Introduction
Safeguarding the internet against censorship by exercising your rights
Today, big corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter as well as others have vowed the censor others by banning users under the pretext of "Hate Speech or Controversial Content", De-Monetizing other people's Youtube videos to "accidently" de-listing conservative sites and de-ranking others like on Alexa's site ranks. These things are all part of a effort of censorship and free speech through way of incrementally clamping down on free speech at very slow pace to try and reduce major backlash from their respective user bases. So the question is how do we protect against that?
Use Alternative Sites for conducting business
The only way these companies will understand that we don't want censorship is by simply using alternative sites. For YouTube (Google Service) use Dailymotion instead, For Facebook decentralize your social networking experience as I laid out here and so on. The thing is once they can censor conservative opinions, they can move to the next level and start banning things like Reddit, Movies on iTunes to Videogames or other services and other political views whether you're a free thinking liberal, you lean far-right or far-left, Eventually you'll have no choice but refer to what I call Bypassing Tools for Censorship that I'll lay out in the next section. There's time to stop this but we shouldn't lay down and play dead. Donate to organizations like the EFF because they will be fighting in court to preserve your internet freedoms.
Bypassing Internet Censorship (The Last Resort)
If we reach the point where one cannot do anything to prevent or stop censorship from becoming the norm. These are the tools to use shall the time ever come to pass. The most important tool is something like the Tor Browser or something like BlockStack's upcoming decentralized internet browser. This will hopefully protect your freedom and your identity.
Secondly you'll need a VPN service. This will be something like Tor guard but I would choose VPNs based out of the country. If you run a blog or site, get web hosting in countries that are rated to protect and safeguarding internet freedoms like from Iceland or Switzerland.
Try to build your site away from products from Google if you can. Use Bing or something different. Web hosting from other countries like I mentioned is very key because governments wouldn't be able to just intimidate out of country providers to shutdown your site so easily and they wouldn't be able to raid overseas companies without consulting the respective country so choose your VPN and web hosting carefully, use the chart below to help you decide. Governments could still try to censor the VPN hosts themselves however that'll take some time. Using these tools will help you bypass the internet controls at least for a while.
Conclusion
The takeaway from all of this is we can change things around but we must not do business with people that censor free speech because once they censor one thing successfully, they will think it's okay to censor other things that we might enjoy until we have a internet infrastructure rivaling China's Great Firewall.
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