Twitter toyed with the idea it would “check world leaders'” tweets for “untruthful” posts last month – but everybody with a spare brain cell knew this policy was eventually squarely aimed at Twitter’s biggest user, in terms of influence – love him or hate him – and that’s Donald Trump.
And as the November 2020 election in the US in nearing now – nobody should be surprised that the likes of Twitter are resurrecting some old lip-service rules, just to keep massive legacy media criticism off their back.
Coming hot on the heels of some recent mainstream media pressure that resulted in Twitter putting “fact-checking” label on a post by a serving US president – no wonder that alternatives to Twitter, the Big Tech’s influential, yet profit-wise ugly stepchild, are becoming a thing.
On Wednesday, May 27, Gab – what could be described as an open-source free speech and individual liberty alternative to a centralized and corporate-controlled entity like Twitter – reported its “biggest day” ever.
“Gab has enjoyed 120,000 new and returning Gab users over the past 48 hours or so,” said CEO Andrew Torba, with particular growth in the USA, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. “Site traffic has more than doubled,” Torba noted.
And that means in new users signing up, returning users, overall site traffic – and also, revenue.
The notion of seeing your chosen political representative have their comments editorialized by a Big Tech company and this resulting in indignation and anger is all too human, and all too expected – and finding an alternative to a place that carried out this censorship (Twitter in this case) is one thing – but then, what do you do, to make yourself heard online?
The Gab network made sure to address this by informing the influx of new users by announcing that the official place to get apps was Gab.com.
It will surely take a while to inform/educate a public raised (and perhaps even born) into centralized social platforms about what decentralized social network system even means.
But here we don’t need political – or tech communicators. We just need good communicators, period – who will explain in simple and understandable terms what centralized vs. decentralized is – why the former can exact the kind of pointed censorship that upsets you – and why the latter works as its actual, real-world technical antidote in any ideological scenario.
In other words, now that mainstream censorship is firmly and relentlessly in place – how the free online world can, and must eventually respond to it.
