Deplatforming: Banished from the Web2 Town Square

Internet: The World’s Digital Town Square

According to Global Research Index, 59% of the world’s population or 4.70 billion people use social media and 63% or 5 billion people have access to the internet. Elon Musk called Twitter the “de facto public town square”, but the internet encompasses far more, creating a new paradigm for online interconnected communities, unlocking global localized marketplaces and acting as a tool to hold individuals and institutions accountable.

For much of the world’s population, the web serves as the predominant medium of news, communication, commerce,[digital] identity and reputation.

Web2: The Big Tech Monopoly

The internet or Web2, as we know it today is owned and controlled by five tech companies (Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta & Microsoft). In 2021, The “big five” — Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon have a combined valuation of over $3.3 trillion and make up more than 40% of the value of the Nasdaq 100 index.

Let’s review some examples of Big Tech market dominance:

• Search Engines: Whenever a user uses a search engine, the generated metadata is collected, and the displayed search results are defined by Google’s closed-source algorithms. As of 2022, 92.49% of all search queries conducted across all search engine providers come through Google.
• Social Media: A user’s digital profile and user-generated data on Facebook (2.93 billion users), WhatsApp (2 billion users) and Instagram (1.4 billion users) are owned by Meta.
• Social Professional Platforms: Microsoft owns a users’ professional profile and code, libraries and repositories on the largest social-professional platforms, LinkedIn (830 million users) and GitHub (83 million developers) respectively.
• Cloud Infrastructure: Amazon controls over 50% of the global cloud computing infrastructure necessary to host websites’ front end and storage.
• Operating Systems: Microsoft controls 75% of the computer operating system market. The mobile operating system is a duopoly shared between Google and Apple with 72% and 27% market share respectively.

The big five’s dominance in tech extends far beyond the examples described above, but that calls for a separate article entirely. They also hold unprecedented power to moderate their platforms, able to remove content, deplatform and ban users, with little explanation and minimal oversight.

All of the mentioned companies are for-profit, meaning shareholder interests come first; have centralized decision-making and are built on closed-source code. Each company collects user data and leverages it for commercial interests. E.g. user data is sold by search engines and social media platforms to advertisers, which is then used to place targeted ads. GitHub’s machine-learning programming assistant, the Copilot, is sold as an additional service but was developed by “analyzing billions of lines” of user-generated code.

Ramifications of Deplatforming

Merriam-Webster defines Deplatforming as:

[referring] to the attempt to boycott a group or individual through removing the platforms (such as speaking venues or websites) used to share information or ideas.

Imagine a full-time content creator on YouTube with hundreds of hours of video content being banned from the platform, the videos and their metadata deleted, and the subscriber count reset. Imagine a project on GitHub with thousands of hours of code, libraries and repositories contributed by multiple developers, and one day later, your code ceases to exist. Imagine if Amazon decides to delist a book from its store. All of these examples occur frequently and are widely covered in Web2.

The sanctioning of Tornado Cash, a decentralized open source privacy-preserving protocol, by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) is an example. Within a week of the announcement, companies complying with OFAC regulations severed ties with Tornado Cash, including Microsoft-owned GitHub deleting Tornado Cash’s entire source code and banning its developer accounts. Web3 infrastructure development platforms, Alchemy and Infura blocked access to Tornado Cash, preventing users from accessing the platform by disabling remote procedure call (RPC) requests. Many Ethereum blue-chips DeFi protocols including Aave, Uniswap & Balancer blocked wallet addresses complied with the sanction blocking Tornado Cash addresses on the sanction list.

We’ve covered the Tornado Cash sanction in great detail in SOURC3’s Weekly #ThreadofThreads on Twitter:

In the 21st century, deplatforming is akin to banishing an individual from society, a punishment that was reserved for the worst offenders in antiquity. It infringes upon an individual’s Universal Human Right to Speech and Expression. The professional, financial and social consequences ramifications for those deplatformed are massive.

Therefore, we all share a collective responsibility, state and society, to uphold our universal rights in these new digital town squares. The 1st Amendment in the U.S Constitution is a proclamation of such protection.

The Web3 Way at SOURC3

Web3 is a rapidly growing emerging technology, so much so, that the industry redefines itself periodically, but the core principles have always centered on decentralization, community governance and user-equitable protocols that disperse value across platforms’ stakeholders. E.g. Web3 social media such as Tea.xyz returns data ownership to the users, instead of being owned and commercialized by platforms such as Facebook.

SOURC3 is a cross-collaboration software development platform, similar to the application GitHub, but built from the ground up with Web3 ethos: open source, decentralized and censorship-resistant, creating an unstoppable all-inclusive developer community. The SOURC3 open source community, building the web of tomorrow, are incentivized and compensated for their contributions, awarding ownership of the platform and a share in the platform’s revenue.

All code on SOURC3 is user-owned, authenticated on-chain and stored on decentralized peer-to-peer IPFS storage, making it tamper-proof and censorship-resistant. Contributions are attributed to the user’s unique wallet identity, allowing developers to build a professional reputation and Web3 portfolio. Users retain full commercial rights for each contribution, can remove their code from the platform if they wish, or license their code to earn royalties.

We believe free code equates to free speech, and digital playgrounds are a public good, accessible to all, owned and democratically governed by the community.

About SOURC3

Built to benefit the creator community, SOURC3 is a Web3-native, decentralized platform for on-chain reputation management.

Our first Web3 DApp is now live! SOURC3 GitConnect, allowing developers to bring their contributions on-chain.

Visit: http://www.SOURC3.xyz for more information about moving from the Web2 world to building the Web3 way.

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