The Censorship Wars

It's time we all address a massive elephant in the room. Look, we've made no secret of our thoughts on the current direction that quite a hefty chunk of the Western world is headed towards. Whether you're inclined to believe it or not, we're at war. Yes, that includes you. Again, you could be forgiven for not having the time or simply not having the mental bandwidth to follow the day-to-day happenings around the world. Unfortunately for the author of this article, I simply have no choice. Burdened with the weight of the knowledge that I have of what's occurring, I feel it's imperative that we do our very best here at Mirage to sound the alarm bells as best as we possibly can before it's too late.

The Reddit Problem

Let's first start with the Reddit problem. Reddit's original tagline/mission was simple. "The front page of the internet". The idea being to surface the best content from across the web through community voting. Their early pitch was basically democratize content discovery. Instead of editors or algorithms deciding what's important, let users vote. Best content rises to the top. The Y Combinator application reportedly described it as wanting to replace traditional media gatekeepers with community curation. Over time, it evolved from "link aggregator" to "community platform," but the core idea was always: the crowd decides what matters, not centralized authorities. This is simply no longer the case. Owing to an increase in political polarization, they've strayed massively from their conceptual goal. Free speech has become nothing other than a championed slogan by those who seek to quash dissenting voices at every possible juncture. You don't need to look very far to see countless examples of conversations being shut down by power-hungry moderators that are hellbent on enforcing their political ideologies at the expense of open discourse.

It's rampant. You've got well-documented examples of moderators recording themselves demanding that they receive celebrity status for the positions they hold within the platform. Some of the absolute most pertinent issues currently plaguing the world are shut down almost immediately by those who hold an alternate opinion. One fantastic account that serves to highlight the existing problems on there is @Reddit_lies. They provide a literal conveyor belt of content that shows that general discourse is simply impossible, whilst access to the sum of the discourse is in the hands of those who disagree and refuse to allow differing opinions have an arena to voice their opinions.

The Pandemic Precedent

All of this, not just for Reddit, became a massive issue around the pandemic. We saw how powerful tech companies had to bend the knee at the request of government bodies that wanted to control narratives. Zuckerberg quite literally confirmed this fact in an appearance on JRE. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, they all conspired to deplatform and delegitimise those who refused to conform to the mainstream narratives. You could not question the lockdowns. You could not question the sciences behind the rules, regulations or the vaccines. Some of the most qualified people in the world to discuss these topics were taken down. Robert Malone. Peter McCullough. All deplatformed.

The problems that stemmed from this approach were almost brushed over by the fact that people were just happy to resume some semblance of normality in life again as the pandemic passed. We never got to properly dissect the madness of what happened. In fact, it somewhat normalised these tactics, as we can see still to this day. Look now at what's happening across Europe. Moves to enact draconian laws around online activity under the guise of preventing "hate speech". In the last few weeks, European nations have been moving in almost absolute synchronicity to prevent under-16s from using social media. A novel idea until you consider the fact that what they really intend to implement is essentially a KYC-structured gate in order to use the internet. No more online anonymity. A population living in fear of criticizing their governments online, lest they receive a knock on the door from the secret police, as has been happening en masse in the UK, Germany, France and more!

Europe is Collapsing

Europe is collapsing under the weight of government action that no one voted for and no one wants. Everyone knows. Everyone can feel it, yet the elected leaders are more concerned about what prevents the "low-lying peasants" from criticising them online. Read one tweet from one William Hague this week that proclaimed that "social media is becoming incompatible with a healthy democratic system". Read that again and take a second to think about it. Incompatible for whom exactly? Were it not for the free flow of information online, albeit sometimes false, how would we hold criminal politicians (of which there are many) to account? How would we know of the mass waste of taxpayers' money across the world? How would we know about the vile revelations from the most recent drop of Epstein files that they fought tooth and nail to bury? When they say it becomes incompatible with a healthy democratic system, what they mean is "the peasants are conversing, and we can no longer control the narrative."

Why We Must Fight

That, my friends, is exactly why we must fight tooth and nail to maintain the right to speak freely. That we must fight to maintain our right to think for ourselves. To determine and disseminate the context of information ourselves. Everything is at stake. What's becoming abundantly clear is that the established mediums that we've relied upon for years are simply no longer fit for purpose. Reddit is but a mere shell of what it set out to be. There's nothing to suggest that will change anytime soon. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube all showed their hand during the pandemic. If they can pivot on a dime and decide to discard and censor differing views as they please, they can and will do it again. Twitter now post Elon acquisition is a definite improvement of what it was, but it's not without its faults, given the well-documented issues with the ever changing algorithm issues. Pavel Durov is leading a charge in pushing back against the swarms of attacks from the bureaucrats in Europe, but how long can he hold the line against what is seriously mounting political pressure?

The writing is on the wall here people. We need something new. If you've been in the crypto space for more than 2 or 3 years, we'll assume here that you've hung around this long as a result of some ideological beliefs that blockchain and crypto could and would liberate and change the world. Yes, we've strayed horrifically off path in that mission. We're generalising here when we say "we've" but it's largely true. Well we here haven't forgotten. The true cypherpunks that conceptualised the space many decades ago, they had almost prophetic vision in seeing the direction the world was treading towards. It's time we returned to those fundamentals. Without freedom of speech, we have no freedom at all. It's about time we had a platform that held absolutely true to that effect.