Narrative Warfare: Can't Stop The Chans

Love or hate Gab, but its founder Andrew Torba nailed it last night with this statement:

As predicted in our statement to Buzzfeed: 8chan is indeed online. It's on ZeroNet, a decentralized and open source peer-to-peer version of the internet.

It literally can not be censored now. By anyone. At all.
Not admins. Not governments. No one.

Happy now, media elites? https://t.co/BC1vzmE89m pic.twitter.com/6x9R1EX857

— Gab.com (@getongab) August 6, 2019

ZeroNet requires the use of a separate client to operate. As Torba would go on to state, this has known consequences; being uncensorable means that everything a given government bans is also freely available, and as you can route your traffic through a VPN such as Tor you can anonymize your end of the traffic.

As others have noted, ZeroNet has been around before this but the 8chan migration to it would be big enough to make it come forth into the awareness of a critical mass of users; it only takes a small percentage to come across to make it viable and then snowballing takes place to bring over the rest in good time. Once users get used to the idea of a peer-to-peer network, and VPNs, they'll take the deal that no censorship offers in exchange for freely conversing themselves purely out of self-interest and not out of any form of utopian idealism.

That includes the software itself. Being open source, if ZeroNet gets converged and they decide to exercise power somehow, the code itself can be forked and a new version can replace ZeroNet's to restore and maintain functionality. Can it be countered? Sure, but there are so few willing and able to do so at all--and none willing and able to do so on a global scope and scale--that it's not a practical consideration. They can already route around the Great Firewall of China with ease; nothing else will be a bigger threat.

They'd have to bring down the grid itself, and that's not acceptable to anyone.

UPDATE

8chan admin CodeMonkeyZ disavows the ZeroNet board, claiming that neither he nor any other admin had anything to do it with it. Neon Revolt claims it's a honeypot.

8chan on zeronet was not made by our team and I have no idea who set that up.

— Ron (@CodeMonkeyZ) August 7, 2019

This is disinfo.@CodeMonkeyZ has NOT confirmed this as belonging to 8ch.

Most likely this is a honey-pot, sucking down your IP and loading you up with malware. Already seeing reports of such on Gab.

And like I told you ages ago, "EyeTheSpy" is a LARP:https://t.co/46VhDgCo80 https://t.co/r31thrmRVO

— Neon Revolt (@NeonRevolt) August 6, 2019

I've removed the ZeroNet link until such time as I am confident of this not being a trap.