Is Nostr an Antidote to Social Media Censorship?
Why is social media so easily corrupted by the state? Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey says guys like him are the problem.
“I was a single point of failure,” Dorsey said at the 2024 Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference hosted by the Human Rights Foundation. “It creates a chokehold. You have a company, a CEO, a board, that represents one place where an entity can put pressure on.”
That was especially true during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when federal officials were in contact with every major social media platform, coercing them to remove content. Even in normal times, Google and Meta collect vast troves of personal information on their users and receive hundreds of thousands of requests every year from governments around the world to access that data. When Dorsey was running Twitter, the company’s Indian offices were raided after a tweet offended a member of the ruling party. The government of France recently arrested Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, and wants to hold him criminally liable for illicit activity taking place on the network.
What if there were an alternative platform with no offices to raid and no single CEO to arrest? What if it were owned not by Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, or the Chinese Communist Party, but by everybody and nobody all at once? What if there were no administrators with direct access to user personal data?
That alternative exists, and it’s called Nostr. Like bitcoin, it’s a community-run digital network highly resistant to censorship and corruption. If bitcoin has the potential to serve as the foundation of a new global monetary system, Nostr could do the same for communication and identity in the digital sphere.
Take it from Martti Malmi, who was one of the first developers to work on bitcoin, collaborating with Satoshi Nakamoto himself. Now, he’s a Nostr developer.
“Bitcoin is freedom of money, and Nostr is freedom of everything else,” Martti said during a recent bitcoin conference in Prague.
When did social media get so broken? In what feels like a lifetime ago, Arab Spring activists used Twitter and Facebook to organize, coordinate, and topple long-standing dictatorships. It was intoxicating—but this tech-powered revolution from below was a mirage. Military regimes cracked down, and the very same networks that empowered the masses were repurposed as tools of censorship, surveillance, and repression.
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