The above image was made with stable diffusion using the prompt 'painting of a woman with tape over her mouth.'
Yesterday I watched the RFK, Jr. Roundtable on Censorship on Rumble. Along with Kennedy was Journalist Glenn Greenwald, Journalist Sharyl Attkisson, Attorney Jenin Younes, and Former New Jersey Assemblyman Jamel Holley. The conversation covered a lot of ground, beginning with lawsuits arising from the cooperation between government agencies and Big Tech in stifling free speech online. It was worth watching, but didn't contain many surprises.
The mechanics of the new censorship regime are still evolving. Some of it is top down, like the FBI interference with Twitter on behalf of a foreign spy agency. Some of it is done voluntarily by media companies serving financial interests. Some of it is even grassroots, like the doctor who posted a dissenting view of covid on her Substack and subsequently had her credentials revoked by a state medical board.
On a technical level, governments and other powerful interests have been known to go after web services, financial services companies, and fundraising platforms. Search algorithms are manipulated to further bury dissenting voices. The roundtable discussion didn't offer any good solutions to these problems beyond growing independent media. One participant suggested Substack and Rumble as alternatives to the main social media platforms.
Although it wasn't surprising that no one mentioned Hive, it was nevertheless disappointing. The Hive blockchain can't be censored and could easily become the backbone of many kinds of alt media outlets. Hive payments or donations would be unstoppable, even for a powerful actor like a nation state. Even though the discussion participants all seemed web savvy, Hive wasn't on their radar, which is a shame.
The discussion left me with a couple of questions. How can we grow the independent media ecosystem as quickly as possible? And how can we empower this ecosystem with better technology than the stuff it runs on at present? The first question seems more pressing.
Our control regime combines censorship and propaganda to present the public with a distorted version of reality. Many people recognize that legacy media is a tool of this regime, yet feel like they have nowhere else to turn. The big legacy outlets all have strong reputations even though they've been compromised. In my opinion, alternative media's biggest current challenge is strengthening the reputations of alternative media outlets.
Until this challenge is overcome, independent news will remain relatively fringe. And as long as it's fringe, our population won't so much be informed by the media we consume as conditioned by it. Having worked in alt media for many years, I've seen few signs that people are ready to make the switch from being conditioned to being informed. And yet, I feel like our socio-political circumstances are encouraging us to do just that.
If I was launching a new news service today, I'd launch it on Hive. The front end would look like any other news site, but all of the content and user comments would be handled by Hive. So would donations/payments to some extent. I don't understand why no one has done this yet.
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