Steemit and Censorship
The Problem
I’ve been reading a lot of posts lately and one of the recurring themes that keeps coming up is how to prevent voices from being heard. These calls are coming under several different banners:
SPAM
Many people are frustrated that a high number of posts and pictures are spammy, copy and pasted from elsewhere or even reposted from other authors on Steemit without their permission. None of these practices are defensible and should be discouraged. I don’t think it is censorship to fight these posts and/or posters but a soft approach should be taken because if even one legitimate post is wrongfully suppressed in the name of spam then Steemit has failed a user. The soft approach I speak of is the ignoring of posts, down voting and innovative tools such as @cheetah.
Trolls
Certain people can’t seem to accept the fact that Trolls are a fact of Social Media life and want a way to eliminate them or look for ways to suppress their speech. As always the best way to handle a Troll is to, “Don’t feed the trolls.” Trolls live for drama. Psychological distress notwithstanding, a Troll can be beneficial. A Troll can add life to a post by resuscitating the comment section and adding curation to a post. Trying to eliminate and or regulate Trolls is a nearly pointless and impossible endeavor.
Unpopular Speech
This one bothers me the most. I’ve heard people saying we don’t need “X” of content on Steemit if we want it to thrive in the future. That is a fine opinion and certainly valid but what is disturbing is when people connive methods for discouraging or eliminating certain types of content or people. We will be no better than Reddit or Twitter if we decide what content or people is unacceptable. We are at the genesis of something great but because we are at the beginning we have to be better and missteps can very devastating.
No Censorship = A Better Steemit Future
Steemit has a built in algorithm that allow for the kind of content that “the people” want to rise to the top. The content may be girls in bikinis talking about travel, makeup tutorials, spam or talking about Steemit. Let’s not force the issue on content or suppressing content that may not seem like its right for the platform. Perhaps a year from now the very content we may find unpopular now be what makes Steemit even greater as it is seen as a platform were all forms of speech are welcome.
There is no censorship in steem. The content is stored in a blockchain. Nobody can delete it.
Downvoting stuff does not make it go away, it just becomes less visible.
Your right to free speech does not imply that people have to read it.
I am completely aware of that and that is the way it should be. I'm just saying that people are talking about ways to change the current state of things to censor and that is a bad thing.
The current state of affairs is good. :)
I don't want to censor people's submissions to steemit, I just want the ability to filter certain things from showing up in my feed. As of right now I only browse steemit in firefox with an extension to turn off all images.
I think as time goes along people will use existing tools such as the one you mentioned and even better ones. Perhaps the feeds will get smarter.
Yikes, whales deserve their free speech too! Let's not go overboard and harpoon the whales. My post wasn't anti-whale at all. It was for all the people! :)
Just cause a whales bleeding doesn't mean its dead... Let them Bleed on everybody lol... Eek I think this one's dead =(
Until they have a filter in place for people to choose from the only things I think should be flagged are blatant plagiarism of other steemit posts. If I work hard and make a great post, and you take my post, copy and paste it and post it as your own.
Or obvious first IMAGES as graphic porn, or violence without a warning and allowing the person to OPT in.
If they setup a filter of some sort so you could opt in to seeing those images permanently then I believe no warning would be necessary NSFW or something like that.
At the moment it is beta and no such thing is there.
There are a lot of down vote brigades happening, and hate, and anger on things I believe people are missing.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@dwinblood/that-person-is-not-worthy-neither-are-you-neither-am-i-but-who-is-do-things-my-way-or-else
I just wrote that... at the bottom I link to an article I wrote this weekend about down vote brigades that I think ties into and is relevant to censorship.
Agree. The karma/steempower algorithm should be enough to fight against spam and plagiarism. No censorship makes Steem happy.
I got flagged for giving my readers a chance to sign up on eobot or minergate because they considered it spam. I'm not forcing anyone to read that, it's in my signature line, in case people are interested and they can support me. And when I asked @steemcleaners about it... not a peep. And yet, there are other trending posts with links that are not being censored. Sure my content is there but it's hard to find for anyone inside the platform. I can paste the links to Facebook, but why am I being censored?
I got flagged because I posted a referral link which @steemcleaners and @adm considered spam. No dialog, just bam! When I asked @steemcleaners about it, no word, no discussion, just the heavy hand of "justice." All I'm doing is creating original content and giving my readers the option to support me. I'm not spamming people's posts or comments. It's my blog, it's my content. Why initiate aggression?
The internet is lacking in security and we still need to be able to differentiate between adults and children reliably so some level of protection exists.
Yes the internet was weaponized and militarised decades before companies like Google and Microsoft came along and have a long history as being a hostile environment e.g. British Govt hacking German radar during WWII etc.
There are many trolls online some are organised groups like Jewish Internet Defense Force (JIDF) but there are an ever increasing amount of Bots also doing this.