Tag: Indonesia

This article is about our friends from Anonymous Bites Back http://anonymousbitesback.com, a group of free speech activists who fight back against censorship on the internet.

Most of our readers probably know that independent podcasts are going through a difficult time online right now. The major social media have embarked on an effective censorship campaign to silence dissident voices on the internet. It started with Facebook giving a lot of trouble for groups of a certain political side. Pages were removed, others were shadowbanned and receive pretty much no reach anymore. At first many people were embracing it, because it didn’t happen on their side yet. They were unaffected.

And then it changed. Suddenly everyone with a voice that wasn’t accepted by the “main stream” was being targetted. And after Facebook, the website Twitter started to do the same. It caused people to freak out. Resulting in the word shadowbanning becoming a new “internet dictionary” word, because it is the discussion of the day.

A lot of the victims of this campaign give up and choose to find their place elsewhere. Many new alternative websites are being created, like Mewe.com and Worldie.co. Normally this would be a good thing, but not when it results out of necessity. The major social media networks are attempting to silence free speech in a very serious way. The solutions are there, but the masses are not yet using these websites. So it creates tiny islands and especially for activists this is very difficult to deal with.

But not all of the broadcasters are giving up. Anonymous Bites Back is different. With a panel consisting of free speech activists and technology enthusiasts from around the world, they chose to fight back. At first they were silenced on Facebook. And they started to invent ways to get around the oppressive algorithms, by utilizing their audience as well. Then the same happened on Youtube, with their streaming capabilities being fully disabled for 90 days, without any reason.

Eventually they started to decentralize. Anonymous Bites Back developed a system independent from all social media, able to broadcast to all of the sites at once whenever they go live. This means that they no longer depend on any individual net, but they will just have their live stream on whatever site accepts them. And they will spread that link. The podcasters combined this with audio streams on their own site, and on another volunteer network that works with them. Being fully weaponized against the system. The amount of viewers increased to a level that was larger than ever.

This created a change in things. After streaming just 2 episodes they were already contacted by the Youtube team, asking them if the situation on the site should be fixed and that it might have been a mistake. Anonymous Bites Back gave them a simple response: No. We don’t need you anymore.

So even though they were victims, decentralization made them stronger than ever.

Find their main stream (while it lasts) on Periscope: Anonymous Bites Back Live https://periscope.tv/Anonymousbitesback/

Another article about this: Anonymous Bites Back Free Speech Activists Found a Way to Defeat Censorship http://hacknews.eu/2019/07/31/anonymous-bites-back-free-speech-activists-found-a-way-to-defeat-censorship/