Twitter has recently been banning, suspending or restricting a number of accounts belonging to Bitcoin Cash supporters for unclear reasons.
The latest one is SBI Group, the Japanese conglemorate that has signaled strong support for Bitcoin Cash, recently announcing they will be mining it.
It is unclear why this warning is being shown as the corporate account appears to be tweeting in a reasonable manner.
Our preferred theory is that Bitcoin Core supporters, perhaps with the assistance of an army of bots, have been unreasonably reporting it.
There is evidence to support this theory in regards to another account that was briefly suspended to now be reinstated.
The above account, with nearly a million followers, has been highly in favor of Bitcoin Cash, rattling Bitcoin Core supporters who called for this:
The interesting part here is that they succeeded, suggesting twitter is using an automatic method with little human verification prior to taking action.
As such, one can imagine a clever basement dweller might be able to temporarily suspend Trump’s twitter account through fake reporting, unless twitter does have at least one peanut brain and maintains a whitelist of sorts.
We know they do not, even for verified accounts, because Kraken’s twitter was recently suspended. Clueless individuals perhaps reported the real account rather than the many scammy ones, or perhaps a basement dweller with a little bot wanted to have some fun.
This raises a bigger question. Twitter, and even more so Google, are a commons of sort. A global public space that provides a utility not much different than electricity at our stage of civilization, especially considering our knowledge based economies.
Yet there is no public accountability at all regarding their black box algorithm. No one knows, for example, if Google’s algorithm has a +1 for leftist websites, or for internationalist websites, or for certain political leanings or for certain corporations.
Moreover, we now know government agencies are interfering with Google and how it manages itself due to recent reports FBI pressured them to blanket ban crypto adverts. Thus, we get new rumors for our times:
The saddest thing one ever said is 4chan is right again, goes the meme. Of course, we have no reason at all to think the above is right, and the strongest argument against it is that such grand conspiracy would not stay secret for long.
We have one instance to support that theory, global surveillance. It was talked of for years, and when Snowden blew the whistle, it is known went the chorus.
The moral of that story is that once the secret is at “the emperor has no clothes” stage, then it might be too late to actually affect change as we have seen with global surveillance where nothing was changed at all.
They don’t have to. And this great power Google has now accumulated, as have other social networks, won’t easily or voluntarily be given away.
Which raises the question as to how exactly do you keep them accountable? Who watches the watchers? And the ultimate answer is that we all do.
The preferred way is competition, a mighty task due to network effects and because the costs of entry are stupendously high when it comes to something like ranking the entire world’s knowledge.
Which is why blockchain technology and the crypto-space more widely could provide an answer in an indirect way. Google, but with a token, might sound silly. Yet, it is different, it’s an excuse to provide an alternative.
That “excuse” or “reason” shouldn’t be underestimated, because so far no one has found an “excuse” to disrupt Google.
But, with the token economy having different qualities and thus naturally being innovative, such giants can be taken head on.
That’s because people might be willing to give up a bit of convenience early on for coolness, or to be part of something new, or to feel like the search provider is not just search, but a community, that belongs to the community.
A public commons, which now can perhaps be funded and incentivized through the token economy.
