The subhead in protocol, where I first saw this item, was "who watches the wathchers?" It's a good question. Element is an increasingly popular end-to-end encrypted messenger and collaboration app. Like a number of new tools these days, it is decentralized, which means that people manage and host their own instances. There's no need to depend on a central service like Google or Apple or Facebook. But this also creates a potential point of debate: people can use Element for illegal or offensive content, and there's no way to moderate this content. So what companies can do is to prevent distribution of the application by means of their control of the platform (this is especially true of mobile phones, where companies discourage and in some cases prohibit any unauthorized applications from being run on the hardware). Is this a reasonable response? Would you ban telephones because some phone calls are objectionable? Would you ban a browser because some web sites are hateful? And more: these decentralized services are in direct compeititon with centralized social netwirk sites and services hosted by Google, Apple and Facebook. At a certain point, banning a client like Element begins to look overly self-serving. Image: Twitter.
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