So at this point, with widespread coverage of the TPP, and the recent Twitter/Facebook String of Bans and link pruning of wikileaks, It should be abundantly clear to us all that traditional social media thrives on censorship. That's just the way the incentives align. No, I'm not talking about "hate speech," either, I'm talking about limiting the propagation of user-generated content and ideas based on political or corporate affiliation. I'll be going over the systems in place that enable this kind of de-platforming on other social media, and examining how transferrable they are to Steem.
This is not an opinion Piece. I'm not railing against Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or Google for what they choose to do with their content. I'm just laying out their (and their users') methods for limiting the free flow of information on their platforms. Traditional social media networks, are, in fact, censored, and it is their prerogative to do so. They are privately operated content platforms that can curate their content as they see fit, and often need to to operate legally. The problem is that Steem, as a new and growing social platform, may be vulnerable to some degree to censorious tactics, despite purporting to be resistant to them, and Steem users should be aware and wary of them moving forward.
So, let's get right into it by looking at possible applications for similar tactics on Steem:
The power of confirmation bias -- Silencing dissent by being the loudest minority
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....” -- Noam Chomsky
Blogging platforms, forums, and news aggregation sites are most vulnerable to exploiting confirmation bias. Sites like Reddit and Tumblr have balkanized over time into thousands of little subcultures, very few of which can handle heterogeneous opinions or entertain discussion from differing viewpoints. In the case of Reddit, this comes by virtue of zero-stake up/downvoting, which leads to the most successful posts being those that pander the most to the lowest common denominator of the subreddit's target audience. Opinions or facts incompatible with that lowest common denominator sink in standing until reddit auto-hides them for being unpopular. Tumblr users typically just hurl vitriolic abuse from one subculture to the next until the one with the most members drowns out the smaller, a phenomenon similar to forum-sliding. Confirmation bias can be exploited on these sites by either framing a discussion in terms of how disagreeable an alternative opinion is, or simply inciting one group to band together against another that works against their narrative.
Steem is arguably one giant confirmation bias engine, as you're far more likely to fund content that you agree with or that supports a narrative you're invested in. However, Steem also makes you literally "put your money where your mouth is," raising the stakes on this kind of action. A post supported by many is far more likely to be quality content, as you are forced to pay in support of it, and there's no efficient way to pay for suppression of a post (you'd have to pay into a bunch of other posts to move it off of the front page, which would quickly become very expensive)
Subculture balkanization, one of the major forces in confirmation-bias driven censorship, is a strange animal to characterize with Steem, as none of them have happened as of yet. There are several ways it can happen, though. let's say for the sake of argument, that sometime in the future, steemit.com blacklists content that uses certain phrases or tags. These posts will still be on the Steem blockchain, but not viewable by users on the steemit.com web portal. in response to this move, someone could open up another portal that does not block these posts, and people that subscribe to ideologies that use the banned terminology on steemit.com would move to the new, uncensored web portal. The new site bans another subset of content, spawning another web portal, fracturing the Steem platform ad-nauseum. Eventually the only way to look at Steem as a platform in it's entirety will be to run and parse your own local node. The barrier to entry here prevents the extensive division of the community like similar platforms, but also requires that you trust your Steem portal of choice, similarly to more traditional platforms.
Steem isn't unique in the sense that it is a distributed platform for exchange of information. Take diaspora, for example. It has many of the same aims as Steem, but it isn't on a blockchain, hasn't enjoyed sustained growth since the project's launch nearly six years ago. The difference here is in the monetary incentive, and We'd do well not to forget that. Money attracts malicious actors as much as it does genuine users, so there should rightly be more discussion of how Steem can be exploited or censored than I'm seeing out there.
This is my I'd love to hear from y'all on the subject. more to follow as I research it.