In the Tweet above, Vivek Ramaswamy addresses how segments of the United States Government use incentives and disincentives (carrot and stick) to pressure private companies like Facebook, Twitter, and data providers to censor speech to indirectly circumvent the Constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech.
While it is noteworthy and laudable that Vivek is championing free speech, this is only half of the solution. Large corporations have a vested and direct imperative to protect their bottom line and their own interests. Centralized communication platforms are funded by a combination of subscription revenue and advertisement revenue. If Budweiser is paying Facebook/Meta millions of year in advertising they might have the reasonable expectation that communications critical of their beer are throttled or minimized.
In the same thread an observe Richard comments - > "State action in disguise" sums up the social media platforms." Richard may be correct but those of us who value free speech, can help preserve our own rights.
Engaged citizens don't have to hope that corporations will do the right things or act in their best interests. They can participate in decentralized networks like Hive.IO and help secure and defend their own speech and interests. Hive is a blockchain that is designed to store text data - make it a great basis for a blogging, or microblogging platform. To protect that network the validator nodes on Hive called witnesses are run by groups or individuals voted on by the community. So the infrastructure of the Hive network is decentralized and the users and communities on Hive can ensure that malicious entities can not unilaterally seize control of the network.
Portals like InLeo.io , D.Buzz , PeakD provide a frontend to access the data on Hive - creating interfaces that are immediately recognizable to legacy social medias users.
This image of the D.Buzz interface and the post by @neopch illustrates a simple and clean interface, though perhaps with an addition not familiar to users on Twitter. Because Neo's readers enjoyed his content they upvoted the post - at the time of this blog - that short post had recieved **almost $11.00 in rewards in the form of tokens on the Hive Blockchain. ** *Upvoted posts on Hive are provided with rewards directly by the blockchain itself, there is no direct cost to a user to upvote a post. *
People all over the world are using Hive to protect and secure free speech, and as an enjoyable substitute for traditional social media. It is free and relatively simple to get started.