How Will Decentralized Social Media Handle Censorship?

We’re coming to the age where massive demand for uncensored communication exists, but demand for censorship is rising just as fast.

We’re also at a point where the technology to build decent decentralized social media apps is here.

But, how can we deal with the new reality of being able to just take down bad content, or kick evil or abusive users off the platform?

We have completely new realities today, and unique, new problems to solve. Here’s how to do it:

🚫🔇New Reality: YOU CAN’T CENSOR!

The reality is, the world has changed. The old impulse of using force to remove something you don’t like is just dead forever.

The wrong way to think about this is:

“How can we still censor in a system where that isn’t built in?”

The right way:

“Now that we can’t censor, how do we deal with the problems that made us want to censor in the past?”

🚫🍆🍑Users Still Want Filtered Content!

Unfortunately, while you can’t censor, you also can’t just not censor, paradoxically.

While users may want a free speech platform, they also don’t want to be subjected to adult content, disgusting images, violence, hatred, spam, trolling, and (above all) illegal content.

The fastest way to practically censor a literally decentralized social platform is to just flood it with content that no one wants to see, driving away all users.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑🙈Solution: Social Filtering

The only real way forward is to implement a system that doesn’t delete content or users (you can’t), but that allows users to filter out content they don’t want to be exposed to.

You can implement a central block list that hides content users don’t want to see.

And/or, you can let users block, and subscribe to the block lists of others they trust or agree with.

Any time block lists become too aggressive users can stop using them or make their own.

The worst ones can always make their own nasty uncensored version of the platform with the same data set and network and just use that, with the rest of us blissfully unaware.

We’ll have to learn how to deal with uncensorable networks one of these days. Time to start adapting to this new mental model of a censorship-free world.

Posted Using INLEO