Following the Christchurch shootings in New Zealand, the governments of both New Zealand and Australia attempted to annihilate Brighteon by threatening our upstream providers, claiming our hosting of the shooting videos constituted "promotion of violence."

In response to that imminent threat, we were forced to remove all videos that contained footage from the New Zealand shooting, even against our principles of working to protect free speech. We were also forced to temporarily suspend some accounts to prevent further posting of videos that could have resulted in us being de-platformed within hours. (Nearly all those suspensions are now being reversed.)

Today, we are fighting both a short-term and a long-term battle to protect free speech and defend your right to post controversial content in the interests of public debate. Until we achieve planned improvements in the self-reliance of our infrastructure (see below), we are forced to deploy the following changes to our rules:

All videos will now be moderated before being approved for public viewing. We apologize in advance that this may introduce a few minutes' delay into the time required for your video to go live. We are rejecting all videos that "visually depict violence against living beings," meaning videos that contain graphic footage showing people or animals being harmed or killed. Notably, this rule does not, for example, restrict videos of firearms shooting steel targets, or firearms used in self-defense training. We are rejecting all videos that call for violence against anyone based on their religion, skin color, country of origin, sexual orientation, etc. Actually, this rule has been in place for quite some time.

You may feel free to CRITICIZE anyone you want, and you may post commentary about mass shootings. You may even use still images from the shootings as long as those still images do not depict active violence against living beings. You may not, however, show actual video footage of people being shot.

Our Long-Term Plan to Defend Speech Against Censorship

For several months, we have been working on building an entirely new internal infrastructure that greatly reduces our reliance on upstream infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS. This new infrastructure is still many months away from being rolled out, but when it is, it will grant us the following benefits:

A 90% reduction in the cost of video storage, which will allow Brighteon to break even and perhaps even turn a small profit that can be invested into more R&D. Greatly reduced dependence on upstream infrastructure providers such as Amazon AWS, meaning we will have greater control over our content and be less able to be threatened by upstream providers.

There are two phases to this new infrastructure rollout. The first phase will achieve point #1 (the cost savings), and the second phase will completely eliminate any reliance on Amazon AWS. Realistically, phase 1 will likely be completed around the beginning of May, 2019. Phase 2 may take until August. This timeline is subject to additional interruptions, of course.

Once this is completed, we will be much more insulated from infrastructure providers (though not 100% insulated) and we will revisit our current rules to see how we can expand speech and host videos that dare to ask questions of the status quo.

Thank you for your understanding. We are fighting for survival in an age of extreme techno-fascism and censorship. We are still alive and still functioning, despite the attempts to completely take us down and silence all our videos.

You may continue to support Brighteon by posting videos, promoting those videos to your audience, and shopping at BrighteonStore.com. I will share more updates as we roll out the new infrastructure detailed above. Thank you for your patience.

- Mike Adams

Founder, Brighteon.com