Musk as well made good on a promise to bring about more transparency to Twitter. He gave journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss access to all of the internal communications regarding the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story.

The day before the bombshell report by Matt Taibbi, I tweeted a reply to Elon Musk requesting my previous suspended account, as well as a few friends who have been suspended for dubious reasons to have our accounts reinstated. This included my prior account Guy Squiggs, as well as Joshua Smith, the Vice Chairman of the Libertarian Party.

Taibbi’s report the following day was as shocking as it was entertaining. Elon Musk has his own spin on Occam’s Razor, the law stating that the simplest explanation is the most likely. Elon’s Razor, on the other hand, states that the most entertaining outcome is the most likely. Elon’s Razor proved accurate, as tweet #8 in Taibbi’s 36 tweet long report especially stood out to me. I, Guy Squiggs, was in that tweet. Of course I was.

In this tweet the world saw my previous account being “requested for review” by the Biden Campaign, and then being “handled.” Musk himself responded to this particular tweet asking, “If this isn’t a violation of the Constitution’s First Amendment, what is?” Then in the next tweet we learned that the same thing had happened to actor James Woods. He appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show vowing to file a lawsuit, and I will be closely paying attention.

Large Twitter accounts such as Scott Presler and Libs of TikTok were sharing screenshots of my old account which has been permanently suspended for about two years now. This disclosure for Taibbi might possibly be providing context for that suspension.

This all began on October 14th 2020, when New York Post published a bombshell exposé revealing emails recovered on a laptop that belonged to Hunter Biden. Both Twitter and Facebook heavily throttled the story and prevented it from being spread, and Twitter took the extraordinary step of locking New York Post from its Twitter account. 

Twitter cited a “hacked materials” policy, but Taibbi revealed that Twitter executives didn’t believe that reason would hold up. The materials published were no longer the property of Hunter Biden, so his consent is no longer needed. They were the property of the repair shop he abandoned the laptop at, whose owner willfully turned over this material.

Following the censorship of New York Post, with the corporate mainstream media claiming the story was Russian disinformation, I set out looking for leaks of this material. Many photos from the laptop were leaked on Parler, where I spent an unfortunate amount of time looking at Hunter Biden’s nudes so you don’t have to. One photo however really alarmed me, which I censored and shared to Twitter. This tweet can be viewed in its original integrity in the archives on wayback, despite the account being suspended.

The photo, like many released on Parler, showed Hunter exposing himself (which was censored prior to being posted on Twitter). Behind Hunter however was a balcony where a girl was sitting. She appeared to be young, but the question was how young? That was the question, and that was the tweet’s entire purpose. This was the tweet that the Biden campaign requested to be removed. It’s also still a question I think is worth an answer.

While I have always wanted my old account back, now I heavily desire its return as it is part of a profound moment in history. That account vindicates everything conservatives believed was happening against them, but only up until now could be proven. I understand that the mass reinstatement of accounts is a work in progress, but I would humbly beg Twitter to reinstate the accounts listed in my pinned tweet. I also will eagerly be paying attention to any steps James Woods takes.

The post HANDLED: Guy Squiggs Reacts to Being Censored on Twitter appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Twitter Account @PennLive was hacked in the early morning hours of January 14th, to the surprise of the account’s 128,000 followers.

PennLive describes themselves as a hub mixing what’s trending around the nation/ world with Pennsylvania life and culture.

Once PennLive regained access to their account, they sent a tweet advising of the hack.

The hack had many resemblances to prior hacks from a group called Chuckling Squad. This group uses SIM Card swaps against targeted users and sends tweets from their accounts via SMS Messages.

Chuckling Squad previously hacked former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account, where they tweeted a bomb threat against Twitter HQ, as well as the N Word (many times) from Dorsey’s Twitter Account.

The PennLive account similarly tweeted a bomb threat against Delta Airlines, as well as extensive use of the N Word. They also stated in a rhythmic rap tweet that a SIM Card swap had taken place.

The Tweets have now been deleted, but screenshots are forever. Check out some of the screenshots below.

The post PennLive Hacked, Tweets Racial Slurs And Bomb Threats appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Early in the day on Saturday, Kyle Rittenhouse favorited an image of a topless woman on Twitter. As Twitter will post tweets you favorite in the feeds of your followers, suddenly this image began to display in the feeds of Kyle’s followers, showing that he favorited it.

Conservative host Lauren Chen sent a general tweet reminding people how Twitter functions.

It’s been a little while since Kyle has been on social media, as all the platforms purged him following the incident in Kenosha where he shot 3 people in self defense. Not only did Social Media platforms like Twitter and Facebook remove Kyle, but they removed anyone who said “Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong.”

Only after Kyle’s acquittal was he allowed to open new accounts. It’s pretty easy to forget some of the details pertaining to what activity is visible when you’ve been off the platform for an extended period. Twitter is also unique in that it is a social media platform that openly allows nudity and pornography.

Sure, something like this can be embarrassing… But really, who cares? 18 year olds are going to be 18 year olds.

This is the second time that Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong.

The post Kyle Rittenhouse Caught Browsing Porn on Twitter? So What. appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Dennis decided to expand his horizons when a popular account called Ghislaine Maxwell Trial Tracker was removed from Twitter. 

As Dennis changes his profile and Twitter handle often depending on who he is parodying, the article will use screenshots of the tweets rather than embedded tweets to maintain continuity. This also prevents us from linking to Dennis’ Twitter because in the course of a week that link will likely no longer work when he updates his handle next.

We will embed one single tweet from a profile picture update that will follow whatever he changes his handle to next.

Dennis renamed his account Maxwell Trial Tracker with the handle @TrialTrakMaxwel. However, as customary for Dennis, he does not change his bio to match the parody. This allows anyone who is observant to catch on, yet Dennis’ followers grew from 2,000 to nearly 17,000 in the course of a day.

Dennis’ bio reads:

Pounder of twinks, plower of fairies, crusher of bottoms, first of his name, King of the Gays! Reformed Sodomite! Pronouns: Fuck/You, Parody

Dennis’ Mona Lisa on this Maxwell Trial Tracker account was a tweet claiming that Bill Clinton had been served a subpoena and would be testifying in the Ghislaine Maxwell Trial. This was retweeted and quote tweeted a few thousand times. 

This also prompted some to author their own tweets with this claim, one of which was retweeted by Libertarian Podcaster Reed Coverdale, whom Dennis had previously parodied under the handle @ReeeCoverdale.

Once Dennis decided this gig was up, he changed his handle and name again and tweeted to all his new followers, calling them stupid. 

At the time of this writing, Dennis has so far lost 600 of his new followers. 

The post Libertarian Troll Fools Twitter With Fake Maxwell Trial Updates appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

There was even a petition started on Change.org in support of trying to get Crayola to remove ‘negro’ from its black Crayon.

How tone deaf have American social justice warriors become when they now can’t distinguish between legitimate examples of racism within society and the Spanish language?

Negro translates to black in Spanish. It’s not derogatory or offensive to say the color black. This behavior is a prime example of when outrage crosses with ignorance. According to languagemagazine.com, as of 2019, Spanish is spoken by 580 million people worldwide, which makes up 7.6% of the world’s total population. Langauagemagazne.com also reported that the language is studied by almost 22 million people in 110 countries and is the third most used language on the internet.

Crayola is a global company and makes crayons for people around the world, not just English speakers. The company even joined in the conversation on Twitter in an attempt to enlighten the outraged SJWs.

“With Crayola products sold in more than 80 countries and packaged in 12 different languages, Crayola is very much a global company. The word “negro” appears along with the words “black” and “noir” because it is the literal Spanish translation of the word black,” Crayola tweeted.

This outrage is based on nothing but pure ignorance of the Spanish language and the culture of the people around the world who speak it. It should also be said that it appears racist and exclusionary to want to remove a word from a product just because a group of people are enraged by a language they don’t understand. It is ironic that someone on the political left would scream about the need for inclusion and diversity in American society and then in the same breath say that the Spanish word for black should be removed from a crayon because it looks like the N-word.

There is a saying that leftists care about every form of  diversity except for diversity of thought.  However, this should serve as proof that they really couldn’t care less about any form of diversity and only want to use talk of these things to attempt to win over the votes of minorities every election cycle.

If SJW’s gave a crap about multiculturalism, you’d think they would spend more time learning basic cultural differences instead of claiming a language is racist just because it is similar to a derogatory word.

My message to all Spanish-speaking people in America is simple. If the same folks who claim to care about your background want to remove your native tongue from a crayon, don’t think for one minute that they care about you, the interests of your community, or your well-being.

As a freedom-loving American, it is my conviction that multiculturism is part of what makes this country great and unique among all the other nations of the world. Attempting to censor an individual’s language for any reason is wrong and not in line with the values of a country that was founded on the ideas of individualism and free speech, much less on the basis of ignorance and false assumption of bigotry.

There seems to be no sign that Crayola will bow to the “woke” mob anytime soon, which is good news.

Perhaps those offended that Spanish will not be taken off of Crayola’s ‘negro’ Crayon would be a lot better off if they would spend a little more time being culturally informed instead of showing the blackness in their own hearts toward a group of people whose language they do not understand.

If education doesn’t triumph over blind ignorance and hatred, we will have soon have much darker things to contend with than the word for a color on the back of a Crayon.

The post Triggered America: SJW’s Go Loco Over Spanish Language on Black Crayon appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

The tweet read: “Natural immunity >> vaccine immunity

So why force or coerce those with natural immunity from prior infection into taking the vaccine?”

Twitter labeled the tweet as misleading. Twitter disabled the ability to favorite or comment on the tweet, leaving Retweeting or Quote Tweeting as the only option.

According to Twitter, they’ve purposefully limited the ways in which people can interact with the tweet in order to diminish its reach.

However, prior to Thomas Massie authoring this Tweet, Bloomberg released a Tweet effectively making the same statement, based on a study.

The only difference between the Tweet from Thomas Massie and Bloomberg, is that Massie asked the logical follow up question. 

If a prior COVID infection provides better resistance against Coronavirus than vaccines do, then what incentive does a previously infected person have to get vaccinated?

The answer to that question is that there is clearly no benefit.  There is no scientific benefit, nor is there a moral argument to be had. This demographic of previously infected is also a threat to the idea of vaccine passports, if people who clearly do not need a vaccine opt not to do it, which is their right.

Yet Twitter, being the arbiters of whatever truth to whatever narrative they fancy, has censored an actual sitting Congressman who posted absolutely nothing misleading. His post was forthright and truthful, and the question he posed was logical.

The post Twitter Censors Rep Thomas Massie Over (Not) Misleading Tweet appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

No one seems to know for sure what this means, but libertarians of all backgrounds are tweeting their support of the company’s CEO tweeting a link to the foundational book of one of the major schools of thought in Libertarianism.

Jack’s tweet has garnered approval from some prominent named Libertarian individuals and organizations, including former Congressman Justin Amash, 2020 LP vice-presidential candidate Spike Cohen, the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus, 2022 GA LP gubernatorial candidate Shane Hazel and many official accounts for several state branches of the Libertarian Party.

Some members of the liberty community joined in the thread to call for the Twitter CEO to cease his censorship of the liberty movement online and create a space that honors the spirit of the first amendment and the American tradition of free speech. 

The LP Mises Caucus even posted a screenshot of #Rothbard trending on Twitter nearly three hours after Jack tweeted out the link to a free online copy of “Anatomy of the State” published on Mises.org.

 Is the CEO of one the largest tech giants on the yellow brick road of libertarianism to AnCapistan? Only time will tell, but one thing is sure—this single act promoted the ideas of liberty, peace, and free markets—and that’s something worth celebrating.

The post Twitter CEO Rocks Libertarian Twitter With Mysterious Rothbard Tweet appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Always be careful what you Tweet because sometimes it may come back to bite you. In this case, “Black Lives Matter” exposed themselves for who they really are for the entire world to see. If there was ever any doubt that the BLM movement is indeed a Communist movement hell-bent on making the United States of America a Communist dictatorship, let their own words expose their true intent.

“Rest in Power #FidelCastro,” Black Lives Matter tweeted from their official Twitter account on November 26th, 2016.

If you needed any further proof that BLM doesn’t really care about the struggle of black Americans, there you have it, folks. BLM is to American authoritarians what the brown shirts were to Adolf Hitler. The organization is nothing more than a vehicle by the radical Left to transform the US into a Communist nation. They do not care about issues that directly affect minorities in this country; they only seek to use issues connected to race to stir up hatred and division among the American people. Why would they want to do this?

The answer is simple—divide and conquer. BLM knows all too well that the only way they could succeed in fundamentally destroying this country would be to have us slit our own throats. That is why every time someone is killed by police, they take to the streets using every instance as an excuse to burn cities to the ground even before the facts of the case see the light of day.

Fortunately for America, BLM exposed their goals by aligning themselves with Castro after the Cuban dictator’s death. Twitter users took the opportunity to torch them.

I have often wondered what it would take for the American people at large to wake up and realize that BLM is led by Communists who veil the organization as the messiah of the black community. Despite being very clear about their Marxist ideology, many people appear not to realize the evil intent of the minds behind BLM. If there was ever an answer to my prayer, this tweet would be it.

In effect, BLM just told the Cuban people who have lived under Communism for 62 years that they belong in slavery and should know their place as serfs of the rich and powerful elites. BLM has declared to the world that they think a man who began the Cuban revolution that is credited for at least 11,310 deaths and disappearances to date had the right idea about how to best organize the world.

The difference between libertarians like myself and the folks associated with “Black Lives Matter” is that we understand that many of the problems we face today have either been caused directly by government involvement or in the very least made worse by the government. BLM, on the other hand, comes in the name of justice but only serves as a means to create chaos and confusion so that Communists can more easily destroy anything and everything that looks like a representative government.

It brings me joy that BLM has decided to reveal their true colors to the world as sunlight is the best disinfectant. BLM’s loud support of Fidel Castro should remove any doubt in the mind of the American people that this organization is just another Commie variant. We can only hope that this exposure builds up an immunity to Communist ideas and that the BLM decision aids in its own eradication from the minds of the American people.

Image: Flickr Fibonacci Blue

The post Communist Lives Matter: BLM’s True Agenda Revealed appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

Noor happens to be the niece of Osama Bin Laden. Not that it should matter, but it did to Olbermann. What he thought would be a home run tweet turned out to be foul.

Noor was in her hometown of Geneva, Switzerland where she was born and raised, taking part in a stop the steal demonstration on a boat. She was holding a Trump Won flag and stated that within four to five minutes, police showed up.

Noor told The Libertarian Republic that her speech being shut down was “very emblematic of what’s going on in the United States.” 

A video of the police interaction can be viewed here. 

Speaking with The Libertarian Republic, Noor stated that her demonstration was for election integrity, and to stand with the American demonstrators of January 6th, who have been unjustly persecuted in what she describes as a National Security apparatus turning inward and against Americans.

Some on the left have called January 6th the worst event since 9/11, and some have even called it worse. Noor previously published an article with Revolver News, where she slammed such rhetoric as slanderous. You can read her piece here.

As Keith appeared to be seizing on that line of rhetoric, he aligned Noor with Osama which many on Twitter recognized as egregiously unfair.

Read some of the responses below:

Olbermann’s tweet as well drew the ire of Dr. Gad Saad, author of the book The Parasitic Mind, who had some colorful words to deliver.

“Gad has the ability to literally make me laugh out loud behind my screen,” Noor told us.

She knows Americans well because she has been coming to the United States since she was three years old. She describes Americans as the most kind, heart-warming and open minded people on the planet.

“I know that there are some negative comments from people such as Keith Olbermann, and I know there are leftists who are out of their minds, and who don’t understand the concept of individuality. But I’ve found that this is not the majority case. I’m overwhelmed by the Patriots who have welcomed and embraced me. The Twitter ratio [of Keith Olbermann] is illustrative of that. Whatever Keith Olbermann think, I don’t care.”

Noor began making her presence known to Americans during the 2020 election cycle when she penned My Letter To America.

The post Olbermann Gets BLASTED with Twitter Ratio After Lashing Out At Noor Bin Ladin appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

At a blistering 2021 speed, the screen shifts from archaic interfaces to modern emojis without giving as much as a second to focus before clearing the display for text reading “It’s been 25 years since comprehensive internet regulations were passed. It’s time for an update.” It is part of Facebook’s pro-regulatory advertisement push entitled, “Born in ’96” part of the larger “It’s Time” campaign.

As advertisements go, this one is remarkably effective, if a little overbearing. Would you expect anything less from the king of every corner in the advertising market?

The ecosystem created for the internet in ‘96 by the Communications Decency Act (CDA) has clearly not impeded Facebook’s success. After being created in 2004, Facebook was established in a post-CDA world and has played a leading role in establishing that world’s bounds. Nevertheless, the company’s anxiety over ambiguities in the ancient digital legislation is understandable.

Rather than letting Facebook’s executives design the social media market of the future, what if there were free competition? Not the kind of competition that Twitter and even Parler provide Facebook, rather, a type of decentralized competition that challenges the structure that the Silicon Valley giants are built on. In other words, how about a polycentric organization of competition that makes the CDA obsolete and breaks up vertical monopolies on user-generated content and use data? Thanks to an unexpected source, that competition may not be far away.

To Moderate or Not to Moderate is NOT the Question

Chances are, if you are made uneasy by a social media giant lobbying to change the rules that govern it and its competitors, that dubious feeling may come from a general distrust of Facebook itself. Facebook may or may not have lost your trust after Russia used the platform to target Americans with divisive advertisements during the 2016 election, or after CEO Mark Zuckerberg was summoned to Congress to testify in 2018 about the site’s alleged internal content moderation bias against conservatives. Even without negative associations, however, new regulations on established markets create barriers to entry and disincentivize competition. In this case, new regulations would mandate that social media companies practice internal content moderation—otherwise simply known as moderation—something that has strained Facebook’s abilities up until recently.

At the root of Facebook’s legal issues is the CDA. Although originally intended to determine what content was suitable for television, the CDA became one of the most foundational regulations for the burgeoning internet. Insofar as the internet is concerned, the CDA mandates that a site may not publish certain indecent, and often independently criminal, content. It also delegates the enforcement of these rules to a regulatory agency, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), instead of leaving the justice system to sort out victims and perpetrators. Notably, the CDA also creates a distinction between “publishers,” standard websites that curate or create content, and “platforms” like social media sites that allow anyone to post and merely aggregate and serve content to consumers.

Distorting the justice system by inserting executive agencies between victim and perpetrator creates a topsy-turvy system. As it stands, proving the facilitatory guilt on the part of a social media company is far easier than proving that any crime outside of the scope of the CDA had been committed in the first place.

Under the CDA, there are two systems of online content production. Publishers are obligated to internally moderate content such that it remains within the bounds of what the law considers acceptable speech. On the other hand, platforms are not held to this standard and are, by the nature of the distinction, barred from behaving as publishers. Although this clause, better known simply as “section 230,” has been touted by many as the saving grace of the CDA from the perspective of free speech, it is also the wedge that causes Facebook to take flack from both the left and right.

Facebook has been scrutinized for not moderating content strictly enough in 2016 and for being too politically restrictive ever since. New regulations would certainly clear up Facebook’s role, especially if Facebook’s on-staff legal team would have a say in the verbiage of any proposed bill, which it likely would. Either way, moderation of user-generated media, and therefore free speech online, will either be centralized under a federal agency or only distributed between a few massive companies which themselves have nothing to do with content production.

The free market provided several alternatives to Facebook and Twitter but few gained traction in the face of such established competitors and steep regulatory obligations. One of these start-ups, Parler, managed to gain a healthy following when President Donald Trump was controversially removed from almost every other online platform following the storming of the Capitol on Jan 6. After gaining millions of users overnight, Parler’s web-hosting service, a subsidiary of Amazon, decided to sever ties with the company over its moderation policy. This effectively moderated the entire website off of the internet by refusing to do business with them.

Many were attracted to Parler’s moderation policies, or lack thereof, and, had it not been shut down, the site would have posed a competitive threat for a portion of Facebook’s disaffected user base. Although providing a place for truly unfettered conversation, Parler segmented conversation and would never be a comfortable place for the majority of social media users who prefer some community standards beyond the legal bare minimum to be enforced.

Besides, having a second, slightly edgier public square just outside the first is not a substitution for effective public discourse. The French third estate’s self-separation from the estates general did not, after all, create a more healthy political dialogue for the French people during the beginning of the French Revolution.

Parler was shuttered for two months while the site’s founders procured alternative web hosting services. Although currently functional, Parler’s existence is not a long-term competitive solution to the problem of legally obligatory moderation because it frames moderation, in and of itself, as a bad thing. The same could be said for President Donald Trump’s new media outlet if it is ever opened up to public contribution.

Moderation, when done offline, is a daily practice for most. Whether by choosing the members of your inner circle or choosing to only have two slices of pizza, people self-moderate their lives all the time. Centrally planned moderation, however, is called prohibition and often causes more harm than good.

Enter the Decentralized Social Media (DSM) model, a polycentric model of online interaction recently proposed on Medium by Ross Ulbricht, the currently imprisoned founder of Silk Road, an infamous illicit online marketplace that jump-started the popularity of Bitcoin in the early 2000s.

The Innovation of Decentralized Social Media

Moderation of something as big as social media is incredibly difficult and would take a massive amount of manpower if done entirely manually. Some of Facebook’s most closely guarded secrets determine the algorithms the company has developed for use in ad targeting and to facilitate moderation. The CDA both disallows this moderation and requires it, depending on which side of Section 230 a site falls on.

To oversimplify, Ulbricht’s DSM model would remove those automatic and manual moderation tools from under the hood of a social media’s servers and place those same processes in the device of the social media user under the control of separate companies that stand to profit from providing moderation and aggregation services at the discretion of the device owner. Users could access any or all of the web’s available social media content feeds at once and only be fed content within their own acceptable parameters while retaining ownership of their user data. All of this would be done through the operant function of Bitcoin, the encrypted blockchain.

In practice, the seemingly small distinction between where these algorithms are processed and who owns those functions resolves several of the questions raised and created by the CDA without having to create or pass any new laws.

Where the CDA consolidates and centralizes the responsibility for moderation under the content aggregator’s purview, start-up companies following Ulbricht’s model would compete to moderate and aggregate both user content and advertisements from social media platforms, thereby creating a market where there previously was only mandate.

Users would simply open an app wherein social media content is centralized. Users could pick and choose moderation and aggregation providers to reward with a portion of the advertisement revenue that their engagement latently generates and freely switch between providers.

Rather than having aggregation and moderation be centralized by legal obligation to a few social media companies, levels of moderation, advertisement service, and content prioritization would all be separate overlapping markets which independently compete to provide superior service and control for negative externalities.

Algorithmic moderation is a powerful tool that, along with manual moderation, can create comfortable digital environments. If moderation and aggregation were divorced from the social media platform and made a competitive marketplace, users would be free to use whatever network or combination of networks that they preferred and have the content they are served moderated however they see fit. If users could be in control of the moderation they facilitate and are subject to, the arrangement would be considerably more consensual. Social media companies under a decentralized model would not be held responsible for users misusing their digital infrastructure as content regulation would be the responsibility of the client-side moderation algorithm and the companies that compete to provide those services most effectively. If a user was ever dissatisfied with the moderation they were provided those would have market remedies.

Should someone use social media as a means to harass or threaten another, there would be no intermediate party at fault, freeing the judicial system to bring justice to guilty and affected parties alike.

Side-effects may include

Besides sidestepping the CDA’s ineffectual regulations, a DSM would protect the privacy of users by encrypting the user generated data used by moderation algorithms and keeping a function of that unique data as the user’s encryption key or proof of identity.

The value of the advertising market and the size of Facebook’s share of it are both due to the incredible amount of data that Google, Facebook, and other companies collect on every person who uses their services. This information is the company’s to sell, use to target ads, or train algorithms with. Under a DSM model, that information would be yours to sell and distribute among service providers.

The value of this information is worth much more than the emotional value of privacy. Companies like Facebook make much of their money in one way or another from the accuracy and scope of their user data collection. If that information were to become yours by using a DSM, so too would the money it generates.

As it stands, Facebook and Google data-mine users in exchange for a service. Were they to have to adapt to a DSM model, companies like this would need to shift to more traditional models where payment is offered directly for a service rendered. Ulbricht’s model would allow businesses to accommodate liquid payment between service providers like web-hosts or advertisers and the users so that the app constantly allows users to be in control of how much of their data they would like to share and how much usability they want to pay for by receiving ads.

Innovation always trumps regulation

Rather than offering prescription for what ails the social media marketplace, Ulbricht’s paper is a prediction from a prison cell. The unstoppable march of innovation is sure to further segment the digital marketplace for social programs into intricately specialized niches. The distributed social media model is merely a description of how those businesses and technologies would need to operate.

Because Ulbricht was not granted the clemency from the Trump administration that he so hoped for, the infamous programmer will not be the one to found the moderation or content aggregation start-ups that he describes. Public figures such as Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, and Tim Pool have all claimed to be creating platforms that in some way aggregate social media, beginning the process of decentralizing—or polycentrizing—the social media market. It remains to be seen if these or any start-ups will truly realize Ulbricht’s ideas, but if the CDA is not soon updated, it will likely be circumvented.

Just as 3D printers have shown several gun laws to be archaic, if not entirely obsolete, the best way to counter a bad set of laws or regulations is to create a technology or idea that renders it pointless. Ulbricht may not be the one to lead the charge, but his simple Medium post certainly opened a door.

Gavin Hanson (born in ’96) is the Editor-in-Chief of Catalyst

Published with permission from Catalyst. Read the original article here.

The post Regulation, Moderation, and Social Media Decentralization appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.