Is Holochain a Safe Haven for Dangerous Extremists or a Beacon of Hope for Accountability?
By: Josh Zemel
Tags: Social Media, Censorship, Distributed Apps, Open Source, Blog

Is Holochain a Safe Haven for Dangerous Extremists or a Beacon of Hope for Accountability?

Assessing Risk and Opportunity in Light of the Deplatforming of Parler and Other Recent Events Josh Zemel Follow Feb 22 · 9 min read

In collaboration with Arthur Brock, Holochain architect

Lately we’ve seen the deplatforming of communication apps that have been used unchecked for the planning of violence or the spreading of disinformation that resulted in violence, especially the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Extremist groups had already been pushed toward the most fringe, most permissive communication apps such as Parler and Gab after more mainstream apps like Facebook and WhatsApp increasingly moderated activity throughout 2020. Since Jan 6, though, even the fringe apps have been crippled by their disappearance from the Apple and Google app stores and from hosting services such as Amazon’s.

Public opinion about these kinds of measures being taken by centralized technology providers has cut both ways: many moderate voices have applauded the shutdowns and the fact that such levers exist, while many whose communication channels have been cut off — on multiple sides of the political polyhedron — have decried the loss of ‘freedom of speech’, insisted on a need for censor-proof platforms, and scrambled to figure out where and how to organize.

This has led many people to speculate that a peer-to-peer platform like Holochain could be the answer for the Parlers and fringe actors of the world: an infrastructure upon which anyone can create a communication space with as much or as little moderation as they like, invite anyone into it, and never face threat of being shut down. If that’s truly what Holochain offers, it might be seen as a savior by some and as quite dangerous by others. So, does it do that? Is Holochain the safe haven for uncensored, unmoderated communication that some hope and others fear it might be?

We’ll get to the answer in just a moment. First, we need to clear up a bit of confusion.

Holo and Holochain

We’ve heard some voices saying that if Parler were “hosted on Holo” none of this would be happening.

Holo is different from Holochain. Holo is a distributed hosting platform where anyone can host Holochain applications for users who are not running Holochain software themselves. By necessity, Holo has some centralized aspects, including domain name resolution, routing algorithms, and performance metrics that are used in matching hosts with applications. As a result, just like Amazon Web Services, Holo can shut down anything that is being hosted on its network, and in fact must prohibit illegal activity or face regulatory exposure as a service provider. So it’s false to say that Parler would not be subject to any oversight if it were hosted on Holo.

Holochain, by contrast, is a data engine that enables a web application to have its users host themselves as well as portions of the application’s shared data. Holochain is entirely peer-to-peer, completely lacking any centralized components that could be shut down. Users of Holochain don’t need permission from anyone to interact — not from an app store, not from a cloud server, not even from the internet’s gatekeepers (ISPs, nameservers, etc.) if the application were built to use non-internet protocols such as mesh or local networks.

The closest thing to a centralized component in Holochain is the free ‘bootstrapping’ service that Holochain provides for apps, which enables users to ‘bootstrap’ themselves into the network of an app when they run it for the first time, in order to locate and synchronize with that app’s peer network. But it’s entirely possible for a peer network to run its own bootstrapping service, in which case no one at Holochain would necessarily even know about the app existing, much less be able to intervene.

So as for whether it’s possible to use Holochain to create a communication space with little to no moderation that can never be shut down, the answer is yes, but it’s a qualified yes, for reasons we turn to next. As for whether Holochain can serve as an ideal safe haven for bad actors: not so much.

Unenclosability vs Anonymity

Holochain is designed to be unenclosable, which means that no one can stop any two or more people from interacting any way that they want, as long as their interactions are consistent with the rules of the app space they’ve voluntarily joined (and/or designed). If a given peer-to-peer application space has few or no rules around the kind of speech permitted, then anything goes in that space. Which is good news for free-speech advocates. That’s the ‘yes’ part of the qualified yes.

But that doesn’t mean people are protected from consequences. Unenclosability is different from anonymity and, by extension, from lack of accountability. Your app can’t get shut down, and maybe your app’s rules are such that nobody can be booted from it. However, in Holochain you’re digitally signing everything you do, which creates permanent evidence of your actions. That means, at the least, you could face social consequences for unsavory behavior. But you could also face legal consequences: if your computer were seized and your private keys found, that’s a pretty irrefutable link between your online persona and your real-life identity.

Holochain is not optimized for anonymity. It’s actually optimized for accountability.

Accountability and Provenance

At the risk of sounding promotional: the combination of unenclosability and accountability is one of the things that makes Holochain truly great. Holochain avoids the corruption-prone power imbalances of the centralized web, and it avoids the disinformation-prone free-for-alls of the anonymous web. Instead, it actually resembles communication in real life: you can say what you want, but expect that there may be consequences.

Maybe certain extremists or insurrectionists would prefer to have app spaces where they can organize anonymously and with complete freedom. But guess what? Not only is that dangerous; it’s not even really possible: if anyone can say anything to a lot of people without verifying its source and without consequence, you actually just have a noise machine, with little means of amplifying anything above anything else. You also have no means of filtering out floods of speech that are intended simply to overwhelm the space and drown out other speech.

Discerning Signal from Noise

To amplify signal over noise in a communication space, you need some combination of:

Privacy: restricting who can join the space in the first place. Privacy limits reach. The more private a space, the more possible it is to say what you want without consequence, but you just might be saying it to only a handful of people (just like in your own home). Moderation, or curation: empowering a subset of people to determine what gets elevated into or hidden from the attention of others. Moderation limits freedom of speech. Highly moderated or curated spaces promote coherence and coordination of activity because they enable people to receive the most relevant information and, as needed, the same information as one another. Verifiability, or provenance: knowing where speech came from. Provenance limits anonymity. As people are made accountable for their actions (whether socially, economically, or legally), the quality of action goes up.

Holochain enables apps and their communities to dial in their own approaches to privacy and moderation: some spaces will favor relatively more signal in these regards, others relatively more reach and freedom. And these two values trade against each other to some extent: the more private a space, the less need for moderation or curation protocols, while more curated spaces don’t need to restrict reach as much. For example, your Facebook News Feed is more curated and less private, while content within Facebook Groups is less curated but more private.

Provenance, though, is not optional in Holochain apps. Even if you have a space of complete freedom where anyone can say what they want and reach a lot of people — which is too noisy in practice, but let’s say your space leans in that direction — it’s a feature of Holochain that, at the very least, you can’t falsely attribute speech, and you can’t alter speech once it’s been spoken. Holochain, at its core, is a data integrity engine: all communications are immutably bound to an author and timestamp.

The Verified Web

The challenge of sense-making is only intensifying as the sea of disinformation and propaganda grows wider. Deep fakes are getting easier, broadcast technology is becoming cheaper, and centralized platforms continue to have a profit incentive to amplify the most divisive content. Then when it turns out those platforms have amplified a bunch of lies, fakes, hate speech, or violence, do we really want them being the ones to decide, under intense political and economic pressure from other centralized power-brokers, what to censor? On the other hand, relying on anonymous, consequence-free forums as sources of information is an equally poor solution.

What we can begin to imagine — and what we must begin to imagine — is a divergence between a verified web and an unverified web. In the verified web, everything will be digitally and immutably signed. When you take a picture, for example, your camera will be able to unalterably save the photograph and stamp it with a time and your private cryptographic keys. The picture cannot be made to look as though it was captured differently or by someone else; it can be copied and altered, but those versions will be easily distinguishable from the original.

The verified web will be an immutable record of what everyone has said, created, or captured, such that no one will be able to claim that a piece of information is originally sourced when it isn’t; no one will be able to conceal who said or captured it; and no one will be able to claim it wasn’t ever said or captured. Increasingly, the verified web will become the go-to web for journalism and courts of law.

Just like in real life, there’s never going to be a way to force people to tell the truth online. Nor is the truth always objective. But whatever someone says will be on the record, and they will be exposed to various kinds of impact on their reputations, positive or negative. Lie enough and most people will stop listening to you.

Meanwhile, the unverified web will continue to operate, but people with any interest in the truth will begin to pay less and less attention as faking continues to proliferate there.

A Framework for the Verified Web

So, what is the technology that could enable the verified web? Some people might think it’s blockchain, since it offers a decentralized, immutable record. But can you imagine this amount of videos, photographs, and messages being uploaded and stored as a shared universal state by all the blockchain’s nodes? Not only would this be hopelessly inefficient, but it would actually be subject to corruption and power imbalances just like the centralized web, as we discussed in the NextNet Series on the future of communication.

What we actually need is an information carrier that enables everyone to host their own videos, photos, and speech while still ensuring that no one can alter those artifacts after they have been shared. Holochain was created to be precisely this kind of technology: a provenance-based, peer-to-peer carrier for communication. In a world rife with fake news and the fomenting of violence through misinformation, a technology like Holochain isn’t just a good idea; it’s actually the only viable way forward for humanity.

And Holo, as a distributed hosting platform that enables anyone with a web browser to use Holochain apps, makes the data integrity of Holochain widely available immediately.