(ANTIMEDIA) Chula Vista, CA — For those who have been following Anti-Media’s journey, the recent news of our censorship should come as no surprise. Following the 2016 election, we were falsely labeled Russian stooges by an anonymous group of supposed propaganda-spotters for not spreading pro-U.S. talking points, and these unsubstantiated claims were given credibility and widely circulated by Western corporate media. While these bogus claims were later walked back, Anti-Media remains on that McCarthyist blacklist to this day. To be clear, we were falsely accused of publishing fake or false news — but in reality, we were targeted for uncovering corruption and lies we’re apparently not supposed to.
Following this smear campaign, we saw our organic reach across social media drop dramatically, which put Anti-Media’s normal business operations in financial jeopardy. We’ve been adapting by building our presence on alternative social media sites, rebuilding theantimedia.com’s front page as an interactive “Homepage for Independent Media,” and setting up a daily newsletter. Anti-Media survived the algorithmic silencing campaign, and we even began to see our traffic climb over recent months. Then Facebook and Twitter decided to officially purge (see: censor) us from their platforms on the morning of October 11th, along with 800 other political pages and profiles. Anti-Media’s two million+ followers can no longer view our posts or content, and Anti-Media administrators can’t access the content we created and published on Facebook over the last six years.
Anti-Media Strikes Back
Fortunately, before the October 11th purge, Anti-Media partnered with LBRY, a blockchain-based digital content marketplace. In August, we began working with LBRY to build a decentralized content delivery system for our website and an uncensorable hub to store all of our content from across our various social media platforms. As of today, all the content published on theantimedia.com will automatically be pressed onto the LBRY blockchain and hosted on our decentralized LBRY channel, which can be found on the LBRY app at lbry://@AntiMedia. Now our fans will be able to find all of our content — no matter which social media platform we post it on — and all of the articles published on our website in one place. With the help of LBRY and the LBRYPress WordPress plugin we’ve helped develop, Anti-Media’s content is now unstoppable. All of the video and image content we create can also be found on the web at our custom LBRY-powered spee.ch site lbry.theantimedia.com.
Nick Bernabe, founder of Anti-Media, commented on the new technology:
These new tools from LBRY will insulate Anti-Media from the corporate censorship we’ve recently been dealing with from Facebook and Twitter. Now our fans can find all of our content on lbry.theantimedia.com, a decentralized hub for our publishing, and our team will never lose access to our work again. We are proud to be one of the first news websites to embrace blockchain technology in our publishing process.
According to Paul Kirby, the developer behind the LBRYPress WordPress plugin:
Any publisher can now start getting their name out there on the LBRY Network, which, in my opinion, is what the future of publishing and content consumption looks like. It’s also a great way to create permanent copies of all your content and media and put them onto a decentralized network. The beauty of the LBRYPress plugin is that it doesn’t impede your current setup in any way. It is a plug and play system that steps out of the way of any CDN, caching, or other setup you may have and lets you focus on writing and creating content in one place.
LBRY CEO Jeremy Kauffman said in a statement:
This is a powerful technical achievement for independent media outlets. Instead of relying on Silicon Valley to keep their data available, journalists and outlets can safely store everything they’ve created on the decentralized, peer-to-peer LBRY network.
LBRYPress is an open source WordPress plugin that will be available to any publisher who wants to integrate blockchain technology and the decentralized LBRY protocol into their website. Learn more at lbry.io/lbrypress.
Check out Anti-Media’s LBRY-powered content hub at lbry.theantimedia.com
Anti-Media founder Nick Bernabe can be reached for comment at nick.bernabe@theantimedia.org