 Recently, a lot of people have been talking about deplatforming. What is deplatforming? Deplatforming is a different kind of censorship. Instead of the platform owner saying, I don't like this speech over here, so I'm going to erase it from my platform, they say, I don't like this person's speech, and so I'm going to kick them off of the platform altogether. This year, we've seen a substantial increase in the amount of deplatforming happening on platforms all over the internet. And there's a lot of discussion as to whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. There's also a lot of discussion as to what potential solutions could be to this problem, but really there's only one solution that's guaranteed to be effective. And that is moving away from these platforms that have one owner to platforms that don't have anyone controlling them at all. Decentralized applications. I'll talk more about decentralized applications later in the video. But first, I want to give you a few examples of deplatforming that we've seen this year. In March, Reddit banned a whole bunch of subreddits that were devoted to discussing different types of goods and services, alcohol, tobacco, firearms, sex work. All of them were banned, even though many of those things are legal. Also in March, YouTube removed a whole bunch of content creators' material that was devoted to guns. This isn't people calling for gun violence, just people discussing firearms, which is completely legal. But the channels themselves, many of which had hundreds of videos, were banned from the platform. YouTube wasn't only deplatforming people. They would also demonetize people who had controversial content that they didn't like, preventing those creators from having an income. In August, Shopify started banning the sales of some guns, weapons, and ammunition. Also in August, YouTube, Apple, and Facebook all banned Alex Jones. Twitter followed a few weeks later. In November, Shopify banned some controversial political groups. And then Twitter started doing the same thing. In December, Tumblr announced that they were no longer going to allow adult content on their platform, kicking out huge communities altogether. Last year, crowdfunding site Patreon decided to restrict adult content significantly on their site. And then just in the past few days, they've started closing accounts of politically controversial creators, which has led other creators to leave in protest. This was not an exhaustive list of deplatforming over the past year. I'm sure I've missed quite a few good examples. It's been happening a lot recently. Those examples were all ones where the free expression was directly through speech. However, that is not the only case where deplatforming happens. There are several financial platforms where people are being prevented access because of their particular views. This is happening right now with PayPal, but it's been happening with credit cards for a very long time. I'm sure many of you out there are thinking, well, I don't like guns and I don't like the alt-right, so maybe this doesn't sound that bad. And these are private platforms. They have every right to kick out people that they don't want on their own platforms. But there's no guarantee that you're always going to be on the right side of these particular issues. So if these platforms start to abuse their power in the future and many think they already are abusing their power, then what are the alternatives? You might think that you could just go to a new platform that supports free speech. That sounds great, except companies often have a poor track record of professing their belief in free speech, but when the rubber meets the road, they don't actually follow through. Shopify is a good example of this. Back in 2017, Shopify was being used as a platform for commerce for a few folks on the alt-right. Many people called for Shopify to shut them down. However, Shopify's CEO wrote an essay called In Support of Free Speech, where he said, if we start blocking out voices, we would fall short of our goals as a company to make commerce better for everyone. Instead, we would have a biased and diminished platform. However, they did not adhere to those goals, and in 2018, they started censoring trade for people selling guns and ammunition, as well as for people in controversial political groups. In fact, if you try to read the essay In Support of Free Speech today, it's not there. These platforms are becoming politicized, and there's a decent chance that some point in the future, no matter where you fall in the political spectrum, you're going to be in the crosshairs of someone who owns a platform that has a different point of view than you do. So where do you go? The solution is to have a platform that isn't controlled by any one organization, which means it can't become politicized and it can't deplatform anyone. Decentralized applications are becoming more and more popular, and there is no organization which controls them. They cannot become a political tool. These decentralized applications are still pretty young. They've only been around for a few years and don't have a lot of users yet. But there are a lot of reasons to use them other than just getting away from the risk of being deplatformed. Decentralized applications are typically much more private than centralized platforms. Because you're connecting to someone else peer to peer, you're not connecting to one organization and giving them all your data. They're also usually free to use. You can join and leave the network as much as you want whenever you want. And of course, decentralized platforms are best known for their censorship resistance. Not only the deplatforming type of censorship that I've been talking about, but also the more traditional type where one particular message gets taken down. Again, because there's no one that controls the platform, there's no one that has the ability to go and censor any particular message. If you're interested in learning more about how decentralization works, I recommend you read The Beginner's Guide to Decentralization on the OpenBazaar blog. I'll put a link to it in the video description below. So here are a few of the decentralized applications that I find most interesting personally. Mastodon is a social media network. It's similar to Twitter, but not controlled by Twitter or by any organization. BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing network that's been around for a long time, has lots of content on it. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer network of people able to send electronic cash directly to each other without relying on any third parties to process their payments. Bisk is a decentralized network where people can buy and sell cryptocurrencies directly with each other. IPFS is a distributed file system. OpenBazaar is a decentralized marketplace. People all over the world can buy and sell goods and services directly with each other, privately, without needing to pay any fees or worry about censorship. OpenBazaar is a project that I work on. I've been working on it for over four years now along with a very talented team of people from all over the world. Its primary goal is to create an area where people can buy and sell goods and services with each other online, privately, without needing to pay any fees or worry about censorship. Though its primary goal is to facilitate trade, OpenBazaar also has some social features like encrypted chat and the ability to follow other people on the network. And we're rolling out some new social features in the near future. So if you've been de-platformed or if you're concerned about being de-platformed in the future, I recommend you check out OpenBazaar and all the other decentralized applications that I've been talking about. I've left a bunch of links for you in the video description below. Go check them out.