- Joined
- Jul 1, 2014
In what I believe is another first, I will publish an article I wrote here. Hope @Null is OK with it.
www.dailydot.com
I will put below the director's cut so to speak. A lot of my snark was edited out. I even interviewed Weev for this story, that was cut out too!
Bitchute claims to be a decentralized platform—that's not true
One of the selling points of Bitchute is that it's the kind of decentralized site where people can't be deplatformed. That doesn't appear to be the case.
www.dailydot.com
I will put below the director's cut so to speak. A lot of my snark was edited out. I even interviewed Weev for this story, that was cut out too!
BitChute, in many respects neo-Nazi YouTube, is neither decentralized nor peer-to-peer—despite its claims
As never-ending free speech arguments rage throughout mainstream platforms, a growing number of alternative platforms have sprung up, happy to accept ostracized users.
While these platforms all claim to be politically neutral, it does not really matter if they are or not; even perfectly politically neutral moderation cannot overcome the fact that users will tend to flock to the largest platform they are allowed to use.
In practice, this means that every “free speech alternative” to a mainstream social media site is full of neo-Nazis and other undesirables.
BitChute tells its users a compelling story, which goes something like this: Freedom of expression is under attack by corporations and the “totalitarian leftist media”, mostly against right-wing thinkers. The solution to this problem is the market, which is obviously the fount from which all solutions flow; that is to say, the solution is another corporation, BitChute!
But BitChute isn’t just another centralized video platform which will jettison its Nazis once it becomes popular, no. This time it’s decentralized and a member of #AltTech (along with Gab, Minds, and others)—impervious to attacks by those fascists who hate free expression: as its Twitter bio tells us, it’s a “revolutionary p2p video platform”; “#BitChute - Decentralize FTW”!
As such, BitChute has become a favorite platform of alt-right adjacent YouTubers and many other members of the self-styled “independent media” in an attempt to escape what they see as censorship.
The casual observer would be hard pressed to distinguish the BitChute of 2019 from the YouTube of 2009; for all intents and purposes, besides the content, the sites are identical.
Felix Lace, better known under the moniker “Black Pigeon Speaks”, who according to Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center is “xenophobic, misogynist, [and] anti-Semitic,” shills BitChute in his YouTube outtro and uploads all his videos there a day early to entice users to make the move to BitChute;the platform is otherwise full of such memorable shows as “Goy Talk Live,” which has hosted such speakers as Richard Spencer and David Duke.
BitChute is fully aware of where its popularity comes from—its official account has retweeted, among other videos, one which calls white nationalist American Renaissance leader Jared Taylor a “reasonable guy” who makes “reasonable, clear, and evidence-based arguments.” And just like many of its creators, BitChute has suffered at the hands of “cancel culture”: having been deplatformed by Patreon, Stripe, Indiegogo, and PayPal.
The only problem is, the story BitChute tells its creators and users, especially as regards decentralization, is verifiably not true: BitChute is just as centralized as YouTube, despite Brookings, Breitbart, and Daily Dot reports to the contrary.
This should be immediately obvious; on 22 November, BitChute went down for fifteen minutes. A decentralized system does not “go down” just because one person pulls the plug. Think of Bitcoin: if you turn off your miner, someone else’s miner will pick up the slack. Even if every miner in China were to shut down, the network will correct for that.
Yet BitChute could just shut itself down on a whim, because it’s not in any way decentralized.
BitChute also claims to be peer-to-peer, but, I found no evidence that BitChute’s operation is in any way peer to peer.
Ray Vahey, an Englishman living in Thailand, is its CEO, and one of the directors of the corporation which owns it and its IP blocks, Bit Chute Limited. In an interview he gave Dave Cullen, who according to Polygon has “ultra-nationalistic, xenophobic views”, he says:
Especially relevant is the claim that BitChute stays sustainable via peer-to-peer WebTorrent technology. Essentially, what Vahey is claiming is that in order to save money on his bandwidth bills (cloud ISPs charge around $0.09/GB), he’s using the bandwidth of other people who just happen to have the videos open in their browsers instead—that is to say, video is sent from one viewer (peer) to another viewer (peer) without BitChute in between—peer-to-peer.
- We’re all being “acclimated” to censorship by YouTube; (03:50)
- Web traffic is costly, and BitChute remains sustainable via WebTorrent; (08:00)
- “Basically, we’ve got the scalability advantages of BitTorrent with the usability advantage of a normal website;” (08:36)
- “We keep a copy, we’re a peer of last resort, but people watching are also storing a copy and they’re also using their bandwidth.” (09:12)
If all this is true, it should not be hard to find a video which is served via a non-BitChute peer, right? I searched “the”, and came across “Insider Blows Whistle & Exec Reveals Google Plan to Prevent "Trump situation" in 2020 on Hidden Cam”, which at press time has 357,000 views.
Simple analysis shows that this video is hosted at https://seed13.bitchute.com/enCP7veavtI1/re9Xp6cdkro.mp4 , which despite its BitTorrenty sounding name, “seed13”, has nothing at all to do with BitTorrent and is not a BitTorrent seed.
BitChute has a lot of these “seed” subdomains. “seed13” goes to 69.30.250.10, owned by Bit Chute Limited. I decided to take a look at all subdomains between seed00.bitchute.com and seed99.bitchute.com, and found that those which resolve (33/100) resolve to IPs either owned by BitChute or likely to be owned by BitChute. Here’s a summary as of press time:
AS16276: 1 IP, OVH, seed24.bitchute.com
AS32097: 19 IPs, Bit Chute Limited via WholeSale Internet Inc., seed03.bitchute.com, etc.
AS33387: 9 IPs, Shivam Saluja via NOCIX - DataShack, seed67.bitchute.com, etc.
AS53667: 4 IPs, PONYNET d/b/a FranTech Solutions, seed29.bitchute.com, etc.
All of these IPs are in very large datacenters, it is very unlikely that any of them are not in direct control of BitChute.
The NOCIX IPs, AS33387, while not explicitly marked as Bit Chute Limited, are likely his as the customer, Shivam Saluja, has the same Kansas mailing address as Bit Chute Limited is using. Mr. Saluja has not responded as of press time, but is likely an employee of BitChute’s.
To be frank, I could not find a single video that was served via BitTorrent peers. Not a single one. In both Firefox and Chrome, all video data came directly from servers owned by BitChute.
BitChute does not work how they claim it does. Even the top video for the letter “a”, BAD ENGLISH - WHEN I SEE YOU SMILE, with 291,000 views, was served directly from BitChute’s server, in my case via seed63.bitchute.com.
So, BitChute is serving all videos directly from servers under their control, and is saving no money at all. Their Twitter bio is a lie.
At this point I finally heard back from BitChute. They claim that they are “able to enable p2p and disable it as [needed] to optimize bandwidth as necessary.” It is of course absurd to ever need to disable a peer-to-peer solution which works well—even if it’s only saving the company 1% on their bandwidth bill, that’s not 0%, and if some pesky investigative journalist starts snooping around, your “revolutionary p2p video platform” is actually decentralized as promised—so the main thing I got from their reply was that theirs doesn’t work well.
It would seem that at BitChute decentralization is not so much a technical reality as a state of mind; like #AltTech itself, it is a brand, a category, a hip buzzword. I’ve seen this mentality a lot in people who use the word “blockchain”; this is unfortunately not my first time trying to figure out how a decentralized platform works only for it, under my gaze, to come up fully centralized and with a founder making excuses.
I asked whether or not its donors understand that BitChute has no working decentralization, and was told, quote, “your question is misleading…Decentralization is not a goal for the sake of it.” So much for “#BitChute - Decentralize FTW!” A simple “no” would have sufficed.
The magnet links provided which allow users to download videos, presumably from a swarm of BitTorrent peers, likewise do not work, and seem to be there mostly for show, to give the illusion BitTorrent peer-to-peer technology is in use when it is not—the top trending video at press time, Hillary Clinton and the Ultimate Ironic Tweet, failed to download via magnet link, as did every other “trending video” I tried. This is not user error, I’ve done this exact kind of thing before, the problem is that BitChute doesn’t work how they say it does and so there are no seeds.
Andrew Aurenheimer, a neo-Nazi known online as “weev”, told me that associates of his were banned early on in the site’s history; I don’t argue that’s a bad thing, mind you, but it is illustrative of the fact that they can control the platform’s content if they wish.
According to correspondence provided to me by Aurenheimer, the term BitChute uses when it deplatforms a user and deletes their videos is called “delisting”. This term is a more friendly form of “deleted”, but is highly misleading. BitChute’s interface for viewing videos, and for making searches, is proprietary. It is not like BitTorrent, where BitChute maintains one “list” of videos, but you may create your own tracker to maintain your own “list”—yet it wants you to think it’s like BitTorrent.Being “delisted” from BitChute is just a duplicitous way of saying the video was deleted. BitChute, in their reply, did not dispute this. Instead, they once again promised real decentralization was just around the corner; indeed, they blame their lack of promised decentralization on their supporters: “we’re community funded so it’s really down to the community how soon we can get there.”
BitChute wants to have it both ways: it wants its users to believe that BitChute is impervious to censorship, yet it wants to censor its catalog of videos. Who can blame them for wanting to censor their catalog? The internet is a vile place. But the truth is, if BitChute were truly decentralized, it wouldn’t be able to. In the same way no one can stop people from sending Bitcoin to Nazis like Aurenheimer, if BitChute were decentralized, it wouldn’t be possible to delete his videos either. The fact that they can is the best evidence that it’s not.
I suppose it is not incidental that BitChute’s administrators started up a centralized platform, billed it as peer-to-peer, and then promised to figure out all the details of actual decentralization later. The public is weary of blockchain projects and ICOs, and better decentralized data stores, such as distributed hash tables, don’t pay the bills of their creators.
To decentralize is to make yourself irrelevant; Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto is not asking for donations, BitChute's is. ∎
