Would anybody like to fill us in on what BitChute is, in theory and / or in practice?
You might imagine that with how endemic some people allege YouTube's censorship is, there would be a variety of interesting and censored content on BitChute.
Which is why when you check the front page you get and click popular you get... FOX News clips for posting on Voat (a far-right reddit clone), conspiracy theories about the magnetic poles, conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation, conspiracy theories about the Mexican border, a far-right news source complaining about Jeff Flake, neo-nazi videos, Brazilian spam, anti-semitism, people complaining about YouTube censorship, etc.
I was under the impression that voat was created due to censorship that reddit applied on all kinds of things, including anime porn for example. Not exclusively for far-right content.
I certainly do not doubt that most of bitchute's or voat's users are far-right however. It only makes sense that the groups that are censored from other platforms move to censorship-free* alternatives. That being said it would be great to see other creators who have suffered by youtube's content-id system move to decentralized and censorship-resistant alternatives.
* I do doubt that it is fully censorship free still. Chances are that they are willing to take down copyrighted content from their site for example, even if they can't affect the webtorrent distirbution.
There was a lot of scaremongering around the time that voat was launched, the "under 18" part was often left off when people were using that ban in an argument.
Of course, all of this makes for a charming community.
As opposed to, you know, the New York Times or even the Supreme Court.
Bitchute isn't the home of people posting Trump critiques. It's the home of people explaining why all criticisms of Trump must be dismissed as conspiracies initiated by the real enemy: Jewish New World Order reptilians https://www.bitchute.com/hashtag/trump/
It's almost like what is being discussed has nothing to do with free speech. BitChute didn't have its free speech rights harmed in any way. No jack booted government thugs pointed their guns at the owners faces and told them to unplug from the internet.
All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
Jack booted thugs most certainly will point guns at anyone who tries setting up a payment processing system to compete with the company that blocked them.
> All that happened is their current payment provider determined that their business relationship wasn't profitable and terminated the business relationship. BitChute is free to find another way to seek payment.
BitChute is NOT free to find another way to seek payment, because of a state-enforced monopoly on the payment market.
It would be like if your water company decided to cut off water to your house, to compel you to stop speaking, at the behest of activists. Sure, you're "free" to carry buckets of fresh water to your house, I suppose.
No, this is not some business decision, this is systematic economic pressure intended to coerce someone into silence. And frankly I think it is good grounds for a RICO case.
It's also not about protecting any opinions (popular or unpopular) from private refusal to assist in propagating them.
Free speech is not the same as anyone else being obligate to provide assistance with distributing your speech, in fact, such an entitlement would violate freedom of speech for those compelled to participate in speech they disagree with.
Yes. If these platforms and payment processors want to continue to enjoy the state-enforced privileges they receive, then they must, within reason, offer their services to all.
What makes Twitter far worse than Gab is that Twitter actually took the time to have a human review it, and gave it the green light. Gab at least is not attempting to police its content. That makes Twitter much worse.
This is all hypocrisy. The "outrage" of Gab is completely fake. There is no legitimate argument against Gab that does not include Twitter.
[1]: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/twitter-won-suspend-louis-...
There's still a (naive?) liberal side to me that thinks free expression, even of profoundly stupid ideas, might be a net good for society, but I don't want to be a part of a community that is innundated with nasty weirdos who were kicked off of every other platform, so "free speech" is almost a red flag to me at this point. That's kinda sad.
Assuming the motivations behind them are genuine (a big assumption), then there's nothing inherently wrong with BitChute, Voat, Gab, etc. But the actual content on these platforms is the polar opposite of the "diversity of thought" they claim to promote. That may not necessarily even be the site owners' faults (again: a very generous assumption), but a set of circumstances that arises from who actually takes advantage of "free speech" in practice.
I don't have any good answer for how to address that contradiction.
If you want to publish non-racist videos, you can publish them on BitChute without endorsing the racist videos.
The platforms are fundamentally good ideas. There just needs to be a way to bootstrap a diverse community before they're killed in the cradle by angry nerds.
To observe the ideological flipside of this conundrum, I invite you to browse many Mastodon instances, where discourse is driven by the most unbearable carelords imaginable.
Perhaps because the videos that get censored are only shitty to people who aren't you?
I want to say that it's rooted in practicality rather than idealism. I'm uncomfortable with for-profit entities being arbitrators of acceptable content, because various "divisive" or "extreme" viewpoints outside of racism are threatening to their bottom lines as well. A distributed, censorship-proof network would have the side effect of allowing racism to propogate, but it could also protect viewpoints that lie outside of the stifling pro-market center-right consensus that grips most mainstream media platforms. The problem is that these alternatives only attract assholes for the time being.
It's a definite tradeoff where I can't stand behind any one position definitively yet.
It totally is! Stupid ideas are very dangerous. You don't want to hear about them from people with pitchforks at your door.
I was thinking today about the high costs of the stupid idea of anti-vaccinations, in this case children that are not at fault will die because of this ideas, should we block them or we should put billions of dollars into educating this people instead of using this money for better things.
it is not a black or white problem but in this case I personally think is better to block this idea.
Instead of blaming the actual bad party you are trying to blame the schools and the idiots that belive the stupid thing, I am not arguing putting people in jail , I want to have a discussion of ways to keep the "expensive stupid ideas" down, it could be a solution that does not involve laws and governments.
There is a saying in Romanian I am not sure if there is an English equivalent:
"An idiot drops a stone in the lake and 10 geniuses are struggling to find a way to get it out"
Those banned from one distributor or another will of course wave the banner of free speech, because that sounds much nicer than, "Why won't people just leave me alone to organize purging society of all the Jews?" But it's not like the government is suppressing them; it's just that distributors have decided that they don't want to associate with a very small number of people. And that banner-waving has always struck me as a bit false; it's not like, e.g., Nazis are known for their tolerance of dissent, so I have to suspect that their fondness of "free speech" would evaporate the moment they had any real power.
Which is why it's better when giant platforms themselves allow free speech rather than relegating it to niche communities. Of course, good luck convincing them of that.
I don’t think it’s fair to compare the content on a startup platform to a well-established corporate behemoth.
That being said I checked out bitchute for videos on fringe chemistry demonstrations that wouldn’t survive on YouTube. Some pretty cool stuff in that category. But still haven’t been back there because the production values of most are just terrible and painful to watch.
I don’t know why YouTube thinks I want to watch nutcase conspiracy theorists and alt-right whackjobs and compilations of “SJWs getting owned” but it seems to have plenty of them to show me.
As an extreme example, it would be the same as saying 4chan and voat attracted the same type of users in the beginning (as much as 4chan involves some fringe groups)
Corollary: a known, named extremism will have an opposite extremism that can be as bad as the thing it purports to oppose, though it will operate in an orthogonal way and it might not be always have a specific name.
One presumes that people are not in any way obligated to use garbage platforms they don't like to consume content they don't want in service of some higher commitment to a platform that does not exist but might emerge later under ideal circumstances. Rather it is typically the platform operator's job to manage the platform in a way that attracts content of interest, right?
And surely interesting content emerging is not a given. Voat is 4 years old (older than reddit and YouTube were when I started using them, at a point where most of their content was not fringe stuff). The front page is: Far-right politics, libertarian politics, some weird political thing about the french, a guy complaining about YouTube censorship, MAGA memes, MAGA memes, a picture of a cute cat cuddling with Nazis, an attempt to bandwagon someone who wrote a code of conduct, a meme about how George HW Bush is in hell because he doesn't support Trump, PewDiePie, Linux is over because of code of conduct, a meme about how there are only two genders, a meme about how liberals don't believe in fumigating ant hills because they're weak, a video about how George HW Bush is a piece of shit because he likes Israel, a post rhetorically asking why anyone is sad about George HW Bush dying, a Washington Times article about "illegal immigrants", a conservative article alleging Hollywood are all pedophiles, a nazi webcomic, an article about how Democrats stole all the California house seats, a post about how it would be good if someone lynched Emmanuel Macron and how that would be enjoyable, and a meme about how right-wingers should ironically wear burqas to own liberals while they are beating liberals up, a meme of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez saying she's a stupid idiot (this is a "parody" -- not actually clear what it's a parody of, but whatever).
There are a couple I didn't copy-paste here because the titles have racial slurs in them and I couldn't figure out a way to summarize the content without repeating them. So I hope you'll provisionally yield that Voat has not yet grown beyond what you call the "startup platform" phase.
I guess it's possible that Voat is just about to turn the corner, but if I had to guess...
But hey, that's true of any right protecting service or platform. The initial adopters will usually be the people who need that protection earliest, which often translates to criminals, extremists and nutcases. See also most privacy focused tools and platforms (like Tor) which attract the exact same audiences.
It's one reason marketing a service or platform based on privacy or free speech is usually doomed to fail.
But it's not an unsurmountable obstacle. These services just need to attract average Joes with mundane topics as early as possible, and build up communities about non political, non controversial topics as their main priority. That way, while the nutcases will still join en masse, you'll attract enough 'normal' people that people's perceptions will be of you as a neutral provider rather than crazy fringe community.
That isn't possible unless you filter out the bullies and nutcases. If you don't filter out those folks, the place will eventually get taken over by them. The irony is, if you filter them out those very same people will cry about "censorship" and "FREE SPEECH".
You can't have Truly True Free Speech on the internet. It is too cheap for a few folks to spoil things for everybody else. In order to keep a good level of discourse, some people, some times, just have to get lose their right to access certain platforms.
I mean, what is spam filtering besides "censorship"? Everybody filters spam... Thriving communities with good, open content have to filter out bullies and troublemakers the same way.
Surely you meant the actual conspiracy theory Mueller is investigating?
BitChute annoys me because the video streaming is decentralized through bittorrent tech, but the repository of videos is totally dependent and centralized with BitChute.
This comment on the linked post nicely sums up BitChute’s niche.