Mark Zuckerberg’s
announcement that he is dropping censorship in the U.S. for Facebook and Instagram was accompanied by a comment that he is going to work with the U.S. government to encourage other countries to not censor content. Upon acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk dropped censorship and soon learned that government mandates from across the world censor content.
In 2024, Brazil blocked Twitter until it complied with censorship demands, France arrested Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, the EU censored additional Russian outlets and wrote letters to Twitter mandating more content moderation, and Australia announced it will fine platforms for misinformation.
The current U.S. administration had a heavy censorship hand and had threatened to revoke Section 230 which protects Internet sites from liability about their users’ content. Zuck indicated in his announcement and a letter to Congress in November that Meta felt coerced to comply. Twitter under Jack Dorsey was also coerced to censor, as disclosed in the
Twitter Files and
Alex Berenson’s amended censorship lawsuit with new insider materials from Twitter.
Western governments did not typically engage in government guidance or mandates on content until after the Brexit and Trump elections in 2016 followed by the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022. Once Western governments realized that they had lost narrative control, they started playing catch up with China, which was well aware from the start of the power of social networks to both disrupt and control narratives.
Due to the secretive nature of government guidance and mandates, Elon and those outside social media organizations had only witnessed basic
content moderation. Jack and Zuck had already experienced years of coercive government guidance threatening Section 230 revocation as well as numerous explicit censorship mandates from Western governments.
Zuck’s response was to downrank and
de-emphasize political content in early 2021 after the bruising 2020 U.S. election cycle. This was a difficult decision since Facebook made a lot of money from political arguments, as I pointed out in a
2019 article for VentureBeat. Zuck sidestepped government pressure and continued to grow his properties. Correspondingly, despite the volumes of
racist and homophobic content on Instagram, there is not much pressure for content moderation from groups like Media Matters and GARM that have targeted X/Twitter.
Jack’s response was to fund Bluesky to shift Twitter to an open protocol like email’s SMTP and the web’s HTTP. Governments can of course censor at the protocol level with firewalls like they currently do for email and web, but by separating the application and protocol layers, Jack recognized that social networks could operate like any other Internet infrastructure that is content neutral. Jack departed Bluesky when the company started
massively moderating accounts and content. Jack then discovered
Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays), a decentralized messaging protocol initially created by an anonymous developer
FiatJeff, much like an anonymous developer Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
Nostr is reminiscent of
FidoNet, a popular store-and-forward messaging protocol for Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in the 1980s. Each BBS was fully independent, and each could choose which forum messages to store-and-forward, whether to moderate content, and how long to keep the messages. In addition, FidoNet could store-and-forward private messages between users.
UseNet also operated in a similar store-and-forward manner for Internet forums, but did not operate private messages since the Internet already had SMTP.
Nostr developers offer an active ecosystem of both clients and servers offering an interface familiar to social network users, as well as micro apps offering new functionality on top of the protocol. Nostr is decentralized with no central control point and transmits messages across independently operated relays. Just like with current email systems and Nostr predecessors FidoNet and UseNet the independence of the relays create inefficiency. Different users may not see each others’ replies chronologically until the messages transmission has caught up, and not all relays transmit all messages. FidoNet and UseNet were inefficient due to resource constraints such as long distance charges and intermittent connectivity. Nostr and Bitcoin use inefficiency to engineer resilience into the protocol.
A Nostr account can never be “revoked,” however relays are not obligated to carry an account’s messages. Users can easily switch relays or even operate their own. As part of the new generation of decentralized crypto software, Nostr uses a public/private key combination for identity, and you can optionally publish your profile name, e-mail address, and lightning wallet associated with the key. Nostr clients sign messages with your private key when you post, and users know it’s you by your public key. A note of caution: just like with crypto, if your private key gets compromised or lost, it’s like losing or having your Bitcoin private key stolen.
A new administration could easily coerce social media companies. This time, Elon stood in the face of a government onslaught. Zuck followed when the coast was clear. Jack has laid the foundation for the future.