| > Censorship resistance means that anybody can say anything, without suffering consequences. I can't even get to the heart of the poster's argument. That's because the shitty state of all current social media software defines "anybody" as: * a single user making statements in earnest * a contractor tacitly working on behalf of some company * an employee or contractor working on behalf of a nation state * a botnet controlled by a company or nation state It's so bad that you can witness the failure in realtime on, say, Reddit. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has skimmed comments and thought, "Gee, that's a surprisingly reaction from lots of respondents." Then go back even 30 minutes later and the overwhelming reaction is now the opposite, with many comments in the interim about new or suspicious accounts and lots of moderation of the initial astroturfing effort. Those of us who have some idea of the scope of the problem (hopefully) become skeptical enough to resist rabbit-holes. But if you have no idea of the scope (or even the problem itself), you can easily get caught in a vicious cycle of being fed a diet of propaganda that is perhaps 80% outright fake news. As long as the state of the art remains this shitty (and there are plenty of monetary incentives for it to remain this way), what's the point of smearing that mendacity across a federated system? |