Yesterday, WeChat, one of China’s largest social media and messaging services, executed a platform-wide ban on Chinese crypto-media accounts. The official reason: the publishing of ICO and cryptocurrency trading information. However, there is chatter on Crypto-Twitter that the real motivation for the ban is because media accounts were reporting on the vaccine scandal that bypassed China’s censorship earlier this year through the use of the Ethereum blockchain.
We’ve all seen this before. The Chinese government has shown that it is not a fan of bitcoin or blockchain — precisely because these technologies often nullify the government’s censorship attempts. It was one of the first major countries to ban ICOs and cryptocurrency exchanges, and now it is in the process of removing crypto-related media businesses.
This move is exactly why blockchain is vital. A fully decentralized system enables people to share information without the fear of censorship. When everything lives on one platform, whether it is WeChat or Facebook, the platform controls what information people see. When one platform controls the flow of information, it becomes a honeypot for regulators looking to censor content. We need alternatives: The growth of decentralized content-sharing platforms like Mastodon proves that people are actively seeking for them. For information to truly flow free, the path it travels through must be unobstructed.
