The latest Facebook purge of political news pages ahead of the 2018 midterm US congressional elections sent shock waves through more dissident groups. The Anti-Media, a page with two million followers, vanished over night on 11 October. Years of work gone, followers left hanging. Undeterred, the site, and outlets like it, have taken to distributed ledger technology, similar to that underpinning most cryptocurrencies, to build what they describe as “a decentralized content delivery system for our website and an uncensorable hub to store all of our content from across our various social media platforms.”

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The Anti-Media Partners with LBRY.io

CoinSpice.io readers were among the first to learn of Facebook’s latest purge. Crypto folk count themselves as outside-the-box thinkers, and often look to unconventional, unorthodox sources of news and information. The Anti-Media was among the outlets many cited as a mixture of anti-war and alternative to mainstream media along with a freer market focus. Needless to say, criticizing current levers of power on both sides isn’t something Facebook is interested in supporting.

Founder Nick Bernabe, founder and Editor-in-Chief, explained to CoinSpice.io how years of work was suddenly cast aside by the world’s largest social networking site. No notice. No warning. No flagging of questionable content. Just gone. Bernabe (pronounced Bern-ah-bee), it turns out, had been planning for something like for it a long time as he watched other sites get similar treatment, and he suspected The Anti-Media might be next.

“As of today, all the content published on theantimedia.com will automatically be pressed onto the LBRY blockchain,” The Anti-Media explained, “and hosted on our decentralized LBRY channel, which can be found on the LBRY app at lbry://@AntiMedia. Now our fans will be able to find all of our content — no matter which social media platform we post it on — and all of the articles published on our website in one place. With the help of LBRY and the LBRYPress WordPress plugin we’ve helped develop, Anti-Media’s content is now unstoppable. All of the video and image content we create can also be found on the web at our custom LBRY-powered spee.ch site lbry.theantimedia.com.”

Crypto Could be an Answer

When Facebook brought the hammer down, news sites (some 800 total) relying upon it found organic clicks way down. And since they live and die by the click, the entire news project was in danger of being crushed. As a result they began “adapting by building our presence on alternative social media sites, rebuilding theantimedia.com’s front page as an interactive ‘Homepage for Independent Media,’ and setting up a daily newsletter. Anti-Media survived the algorithmic silencing campaign, and we even began to see our traffic climb over recent months.”

CoinSpice.io profiled answers such as Honest.cash that use either crypto directly or its blockchain tech, or both, to find ways around censorship. LBRYPress developer Paul Kirby explains, “Any publisher can now start getting their name out there on the LBRY Network, which, in my opinion, is what the future of publishing and content consumption looks like. It’s also a great way to create permanent copies of all your content and media and put them onto a decentralized network. The beauty of the LBRYPress plugin is that it doesn’t impede your current setup in any way. It is a plug and play system that steps out of the way of any CDN, caching, or other setup you may have and lets you focus on writing and creating content in one place.”

And while it’s early days in the use of such tech, and few people know it even exists, that isn’t stopping a great many business and developers from working on an obvious problem: corporations too close to governments, bending to please political whim at the expense of free speech. Crypto just might have the answer.

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