Steemit could be the hope of real freedom of speech
It is no news that the traditional media is controlled by lobby money and only provide subjective reports. If you look at NBCU and FOX, you would think that you live in two parallel universes.
I used to have high hope on social media and discussion boards. Yet, I was deeply disappointed learning how Facebook manipulates news feeds to its users. (http://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/facebook-manipulates-emotions-business-usual-social-media-giant-n144811) In the name of science? What if someone was already depressed and later kill himself/ herself when Facebook keep feeding negative news to him/her as a blind experiment?
In the horrible and disgusting Orlando shooting tragedy yesterday, many people witnessed unprecedented deleting in platforms such as Quora and Reddit. I want to be politically neutral here but I have to say, based on my knowledge in the media world, it is a stupid move that served against its purpose. The only place that does not have massive deleting yesterday was the Donald Trump session in Reddit! So even median voters who doesn’t necessarily support Trump have to visit the session as it is the only session that does not show massive deleting. (
I was searching the news trying to verify if it is real that an LGBT group endorses Trump. Questions, even with seemingly neutral title such as “whether LGBT groups should support Trump” were deleted. I feel deeply frustrated as Quora does not even trust my judgement of whether the content was offensive. If it is indeed racist, I can condom it and vote it down. Yet, my freedom was taken away by Quora.
I think Steemit could be the hope of real freedom of speech. First of all, we have a decentralized environment here. The more participants we have, the less power a particular interest group has. The vote up/down feature allows the majority of good people to control extreme comments, but the content is cannot be deleted as in the main stream social media.
I propose that we actively advertise it to the outside world. Let’s work together to defend our rights!