Twitter BANS Crypto Founder! Where’s Elon? (Free Speech with Stani Kulechov) #FreeStani

Transcript

hey bankless nation we've got a special quick hit episode now david and i are not journalists we're not reporters but look this is worth diving into we've got stani from the ave protocol uh and we're talking to him right now he's currently resides in twitter jail so his account has just been banned stani how's twitter jail going for you like what's what's going on here well um thanks for having me here uh david and ryan but uh not not very well to be honest there's no one to talk to here you know i i feel like i don't i feel like i don't have any audience i i have i had all my audience on twitter um and i got banned and and i don't know who to talk to so uh well you can talk to us and uh so far youtube has not

banned the bankless channel um hopefully that is not coming in the future uh fingers crossed um you know we want to talk about like what happened and how like elon buying twitter fits into this what we can do how to solve this from a long-term perspective but just a few things for uh for for bankless listeners okay so if you're not up to speed elon musk finally bought twitter this week so that is a thing that happened um stani got banned for making a joke about this question mark we're not actually sure why he got banned no due process there no due process uh let's start there stani to the best of your ability like do you understand why you actually got banned i'm gonna pull up some tweets that uh may

may have triggered this uh this whole banning event let me pull that up now stani but what happened here well in general it's kind of like a hard to always say of course because you know when you look at the uh the two social media platforms um you know you get a ban or suspension or whatever you call it and and essentially uh there's not much of actual reasoning uh there so you you might have some reason but there isn't like specifically because you you kind of don't know actually how the system works because it's essentially a a black box you don't even know who was the person or like uh and what time the ban happened so there is like very um uh less

least amount of information but i i think i i have a idea of essentially that uh recently with all this kind of like uh along buying twitter and and advocating for uh freedom of speech which which is something that is very valuable uh to me uh quite a lot uh i i kind of like uh posted in the same way that uh elon musk uh posts and jokes on twitter with his audience and i did it with my audience uh and i joked that joke that uh finally this is happening and you know and the breaking here is that i'm joining twitter as interim ceo which is kind of like a funny joke because uh obviously twitter has a ceo and there's no news about change of the that that position

so um i also posted actually i was very uh i went further uh you know posted even a road map so for me like for me it's very important if i start something or i take a position even if i joke a joke about it uh i i need to always have a roadmap so i'm a builder um and essentially i i you know i message that's um i want to ship the edit button by next week um and and including my 90 days roadmap i also wanted to open source twitter algorithms because that makes things more kind of like understandable i could understand for example why a good band uh adding support for ethereum and janas and and and last but not least uh

integrating with lens protocol and making uh twitter more kind of like a um decentralized as a as a platform so i guess like this was the the thing and uh you know i i think few hours later um i saw that this this these tweets went viral and essentially i found that my account was was blocked so so you know the blocking part of course is the interesting part of the story but i want to pick your brain as to why you think twitter would go so far as to actually banner banner block you because like i don't know can twitter a not take a joke or b do they actually feel threatened by what you are saying you could do as the potential interim ceo

of twitter if you were the the interim ceo of twitter do you feel that twitter might be threatened by by this this whole proposition of integration with an uh a web three protocol like lens i think it's the edit button uh getting it shipped so fast i think that was the the uh i hear they like to be relaxed at twitter i hear they don't like to ship things too fast yeah i mean uh you know i would say kind of like the maybe to challenge also is here that um you know it's it's definitely kind of like hard to say like what other you know uh folks that are uh they have like a big big amount of uh followers and what they can actually post and what's

serious what what's not i mean recently you know tweeted about buying coca-cola and putting cocaine into it back and you know those kind of things and and for me i i pretty much joke with with with the uh ceo tweet and and as since for some reason i got banned so i think it's just like kind of like unfair but um uh also kind of it wouldn't be unfair if those algorithms would be public and we could understand and there's transparency but also it wouldn't be unfair if i just could go to another platform and have my followers there and just like solve the issue by actually you know putting these you know platforms uh into the state that they

kind of like to curate and moderate and compete on on the best uh duration but in in this case with twitter uh essentially i don't know anything all the audience is there and i honestly i've been advocating this for quite a long period of time but now that it happened uh directly to me uh with this joke and i i didn't realize that this could lead to this kind of uh um end result uh the the the worst part is that's not just like losing your followers there and looking in but also all my uh private messages uh i couldn't access them uh at all so that's that's kind of like a issue you're silenced you've been silenced yeah it really impresses on on you that

you look if you're on twitter or any social media account for that matter you don't actually own the property there right you don't don't don't own the list of of your followers it's completely private property and we are viewing the actual tweets on youtube and i just want to recap this okay so this is innocent this is innocent af this is like even wholesome it's funny stani tweets breaking joining twitter as interim ceo clearly an elon musk style joke and then as a follow-up he offers an actual like tongue-in-cheek list of solutions of what twitter should be implementing moving forward if i'm on the product team of twitter i'm like jotting some of this stuff down potentially uh and he says this thank you for the opportunity

to work at twitter my first agenda in the roadmap for the first 90 days is ship and edit button open source the twitter lgos add support for ens and ethereum integrate with lens protocol i ask you the viewer is this a bannable offense on twitter like what is going on no due process no explanation as to why this is not a threat of violence in any way shape or form or incitement of violence how does this break the the policy of of twitter these are some of the questions i have but let's uh let's jump to um the next kind of i guess take on this is now this is elon musk's problem isn't it because elon musk just majority purchased all of twitter which makes him kind of the the governance

vote for everything that happens on this platform uh musk has talked a lot about free speech and of course look i don't know what is he day three or something day two on the job whatever right he probably hasn't been able to influence things but how do you feel about this donnie is this now musk's problem and can he actually fix this how might he go about doing it do you think he's serious about fixing it i think it's it's a bit of like everyone's problem i i see i see the social media uh when it comes to uh motivation censorship and and like the ownership uh from from kind of like a perspective where um social media is such a valuable

infrastructure as if if you go back to history before social media media in general whether it's like tv channels newspapers and all the way to those you know town houses and and and uh halls um and and you know bazaar so basically you always have some sort of a kind of like a venue where you are actually um sharing information and and you have your audience and and you share that audience with with the rest of the community and i think that as an infrastructure is very important to not to be kind of like in uh complete control of of you or or particularly even like a company so i think just uh we reached that state that that that

has happened before and you know the platforms take very opinionated decisions you know we went from uh something like what what was myspace and giovs it is where you could like um adjust and tweak your profiles and and you have a lot of freedom into something where you know a lot of things are opinionated and where what you can actually change and then of course the moderator on top of that there's a reason of course for for uh moderation uh but it's very subjective so there there isn't competition of whose moderation uh is the most at least um harmful and i think as social media is uh uh infrastructure very valuable and important because the communication channel

uh with you and and your your your own peers and your audience i think it just has to be in form of a public good where you create your profile you have your followings but then you can actually port them everywhere else so if someone uh moderates or over moderates or bans you in in one particular application you can go into another venue and you can still have that accessibility for sure uh you can limit that accessibility on the on the kind of like application experience level layer but as a kind of like a very grounded um you know human uh right you should be able to have that because if

you don't have voice especially when you have a big audience and you lose that voice you'll lose everything for me twitter was the only platform where i have public facing audience you know i have an instagram but that's very private and and and for me kind of like i didn't have any communication channels besides uh messaging in in um messaging applications so i i think it's it's everyone's problem but the question is like how we actually can govern it uh very well and i think community-owned uh protocol might be the the way to do it because it also frees and lowers a barrier to enter and create those those kind of like a new moderation uh tools for the whole uh

community since you don't need to focus on creating that platform effect since the user is owning their their their networks and there's some sort of beautiful irony here about twitter banning you particularly stani because you are somebody who thinks very deeply about how our social media protocols should be designed and and where their weaknesses uh how their weaknesses are currently manifested in the web 2 world uh and so and we have also seen elon musk dabble in the world of web 3. you know he loves to pay attention to dogecoin which is like almost web 3. uh he knows what ethereum is he knows he knows the basics of this are you optimistic that elon musk might actually look into the fundamentals of what web 3 is and how it when why it has

drawn so much excitement from the world around it and perhaps use his platform use his now uh majority share over twitter to turn twitter into something like web3 uh i very very much hope so because uh there's just so much value added in in the web3 pretty much like even if you think about protocols uh on-chain protocols with with different kinds of rules whether it's decentralized finance or free social media um or something else so it's very valuable uh and and efficient way to actually provide the ownerships to the users but also if you kind of like approach the whole idea of um you know who is the epicenter most valuable

uh kind of like a um stakeholder in in social media it's it's pretty much the users and the way we have built social media is that we extract a lot of data from the users and then pretty much use that data and algorithms to essentially sell different kinds of services to the user and this is the kind of like a very classical thing comes from where the user is the product actually when you're using something uh for free or you're giving up a lot of data that you're not getting uh paid for and or anything in return and in terms of like the pre uh social you can actually we turn around this this mechanism in a

way where the user is actually the the the one who owns the owns its own network and and then these applications experience layers algorithms are actually competing um to to provide the best services um bringing trans transparency and and other values for example the the uh most interesting social media in the future might not be the one where you can actually accumulate a lot of followers but it might be a new way of interacting content and that's possible because some person for example uh in india uh or let's say argentina could actually uh come and build that application because and that application gets

traction because it gets a lot of um visibility because you don't need to recreate the whole platform uh network effect and and basically the user is is the uh important uh factor here so i i definitely think it changes everything in the whole social media game but at the same time changing something big like twitter requires a lot of work in terms of the mindset of how you get the whole organization behind of the web tree and everything all the way from finance all your compliance departments and and and the leadership to actually think differently that's going to be the uh the the hardest part so if elon needed some help understanding all of this stuff would

you be the guy to ask stani yeah i think essentially it's more about uh the whole community in general because if you look at uh the lens protocol and and people that has been contributed to the protocol itself there are sort of developers already directly contributing to the protocol creating small updates there's different uh front ends being built and the protocol itself is going to maint quite soon so it's actually a community a forum where you can get help and the code is open source so you can always uh use it integrate or uh even uh work it improve it or do do over what you do because it's it's public good but i think we're

just one source of information and we haven't sold everything that there is in in webtree social what we created is a decentralized social craft but there's so many areas that that needs to be solved by the website community in in in this uh space but i'm feeling very optimistic um and i think webtree user ownership community ownership having control of your users is something very valuable and i think we that's the way to go well we uh we definitely agree with you sonny and we think more people should be aware of this issue and so we are advocating on your behalf trying to get you out of a twitter jail and also simultaneously to uh raise awareness of um of what's going on with uh with

twitter bands and and how they can actually be solved because crypto and web 3 are building solutions here so if you listening once you get involved in the free stanley movement you could tweet out something with the hash the hashtag uh freestani uh i have tweeted this tweet out as an experiment i'm wondering if i'm about to get banned oh you're not joining twitter as an interim ceo ryan i i'm i maybe i will maybe we are all ceos maybe that is the web three way i think that's ultimately what we are saying here is we should be ceos of our own twitter account so if you want to tweet out breaking joining twitter as interim ceo you can let's see if we get banned here stani i gotta end with this so what is the process to get unbanned here are you going through that process

and do you have any other parting words for us here yeah i'm i'm basically in the process and and for me it's going to be quite unclear because i i haven't done this ever before like it's it's something that you read and when it happens to you you are you're basically um quite uh helpless in the sense that you have a lot of information that you distribute on a daily basis uh but in some way i'm kind of lucky it was more me than let's say someone who has like a more larger or critical audience so i i'm pretty sure that maybe my account could be restored restored if not i'm waiting for the lens protocol maintenance and i would just continue uh

uh tweeting i mean posting there so all right well excellent sonny thanks for joining us and if elon musk is listening let's let's fix this let's freeze donnie let's go investigate some some better protocols to use for for twitter as a back end and i'm just uh i'm worried on the behalf of social media platforms that start to ban uh builders because you remember what happened when world of warcraft uh nerfed vitalik's vitalik's necromancer he built ethereum so i think we are building solutions here and uh and the future looks bright hopefully we can fix this soon uh for for the world stani so thanks for joining us man thank you so much for having me here we appreciate it uh guys if you like

this video make sure you like and subscribe on bankless i'm super excited to have you on the bankless journey take care hey we hope you enjoyed the video if you did head over to bankless hq right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence we recommend joining our daily newsletter podcast and community as a bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your bank list experience you'll get access to our market analysis our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the bankless token for airdrops raffles and unlocks if you're interested in crypto the bankless community is where you want to be click the link in the description to become a bankless premium subscriber

today also don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders ask me anythings and weekly roll ups where we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content