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Far-right supporters move to open source to evade censorship
I don't think I'm taking it too far to describe this article as a smear against the Free Software movement and people who push for alternatives to centralised corporate-run platforms and services.
The article touches on a perticular individual you may be aware of if you've spent any time watching Linux/Free Software centric videos online: Luke Smith.
Luke Smith is a pretty popular creator of Linux tutorials and opinion pieces on Youtube, as well as alternative video hosting platforms including the de-centralised and federated Peertube for which he hosts his own instance.
If you're not too familiar with him, or have only watched his tutorials and not his other stuff, you may not be aware of his political leanings.
He is unfortunatly and Alt-Righer. He seems to half-ironicly, half-seriously idiolise Ted Kaczynski (The Unabomber), has made videos advocating against democracy, has name-dropped multiple other alt-right internet figuers in a positive light and casually mentioned in one video that he has nazi friends. He has also rather predictably engaged in COVID denial since the start of the pandemic.
It's a bad sign right off the bat that the author of this article claims that Luke Smith is an advocate for "Open Source" software and provides a link to a page on opensource.com. When in reality Smith is a staunch advocate for Free (as in freedom) Software and has even made videos rejecting the Open Source movement (which is certanly something I can agree with him on). This is pretty revealing to the authors ignorance about this subject and the important ideological difference between the two movements.
"Smith has lately been pushing users in the direction of decentralized, resilient social media platforms in the so-called “fediverse”, a network of independent social media sites that communicate with one another, and allow people to interact across different sites. This could allow far-right activists to operate in ways that make them very difficult to shut down."
So the the author seems to be going in on fear-mongering community centric de-centralised alternatives as a dangerous weapon that can enable far-right extremists. Now to be fair the article does seem to acknowlege the leftist advocates and builders of these alternatives, but if you read between the lines they pretty clearly imply that they are naive fools who are creating a monster.
I wouldn't be suprised if this is going to be the chosen strategy of liberal big-tech advocates going forward, it certanly seems to follow the notion that both the far-left and far-right are "as bad as eachother".
To me the most harmful thing about this article is that by painting anti-big tech platforms and software as an alt-right endevour they are giving the likes of Luke Smith exactly what they want.
They want people to think that they are the only ones willing to give the finger to big-tech and advocate for freedom and privacy.
Don't give them that.