Is any anti-villain mechanism planned to be implemented in blockstack

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#1

Hi,

Is it planned to implement any mechanism to ban/blacklist criminals (drugs, child porn) from using the platform in a decentralised manner (like a democratically selected list of curators)?

thanks!

#2

If you discover someone using Blockstack for something illegal, you should notify your local authorities.

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#3

To expand on what @jude said, Blockstack is not a publisher/content curator and has no control over the users nor the data they store.

Say a certain topic is banned in a certain country (like Tiananmen Square Massacre in China), and someone posted about it in a Blockstack Social Media app. In order to block it, the country’s government would probably fix it in one of the ways below:

  • The app is blocked by the country
  • The Gaia Hub used by the offending user is blocked by the country
  • The particular Gaia Hub app-url is blocked by the country
  • The app creator is contacted by the country to fix it, and they
    • hardcode it to not display a certain post, link, or user, or
    • block the Gaia Hub it is served from

While it is up to you to report things like that (and other illegal activity as you mentioned in the OP), sometimes there may be issues with the fact that only you (and possibly a select few others) are able to see that data due to the post being private/within multi-player storage. Therefore a direct link would not work for the authorities and they would have to infiltrate that persons “social circle” in order to confirm it.

It is hard to remove illegal items from Blockstack because it is built in such a decentralized manner. It would have to be up to the app’s developers to make a way to ban illegal activity from their “community”, so to speak, whether that is through moderators, client-side content filtering, or something else.

#4

Great explanation @MichaelFedora!

We’d eventually like to get to a point where blocking apps is much harder - this might mean they are served from a BNS (Blockstack Name System) domain either directly from an Atlas zone file or from a number of different locations.

We envision a world where if a user is doing something illegal the way to address it is to go after that user in the physical world according to the laws and rules of the jurisdiction where the user is located.

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#5

Clear, thanks for the detailed answer.