by Jemayel Khawaja

It started with Facebook. Right around the time the platform became mired in scandal for doing what most knew what it was doing anyway — selling users’ intimate data to the highest bidder — it was announced that Facebook had banned all promotion of posts relating in any way to cryptocurrency or digital currency. “This policy is intentionally broad while we work to better detect deceptive and misleading advertising practices,” noted Facebook’s statement.

Exacted under the banner of inhibiting scam ICOs from luring vulnerable Facebookers into parting with their hard-earned BTC or ETH in fraudulent token launches, the draconian move has in effect stymied the communication capacities of thousands of genuine and worthwhile startups by inhibiting the promotion of content that features any phrase even vaguely related to blockchain and decentralization in its headline.

Next came Google Ads. Then Twitter. And then Mailchimp! What’s resulted is an effective blockchain marketing blackout on platforms that make up much of the internet experience for most of the Western world. A blanket ban on all promotion of blockchain-related pages, regardless of whether they represent an ICO at all, functions less as a safety measure and more as an unprecedented act of censorship against a whole technology that should cause alarm to anyone watching how fast this late period of Web 2.0 is unraveling.

The situation has elicited a spectrum of reactions from around the blockchain world. Many have come out against the move. Some take the high road, claiming either that the industry needs to be exorcised of its scammier demons or that we don’t need those aging 2.0 platforms anyway. Almost universal, though, is a sense of surprise at the sheer breadth and severity, particularly when companies like Facebook and Google are purportedly looking into blockchain technology themselves, and an understanding that this is just another sign that there is still lots of building to be done to make the world in the image of decentralization.

“Centralized platforms give themselves this right because of how they are architected,” says Ariella Steinhorn of Blockstack. “We voluntarily hand over data that should be our own, and agree to their terms because there are no other options. But instead of seeing this as an obstacle, Steinhorn says “Blockstack is focused on funding decentralized projects and promoting usage of decentralized apps that including private messaging platforms, word processors, social media networks, and wallets.” Inspiring as this vision of a blockchain world is, it comes with an implication that the building will be done in spite of or in opposition to the legacy internet rather than with it.

Blockstack’s growing suite of decentralized apps aims to create updated versions of social tech stalwarts.

How did we get here? The situation is a goopy melange of monopoly, censorship, and enterprise gamesmanship. Facebook has long since manipulated its algorithms to require professional pages — be they DJs, politicians, blockchain startups — to spend more and more to reach audiences. In fact, achieving reach within Facebook’s audience analytics widget by pumping dollars into the right demographic (dare we say ‘psychographic’?) is now the major tenet of the whole digital marketing profession. Ads drove over $40 billion in profit for Facebook in 2017, and the platform has become the de facto information source for many of its 2.1 billion users.

Facebook’s monopolistic hegemony over information led Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi to state last week: “We need to break up Facebook, the same way we broke up Standard Oil, AT&T and countless other less-terrifying overgrown corporate tyrants of the past. The moral if not legal reason is obvious: A functioning free press just can’t coexist with an unaccountable private regulator.”

Facebook’s reach algorithms and censorship policies are conducted in secret, with minimal accountability transparency despite its role as the informational regulator of the western world for people aged 18–45. This means that the company’s blind spots, missteps, and oversights result in very real problems offline. Case in point: If Facebook went after Russian hackers with half the vigor with which it has gone after crypto, we likely would not have found ourselves in the dire political situation we’re in today. It is, in fact, easier to advertise illegal opioids, sketchy diet pills, and hate speech on Facebook than it is to market a blockchain app. Something is very wrong here.

All of this isn’t even to mention the red herring of scam ICOs in the first place. Yes, phishing, scamming, and a general lack of accountability and ethics are legitimate problems in the blockchain space. But for some total newbie to get scammed by an ill-intentioned ICO advertising on Facebook — the problem that Facebook’s ham-handed blanket ban alleges to solve — that newbie would have to create an account at Coinbase, link their bank, buy ETH, wait a week, create a wallet, learn at least the basics of transacting on the blockchain, and then participate in a live token sale for the scam to even kick in.