and not stored on a server?
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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.
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interesting) now realize advantages of the platform), you can post information, and it will always be here)
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This is very important. I'm an owner in a company that is very related and close to this industry, WindTalkerSecurity.com. We have been building a platform that can offer similar products as the underlying blockchain tech for Steem. Nevertheless, once I found Steemit, I was instantly in-love!
Thus, this is def the wave of the future to get away from big brother control. Especially with Cannabis!!!
Good call @dashguy
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Not just censorship by the government, but also by centralize social media platforms. For example, Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay conservative journalist was just censored by Twitter today for expressing his views.
https://steemit.com/politics/@limitless/gay-conservative-writer-milo-yiannopoulos-permanently-banned-from-twitter
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In theory, a smaller degree of censoring is possible through the embedded downvoting mechanism. If someone has the steem power to make you "vanish" it can happen. Of course the article will continue to exist on the blockchain - so censorship resistance is alive and well, but it will have less visibility on the platform.
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Look, I like these sentiments, but it seems like you're missing the crucial fact: on Steem, nobody can literally erase your contributions, but anybody with deep enough pockets can downvote/flag them and there's nothing to stop them. Think of it like this: Steem has privatized censorship. The highest bidder gets to censor and promote whatever they want. I'm considering issues like this in my series on game theory in Steem. I'd love your input!
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I understand that, but its far less horrible than our current predicament.. good post though! I'll read the others soon.
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Well we already have one user who created a swarm of downvote bots, so that user can downvote multiple times. So it might be on the blockchain but if its buried so deep then it wont matter.
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Decentralisation is in my opinion one of the keywords here. Decentralisation is also what our societies needs in so many ways, look around you and you will see how eager the average citizen is for achieving decentralisation.
In the political sphere you have the Brexit as a great example of this. The people felt that the decision making processes that influenced their lives were centrally placed in Brussels and therefore far away from the people.
Furthermore did many English people feel that the majority of the press plus the government tried to filter the content available for them during referendum campaign. As an example did the government litterally send flyers to all English households that explained the benefits of staying in the EU. A quite manipulating approach if you ask me. Opinions against EU were by the establishment seen as belonging to extremist persons, which in my opinion provoked the people to express their skeptisism towards EU.
There are many signs of how thirsty people are for an alternative on several levels.
I don't doubt that Steemit can play a crucial role in a decentralised world, were the debate would allow more than the "accepted" opinions.
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Souvenir for Justin =) You will never get here. LOL
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If Uncle Sam tries to censor content, we'll #doyourpart and flag him!
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Totally agree with you. I think it's a great place to debate real issues. I just wrote a post about the war on drug here: https://steemit.com/charlieshrem/@alexfortin/charlie-shrem-is-free-why-the-war-on-drugs-need-to-stop
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Interesting article
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I read and read ... and saw the word "cannabis"
and then I forgot what I was supposed to do :)
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Yea it's funny that they don't see it backfiring LOL
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Yes, just yes to everything said. Well done!
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STEEMIT is Great Innovation based Social Media
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target your goal
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nice post, upvoted.
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Check out this petition! We need to use opportunities like this to increase our user base!
https://www.change.org/p/milo-yiannopoulos-milo-yiannopoulos-should-join-steemit-a-decentralized-social-media-platform-of-the-future?recruiter=277166336&utm_source=share_for_starters&utm_medium=copyLink
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Given the recent Twitter crackdown on user accounts, this post is particularly relevant. "What do you mean you can't suspend the account!? Do it now!!" ahahahaha
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Yea!!! I had not even thought of that!
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If they are about to censor steemit, they better get interpol to sieze all the nodes in the same time and destroy them.
Maybe some censhorship could be done through suing content creator for this or that.
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There are less than 200. https://steemd.com/witnesses
It would not be hard for a government that prints money and doesn't mind trillions in debt to round them all up...
This is actually the least decentralized project out there. If I was a witness, I would be worried.
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More witnesses then, and anonymous ones at that!
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Yes, it would take at least 10x more to be anywhere close to decentralized.
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make sure everyone participates in the first steemit lottery
https://steemit.com/money/@nabilov/the-first-steem-lottery-hosted-by-member-nabilov#comments
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Let's get some wikileaks content up on steemit!
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Upvoted :-))
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