Justin Sun took to Twitter recently to give his statement on the new Steem hard fork. There are just a few problems with his statements, they can all be falsified on the blockchain he "bought".
In case you've missed it, we're now just hours away from a new hard fork on Steem that will "seize" 23,6 million tokens worth well over 5,000,000$ as of today's price. The tokens will be removed from the balances of the 64 accounts currently holding them, and moved to a newly created account on steem community321 with an anonymous creator (this is not a decentralized account, but keys held by one or more individuals behind the hard fork).
It is also important to note that none of the current Steem consensus witnesses running HF23 would be in a consensus positions without the vote from the Steemit Inc proxy account (despite it being 2 months since the Hive hard fork where the community witnesses left).
Is Steemit involved in the new hard fork?
While this is going on, Steemit is actively voting in newly created witnesses running the new hard fork code. As an example, both @rnt1 and inwi, are both created just hours ago, the same day as the hard fork is expected to go live. Both are created by @dlike which is also an existing consensus witness.
Not only that, it only took minutes from these newly created witnesses updated to the new HF before they were voted by the Steemit Inc proxy account dev365 (to which all the steemit account proxies their stake-based witness votes as seen on steem, steemit, among others).
In face of this, to claim that Steemit Inc is somehow "not involved" is absurd. Not only are they involved, but they are also in full control of the new fork.
Did Hive witnesses take the assets from Steemit or the current Steem witnesses?
The claim that the former Steem community witnesses, now Hive, in any way "took" property of anyone can also be controlled for. The basis for this statement is the fact that when Hive was created, it didn't copy the balances of the Steemit accounts or those voting for the Steemit-controlled witnesses used to take over the chain.
However, for the statement that "the Hive witnesses took their assets away from them by force" to be true, it must be shown that those in question have had assets removed. Not that they did not receive a new asset. Anyone can look at the Hive hardfork code to control whether or not those excluded had their balances on Steem affected. As demonstrated by the fact that Steemit holds more than enough staked STEEM to single-handedly decide what witnesses are in consensus and thus what new fork is implemented, it should barely need to be reviewed. But for those interested, I would encourage them to look up each account in the Hive blacklist on Steem to see whether or not they have had any assets belonging to them altered or removed. They have not.
The only accounts on Steem threatened to have their assets taken from them are those touched by the new Steem HF.
So in conclusion, the statements made by Justin are ignorant at best but more likely a desperate and/or arrogant attempt to shape the narrative to be what he needs it to be. Another series of lies.
Remember, anyone can browse the actions of the Steemit voting account on the steemd block explorer https://steemd.com/@dev365. Please go look into all of the details yourself.