In his quest to support alternative social-media platforms, Twitter’s cofounder Jack Dorsey unwittingly funded a developer who’s a follower of a Brazilian fascist, according to archived webpages and business records.
The funding, which supported the development of the decentralized social-media protocol Nostr, comes as Silicon Valley’s rightward political drift has become more apparent and as some in tech’s elite push back against what they perceive as overreach in censorship and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
As Fiatjaf, Parra told Forbes that his political views were shaped by the laissez-faire Austrian school of economics and his entrepreneurial parents’ negative experiences with government regulation in Brazil.
Parra was frustrated by what he saw as Twitter’s increasing censorship of users and wanted to build a decentralized protocol that would allow people to easily take their social-media profiles and followers to other networks if they disagreed with a platform’s content-moderation policies.
On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
The original article contains 822 words, the summary contains 237 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In his quest to support alternative social-media platforms, Twitter’s cofounder Jack Dorsey unwittingly funded a developer who’s a follower of a Brazilian fascist, according to archived webpages and business records.
The funding, which supported the development of the decentralized social-media protocol Nostr, comes as Silicon Valley’s rightward political drift has become more apparent and as some in tech’s elite push back against what they perceive as overreach in censorship and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Before he died in 2022 after contracting COVID-19, de Carvalho — known as Olavo — praised Brazil’s military dictatorship, claimed that Pepsi-Cola was flavored with stem cells of aborted fetuses, preached that tolerance for homosexuality was “incompatible” with democracy, and had an office in Virginia decorated with portraits of Confederate generals.
As Fiatjaf, Parra told Forbes that his political views were shaped by the laissez-faire Austrian school of economics and his entrepreneurial parents’ negative experiences with government regulation in Brazil.
Parra was frustrated by what he saw as Twitter’s increasing censorship of users and wanted to build a decentralized protocol that would allow people to easily take their social-media profiles and followers to other networks if they disagreed with a platform’s content-moderation policies.
On a podcast last year, Parra, as Fiatjaf, mused about the likelihood that “Nazis or racists or whatever” could see Nostr as a home for hate speech because the nature of the protocol means it has no centralized content moderation.
The original article contains 822 words, the summary contains 237 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!