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One of the most contentious issues of our times has been censorship – the ability for private social media companies to decide what content they serve as we live on these platforms as digital tenants, at best. This leads to accounts being taken down without much explanation – a pattern that has seen itself repeated across legacy social media companies.
Before the Adopting Bitcoin Cape Town conference, the X account responsible was suspended. This led to the Adopting Bitcoin account for the event being moved to Nostr, a new social network and protocol that focuses on being censorship-free – where the account could freely post recaps of conference material.
Recently, in Vancouver, a hotspot of Bitcoin merchant adoption, one of the merchants that have started accepting Bitcoin, Killer Ice Cream, suddenly had personal and business accounts taken down without the reason being explained to them. They logged in to find their business account suspended after spending much time building out a presence. As co-owner German Glik put it: “We figured it had to be a mistake – we went through the steps to appeal the suspension, which included uploading a selfie video and typing some keys to verify we were human.”
Yet, when they followed through on this, they now found themselves permanently banned from an account where they had spent so much time building followers. What might have been the cause? Perhaps a recent post about a Bitcoin meetup they had started hosting twice a month according to the owners.
While these can be coincidences, it follows a long-standing policy from social media platforms to suppress what they believe is Bitcoin-related activity. In the past, Bitcoin media outlets like Simply Bitcoin have also been through the same cycle – getting suspended by Google but returning from the suspension afterward – though for reasons that still aren’t clear. Advertising related to “cryptocurrencies” is monitored more closely across different social networks, showing that this sort of content is in the eye of the major tech titans that own large swathes of the Internet. This comes after Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg declared that the White House had pressured Meta to censor certain types of content related to COVID-19.
This is part of the reason a network called Nostr has evolved with Bitcoin. Nostr is similar to Bitcoin’s principles, though it processes words rather than financial data. The idea is to have distributed hardware worldwide that powers relays – broadcasting content across the protocol. Nostr is engineered towards being censorship-proof – when something is broadcast to the network, taking it down is challenging, if not impossible. The important thing about Nostr and its thinking is that it isn’t just building another wheel – a flavored community and platform that reports to state and shareholder and will censor in its own way – but rather re-imagining what authentication and communication might look like if one has an ironclad focus on decentralizing digital power and making censorship difficult if not impossible.
If some relays decide they don’t want to broadcast some content – others will take up the charge and that will then be displayed in the clients most people use to access Nostr posts. In the past, censorship has led to bursts of activity on Nostr. When Brazil banned X temporarily, some Brazilian users put up shop on Nostr to communicate with the world. Chinese users have also embraced Nostr, especially when one of the clients was taken down by Mainland Chinese app stores.
And now, one of the suspended accounts has decided to move from X to Nostr – perhaps for good. We also live through a fracturing global social media ecosystem, where people find their communities on different platforms and geopolitical fault lines are felt online. With a TikTok ban in the air, some Americans have moved to RedNote, while members of the Chinese Internet find refuge in subreddits. Yet, the focus on protocols over platforms is unique among Nostr – where different clients serve content from around the world with a focus on not having one company or person in particular become so powerful that they might be able to kick someone out at whim as is still the case for all of RedNote, Reddit and TikTok.
For Bitcoin accounts and those with dissident views, these events remind many that the giant tech companies own large parts of the Internet – and can cut off access on a whim. Though the reasons may always be left up in the air, Nostr is a powerful alternative for businesses and individuals tired of having their accounts taken down with no explanation given – seemingly a more common occurrence with each passing day.
