I'm less rich yet I remain Steemit fan. I miss the monetary rewards authors earned before Steem prices dropped. The rewards are not what initially lured me here. I arrived here over three months ago for another reason. A bigger reason.
The platform's promise that my content cannot be censored is just as valuable to me as the monetary rewards. It's reassuring to know this publishing will never be deleted and all my followers will receive it on their Feed.
Over the years, activists have suffered from privately owned sites such as Facebook, Youtube, and Reddit, censoring their material. Our content is often slowed and sometimes completely stopped from reaching a larger audience.
I was first attracted to Steemit because of the block-chain's no censorship promise. Apparently other activists are being driven to Steemit for the same reason.
Recently, famed independent journalist, @lukewearchange published "How I got censored on twitter and now running screaming back to steemit," after Twitter deleted one of his viral publishings.
I didn't notice any censorship in 2006 when my work received online and mainstream global attention. NeverGetBusted.com was notorious for crashing servers, landing on the front page of Reddit and ranking in the top-twenty of most talked about stories.
The viral content I posted always related to freeing drug war prisoners, exposing government corruption or teaching citizens how to counter government enforcement tactics. Apparently, the government does not like person's becoming famous for opposing their institutions.
I first noticed online censorship in 2008 when I launched Kopbusters.com. At the time, KopBusters.com was one of only a few sites featuring a collection of cop abuse videos. I also featured my online reality show documenting traps I set for crooked cops.
The stings featured cop's willingness to illegally raid homes and make arrests. According to the news-tracking website, Digg.com, KopBusters led the world as the most talked about story on the Internet and ranked #10 in most searched-for words on Google.
I noticed mainstream media's censorship of my content first. Although the cop stings were the most talked about stories in the world, I never received an invitation from any television or mainstream media to discuss the operations. It's obvious mainstream media was and still is "cop friendly" and allows very little anti-government content to be aired or published.
Online censorship was harder to spot but after some time, easy to prove. Soon, my films were banned by Paypal, Google Pay, Amazon, Ebay and other privately owned sites. For months, I was unable to collect online revenue because Internet banks rejected my applications and banned my content.
I continue being targeted for censorship. For a number of years, "How to pass a drug test by ex-narc, Barry Cooper" dominated similar publishings and ranked #3 on the first page of Google when searching the common term, "How to pass a drug test."
The traffic generated by the high-ranking article earned us a nice monthly check because it was sprinkled with affiliate links to a drug detox vendor. Google deleted the publishing after claiming an image in the article was a copyright violation. I had been using the same image for over three years.
Apparently, someone purchased the image while it was considered "fair use" and being used in my article. The person then submitted a copyright infringement complaint to Google who stripped my publishing. Google made the source of the complainant almost impossible to track. Any attempts to find the ghost were thwarted by Google’s circle-looped instructions.
I hired lawyers as we followed through with all of Google's Ping-Pong and vague requirements. They finally undeleted my publishing but did not restore it's ranking. It's now over ten pages deep and earning nothing.
Another example of online censorship can be found when looking at Facebook. At one time FB allowed me to send a post to over 10,000 fans simultaneously. Earning ad dollars was the motive FB used to overshadow the darker motive of censorship for flip-flopping their algorithms.
I often wielded this power by asking my fans to slam courthouse phones with requests to free prisoners who were unjustly incarcerated. Hundreds of activists and myself were stripped of this privilege overnight when Facebook began delivering only a tiny percentage of our content.
Although authors are struggling with Steems falling prices, Steemit is still a fantastic place to publish your material...especially if you are concerned about being censored.
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Censorship Controlled Image source: http://arcanacreations.blogspot.mx/2015/09/censorship-and-obs.html
Facebook/Twitter meme source: https://memegenerator.net/instance/19912612
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