BitChute, a video hosting platform that is seen as an alternative to YouTube’s ever-more stifling moderating and censorship policies, has over the past five months experienced quite a growth.
According to a tweet from the network, its monthly traffic figures doubled in that time from 15 to 30 million visitors.
And while those behind the platform are still allowed to share this information about their business on Twitter – as of today anybody essentially engaging in further growing of that user base is now actively sabotaged on Jack Dorsey’s network.
It appears, another tweet from BitChute said on Friday, that Twitter had “started blocking all tweets that contain Bitchute videos.”
The message thread further appealed to users to report what the situation looked like on their end, and advised them to counter any attempts at authoritarianism on the web by making sure they bookmark the BitChute website or set it as their browser’s homepage.
In response to BitChute’s call to users to help out and share their current usage status when it comes to trying to posts tweets with links to the platform, many said Twitter had blocked these, providing only the generic explanation that the content was “potentially harmful” – and that Twitter came to this conclusion either on its own, or thanks to third-party “partners” – i.e., likely one of the notoriously tone-deaf or just plain wrong “fact checking” contractors.
According to many users from around the world, they are indeed facing obstacles in posting links to BitChute-hosted content both old, and new. Twitter is yet to officially respond to any of this, which might easily be construed as an example of “potentially blatant censorship.”
At a time when YouTube’s censorship is causing many to look for alternatives, not being able to share those alternatives on current social networks could prove to be a problem and could help slow down getting the word out.
And while Twitter itself appears to be in censorship overdrive in recent times, blocking links to entire alternative platforms is a brazen step for the increasingly brazen company.
