> Instead, I think that regular people’s writings on the Internet is hurting the world on a bigger scale. And the collective sentiment is often manipulated by some “agitators” that are exploiting anonymous online speech for their own agendas: that includes online militias–for example sponsored by foreign governments–whose goal is to destabilize a society.

People seem to think the censoring ideas makese them go away. Nothing can be further from the truth. It just moves it elsewhere. If people are motivated they will find a way to get their message out there.

> In the last few years, completely unregulated online speech has given rise to fake news and conspiracy theories that have actually killed people. It’s offered a megaphone to those promoting dangerous ideas like white supremacy, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, homophobia and other anti-LGBTQ positions, and sometimes outright Nazism. It has tilted many democracies towards right-wing populism and fascism.

Anti-semitism has been around 100s (if not 1000s) of years. Nazism was most prevalent in the 1930s to the mid 1940s. Homophobia and anti-LGBTQ views have been existed since the beginning of time I would wager. The last time I checked that was well before the internet was around.

AS for the the move towards populism (by the way there is left wing populism as well) and facism is because politicians don't address valid concerns around thorny subjects like immigration, whereas people outside the overton window will talk about those subjects. This isn't a problem with free speech it is a problem with these issues not being discussed and addressed by those in power in a serious manner.

As for propaganda (which is what meant by fake news) has been around since pen was put to paper.

> Second, while almost everyone in the communities supporting a distributed web are good people, with good intentions, seeing some names in there is concerning to me. Regarding IPFS, advocates (at least for a while) included people like Nick Lim of BitMitigate and VanwaNet, companies responsible for rescuing, among others, pro-nazi website The Daily Stormer and the platform 8chan, a cesspool full of Nazi propaganda, child pornography, and other hate speech.

This is the same crap old crap from governments and traditional news outlets to justify spying on their citizens and other privacy violations, which I am sure many people on here are opposed to.

> Gatherings on 8chan have been blamed for at least three mass shootings in 2019 alone, including the one in the mosque in Christchurch, all of them motivated by racial hatred.

The same can be said about more mainstream websites and communication services. IIRC the Christchurch shooter streamed the shooting on facebook.

> The first real examples of the distributed web aren’t particularly encouraging either. Among some of the most popular apps (“popular” in relative terms, of course) for the distributed web is DTube, a sort of YouTube that is built on top of IPFS. As you can expect, the website is full of questionable content, including conspiracy theories, cryptocurrency scams, weapons, RT International’s Russian propaganda… and of course, porn.

Not porn! Porn has never got onto the web before, we better stop this right now. /sarcasm

People used make the same criticism of large successful services we have today like Youtube, Reddit, Vimeo by saying the content was trite or dangerous. They used to same thing about novels in the 18th century.

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Ultimately his lamentations will be meaningless. Someone will pick up where he left off and continue the effort.