How to Curate and Preserve Free Speech

Transcript

yes okay hello everyone um thanks for coming uh my name is matthias or just matt i've been a developer at clarus for around two and a half years and this week this year i've been mostly working on proof of humanity and today i want to talk about freedom of speech and curation so just for a quick start so i know how to paste the the talk raise your hand if you know what claros is okay good uh keep your hand up if you know what qr8 is okay so it's a bit split it's no problem um so to start we're gonna start by

talking about actual conspiracy theories um those that have like some you think there's like if someone told you as um oh this is probably a lie and then it actually happens um and we're going to do a little quick time travel to see how things have been in the past uh four or five years so starting off in 2014 we had um this dump of information that maybe we do not remember anymore but facebook was actually using its feed to try to manipulate users emotions so they were trying to make their users happier or set depending on what they would show on your feed so this is quite dystopian and if they can do that imagine what

they can do to influence you on how you vote for example then moving on to 2018 we had like this year of internet lynching and pr weaponization people discovered how to use social media to um promote agendas and uh we have like some guy i'm not so sure who robert spencer is but i know that he's like a political commentator and mastercard blacklisted him um and uh patreon also did the same so he got kicked out of everything and lost his revenue and um the justification that mastercard gave is that he was posting illegal content but there was no um uh actual like they did not point at

what was the illegal content so mastercard was the judge here and there was no due process you know and then there was uh 2018 uh some youtuber also had the same thing first youtube demonetized this channel and then patreon kicked him out and so we have this situation and also like if um you know what i mean slowly money is you probably saw him talking about how paypal also demonetizes sex workers so all of these companies are doing this to some extent of censorship and control and uh sam harris actually ended up quitting patreon um this is uh an activist and political commentator kind of but an intellectual and he

dropped out of patreon at the time because he thought that there was some bias and just justifications were not good and then on this year we have like uh twitter entering the chat um of course we had the craziness of the us elections that the world saw and twitter started stamping tweets with claims that can be disputed so the intentions are good and i actually like um that's twitter's trying to do this um but the the problem is uh with stuff like this you know um twitter is being the the judge and the ag and they are like the experts and they decide when to stamp when nacho stamp so it's not great and then um

just like a few weeks ago the biden administration was saying that facebook would start removing uh posts that is regarded as problematic so this is a point where i actually like i i i really understand what is the the problem because according to the the press around 60 percent of the um like anti-vaxx posts on like with the information that was not correct was coming from there but uh i think it's a really big problem when the government starts having these sort of promiscuous relationships um with uh huge corporations like facebook and then they get to decide

um what stays and what leaves the platform now um so this is very controversial in the western world when we have like at the nsa we have google surveilling and collecting information without users consent but still here it's controversial so when this stuff goes to the media people get very mad and they go to the justice system and they try to talk to their congress people um but it can get a lot worse so for example this presentation if we want to censor it from like 1.5 billion people you just have to put a big picture like this one so i presume i don't have to

to explain what this is but yeah china has been great at censoring us stuff from their citizens and i recommend that you go to this repository to see some actual conspiracy theory stuff so they have this this uh social media and app where like everything happens called weibo and candles became a symbol of the of a protest with um about the tiananmen massacre so abel actually removed the emoji of candles so people would not use it and there were some even weirder stuff like removing the numbers 19 89 if i'm correct of the year which was the year that the massacre happened and then people

started using equations that would result in the in the year so they banned those equations as well so it's quite crazy and people start to get creative like they put the the years in for each calendar like and uh ak-47 uh picture in front of the of the the tiananmen square so yeah 1984 was not supposed to be a manual but it looks like we're heading that way very fast and faster than people can understand what is happening even in countries which are sort of underdeveloped and you would think that okay maybe they're too dumb for this and they're not gonna surveil people it's actually arriving and it's even worse because people do not get mad about it

so um wrapping up this uh beginning of the um of the talk there is censorship we need to build open source uh tools to make social media that does not try to mess with your emotions that does not try to manipulate you and web 3 does have a promise for it but we cannot just let it um run amok like run crazy we need to create it uh otherwise it's just going to be like a flood of uh like nazi stuff and uh assassination stuff we have to create we have to create content end users so how do we fix this um social media can learn your political

opinions your insecurities your technical skills which is weird also um they can learn who you love who interact with they can learn your habits where you go um you're you're carrying your 1984 television in your phone wherever you go and becomes able to predict your actions how you're going to vote how you're going to think to manipulate how you vote they can kind of guess what you think about a certain subject based on your history um and what you probably like comment and share so they can build likes the weird social scars that you would see in a black mirror or on on beijing and finally they can curate

your presence and they can curate what you post they can curate um the influence that you have of your peers your followers and pretty much everything um if you have like some opinion that might be problematic it might get removed or just never published like the shadow banning where people don't even know and you don't know that you've been abandoned from a platform and this is this is where the problem um gets even worse because social media and mainstream media have merged um if you go to twitter and you follow like some influencers or tick-tock influencers they are actually behaving a little bit like newspapers in fact um brands hire them just like they used to hire newspapers

in the chat tv channels to make ads so the fourth paw has become a lot stronger so there's montesquieu crying his three partition of power is gone um and whenever you hear like this is just like a bit off topic but whenever you hear some maxi saying that oh money is the only thing that's worth decentralizing no and i revive old memes so yeah at least media app stores and social media should be decentralized and i put app store there because you may remember the time where the the apple store banned the metamask from its store so basically it's extremely difficult

to use web3 if google and apple can decide what's in your phone or not and my utopia what i would like is if even processors smartphones and computers i hope would become public goods because computers like these ones if you don't know come with backdoors installed by intel and amd which is not nice the management engine that's the name if you want to look it up afterwards so what can a mojack do just to centralize it right when ethereum came about a while ago we we tried building some social networks and we got a bonus that open source allows us to make sure that our google searches or go searches or

or whatever app you're seeing is not trying to mess with you and you have like a guarantee of that it's just not some oh trust me um but if you've been in the space for a while you know that it's not so simple building social media is extremely hard on web 3 still because we lack storage layer so probably the way to go it's not going to be just waiting for these solutions to be ready we had a swarm launch recently but it's still not production ready in my opinion or at least it's not been battle tested to to be more correct but there's a new hope so this is also from a few weeks ago we had uh stanley from uh uh

just just saying like oh if uh jack is gonna try to build like avi or ethereum even on bitcoin then abby should build a twitter on ethereum so my expectation is probably that it's not going to be fully decentralized but they will need some curation and we also had justin kaland um talking about another attempt at building a social on social media platform called pasta which is using proof of humanity so it's not all over but again we're going to have to curate those apps um so what were the problems again what was the source

of all uh the censorship and the bad curation um it's a lack of true partition of powers so yeah montesquieu is still a chat it didn't work so well with the centralized platforms but we can look at for example the app store so apple is the one that writes the policies um it's the judge that tells if an app is following the rules or not and if they decide that it's wrong they have the whole power to execute and kick you out so what can we do you can use your favorite dao to write the laws for your social media for your app store you can have ethereum execute and judge of course you should use squares and we don't actually have to wait for

abby to finish and one thing that gets people mad sometimes is seeing like newspapers and twitter influencers lying to a large number of people so we can actually start small we can try to curate um stuff that already exists the platform does that already exists and soon i will show an attempt at curating tweets so here we have a an influencer saying that uh ethereum is like the dollar it's the same thing and uh yeah people get mad so here we have a cyber hockey saying oh the his reputation ever falls what a world what if we could

at least make the reputation of influencer drop a little bit when they yeah we can curate that today and just very quickly i threw together tcr on curate which is called pythia and basically if you submit a tweet to this list with a deposit a 30 deposit you can accuse someone of uh some influencer of saying something uh that that there's a false information so for example uh the previous tweet was accused of containing false information and if the accusation is false you can go and challenge and defend the tweet to earn the bounty and i also will encourage you to visit

it so this is the page for uh the details of that street specifically and you will see like there's a screen capture on the bottom here there's the link so that you can see the tweet and uh it has to be um like an influencer because in case the author deletes the tweet you're gonna need witnesses to to make sure that the tweet had the contents that the accuser said and it's running on next die so until rollups are not around we we're using that because create can be expensive and i invite you to play the just a bit of a warning is that unfortunately metamask for mobile does

not handle um x dive very well in the fees so you're gonna be able to see the the evidence you're gonna be able to see the accusations but if you actually want to start contributing and uh posting um tweets there you're gonna need a desktop until they have like better mobile wallets and finally um if you do submit don't worry you're going to get your 30 back and if there is some traction to this we can go further first we can set up a dao with a treasury so that suddenly curating content becomes a public good and you can get rewarded for uh making successful accusations and second after the list is populated with say um

300 posts we can make a ranking of word crypto twitter's biggest bullshitters so it's like a wall of shame that had a due process so yeah hopefully that helps a bit with the the the untruths and the fake news on crypto twitter once that works we could move on to try and create a new wash new york post and washington post and stuff like that so i'm going to leave you with some space to ask me some questions if you have questions about proof of humanity or claros as well yeah go ahead hello thanks for the presentation quick

question on your last example who pays for the 30 dollars yeah the submitter so you have it's like what incentives is there to pay money yeah so for now it's uh just if you're pissed off and it's like philanthropy so if you if like you're gonna get your money back um it stays locked for three days and uh if no one changes you get the the deposit back but if there is some traction and people start using this just minimally we could set up a treasury so that if you make a successful contribution you actually get paid for it that should make things more interesting hi my question is so you mentioned this

example of pompano's tweet now since uh the security platform is on ethereum it's way more likely that someone from uh someone who's into ethereum is going to curate this tweet so isn't there like a very very strong bias when you're evaluating these uh tweets uh there is actually but my hope is that um if let's say uh pythia had like a thousand followers and every time someone posts something there's like that annoying tweets there then i reply that maybe bitcoin maxis will try to defend themselves and they will start using ethereum which is amazing but yeah unfortunately i believe that um like if this were to gain traction right

now probably the majority of people using this would be ethereum users which understand the protocol so technical people that's like ethereum if you're not technical you're not going to be able to figure out that tweet has false information in the first place so yeah there's plenty of bias um how would you so the idea behind um kind of migrating toward this web 3 world where you know users now are more in control of their data and how they use it and how it's you know exchanged across that ecosystem how how

do you recommend people kind of start migrating toward that that model like getting off of web 2 platforms or deactivating accounts stuff like that to kind of because they're already basically you know we're already being exchanged behind the scenes so it's so this is actually something that has been uh happening for a while now and uh i think it's a good a good thing that there is like censorship explicit censorship because it motivates people to move away from traditional platforms so i don't use um alternative social media like gab and things like that because i don't like it but i think one of the ways that you can onboard people who are not from web 2 is just with economic incentives

so the most recent example is x infinity where people who never used the world before learn to use it just to play but before that we had like proof of humanity with ubi so in brazil actually we live with some programmers and i was always like oh you should try using this exchange you should try this app and nobody cared but once you say oh you can actually just start earning money then they're like okay let's set up a wallet and get on board with it um so i think it like you don't actually need to do all at once you don't need to say oh i built this network let's move to it you can start with like oh let's curate what already exists and

you're going to earn money with that and the person learns how to use a wallet this way and then they may look at something else like his new social network and they're like oh it's very nice i don't have to register for the step and i have to fill forms and then they start to see the positive sides of web3 hi another question i guess this is more generally about cleros um isn't it an issue that uh when you're a juror and you're evaluating cases such as for example in the security system you have to think more about when you're making a decision what other people are going to decide on as opposed

to what you think is correct since that's where your incentives actually lie right to agree with the majority yeah you got it and actually this is by design so when a juror is is looking at a case let's say you're one of three jurors you should not just think about oh how the other jurors might judge you also have to think about what potential future jurors will rule in case there's an appeal so for example let's say that i like clairol uses randomness to select the jewelers but let's say that for some random chance you get to talk to do some jitter and try to bribe them or maybe the juror is not so good but whatever is the reason they will give

the wrong answer when they do that the party that lost the case will appeal and the new round of jurors will invert the ruling and when that happens um the the incorrect rulings will get slashed so if you are we call that the the loan voice of reason if you're just one judor um like voting correctly you will be rewarded yeah basically yeah this is the shelling point by the way it's a it's supposed to be a like you think where um like how other people will vote and that tends to be on average the correct answer any more questions you can also like

there's uh steam here we have uh uh our mathematician yeah i think actually i think william is probably the best to answer clara's question yeah okay so i guess that's a no so thanks again for for coming and [Applause] thanks