Dissenter can be found at   https://www.dissenter.com/

Outside of those nations that have constitutional protections for freedom of speech, such as the United States, censorship in places like Europe is something that has always been with us to a certain extent. Sometimes, for example in Britain during World War II, a degree of censorship was a necessary evil and to a certain extent justifiable, but in other times in other nations censorship was a method of hiding new ideas from the public in order to protect the governing classes. Censorship is what kept Germans and Russians in the 1930’s and 1940’s from knowing what their bestial governments were up to. Post war, censorship was employed by the nations of the Communist Bloc to keep their citizens from knowing just how crap their lives were when compared to those who lived in the free world.

Today’s censorship, especially in European nations and to a worrying degree in the United Kingdom is not so much carried out by governments but by corporations pushed to do so by a small number of loud and intolerant social justice warriors and other Leftist and, increasingly, Islamist activists. Since at least 2009 Britain and other European nations have seen an increasing fashion for large news media outlets, social media platforms, websites and other online information sources to remove any open comment facility. I believe that they are doing this when the public comments are at odds with the narrative which is being pushed by the writer of the above the line story.

For an example of how this type of censorship works here’s a scenario: You may get a local newspaper which runs a puff piece about a dodgy mosque opening its doors for ‘visit my mosque day’. This newspaper is published in an area where the majority of the inhabitants may be none too pleased by the antics of some of the members of the ‘religion of peace’. Those unhappy with the puff piece then take to the local newspaper comment pages to tell some home truths about the pretend moderate mosque. The response of the newspaper editor, ostensibly to protect ‘community cohesion’ but also to placate advertisers, will be to either heavily censor comments so that only pro mosque comments are allowed or to close comments completely. This is wrong on two counts. Firstly it gives the casual reader the false impression that all is hunky dory with the pretend moderate mosque and secondly it robs local people of a open forum where genuine debate can take place. It is also highly frustrating to make a comment, even a reasonably mild one, only to find that some snowflake moderator has spiked your comment.

However, there is now a way around this problem, a way to allow readers of online material to make comments on stories that either have heavily censored comments sections or have no comment section at all. There is a new product from the Gab team called ‘Dissenter’ which allows the user to input the URL of the site that the user wants to comment on, make the comment hit send and have it appear on the users Gab account feed and on the Dissenter app where it is visible to other Dissenter users. Dissenter is a fabulous way of evading a great deal of the online censorship that is currently plaguing the internet.

I’ve only just started to play around with Dissenter myself but even from my so far limited use of it I can see that this is a fabulous and indeed revolutionary product. It negates much of the censorship of comment pages on news websites and other online media that the owners and publishers of such website use in order to stop people saying what they want. It allows me to comment on BBC stories and point out inaccuracies or bias, make comments on news channels on YouTube that have comments turned off and even allows me to make comments about articles on social media platforms that I have been banned from for political reasons. Dissenter is a stupendously good product and I suspect will take off very quickly especially when people start to realise that they can use it to express their views about organisations and groups that they may be concerned about but which hide behind censorship, blocking and de-platforming.

I can see Dissenter being a useful tool for lots of different people with diverse viewpoints. As well as being used by those of on the centre Right to evade the controls put in place by the SJW’s I can also see Dissenter being useful for those on the Left as well. Left wing campaigners against an exploitative company for example that puts up a self promotion blog post or website article without comment facility in order evade criticism will now find that criticism is still public but on Dissenter instead of their own website or blog. Those who wish to play the authoritarian and ban dissenting comments are now very much on the back foot. I can also see Dissenter being used by members of Trade Unions who may be unhappy with the political direction their Union is going in but find that they can’t voice their views on the official TU social media or comment pages due to censorship. I would like to stress at this point that Dissenter is not, as it is being portrayed in the Left leaning media, a ‘far right’ app and neither is it a programme aimed at the political Right of whatever shade. Dissenter is an app that will be useful for anyone who finds themselves in the position where their voice has been silenced, Dissenter is for everyone.

I think Dissenter will grow and grow as more people start to realise the extent of online censorship and how it is being applied. It only took 72 hours or so for Dissenter to get to 22,000 users which to me is an astonishing growth for a new product. Further growth is likely as more people begin to understand the links that legacy social media such as Facebook and Twitter have with those governments, such as that of the United Kingdom, that are becoming increasingly hostile to freedom of speech. Dissenter places a lot of power into the hands of a lot of individuals to allow them to express their views.

I progress now to discuss the tech side of Dissenter. Now I’m not a coder or a programmer or anything techie like that. My view of Dissenter is therefore very similar to that which may be held by someone who is a casual computer user rather than an expert. Firstly I’d like to discuss security. I have never had any security issues with Gab and neither have I had any problems or seen anybody else have problems with Gab in this area. Unlike other platforms such as Twitter, I very much doubt that Gab would hand over user details to a UK police force in the event that a police force requested such data on the grounds that a user had committed a ‘speech crime’. That said however Gab, and by extension Dissenter, is run according to USA free speech rules and I therefore presume that people can speak freely on Gab and Dissenter but not cross US free speech laws.

To say that Dissenter is easy to use would be an understatement. Installing the Dissenter extension on Firefox is simplicity itself. It’s basically go to the Dissenter site, select your chosen web browser click the consent and install buttons and away you go. You don’t need any particular tech skills to either install it or use it and it is this aspect of Dissenter that I believe will help it gain a great deal of popularity. Once the Dissenter extension is installed a small icon will appear (at least on Firefox) on the top right of the browser window. When you want to use Dissenter to comment, click on the Dissenter icon and it will automatically read the URL of the site that you are on and bring up a comment box. You then make your comment and hit send. There are two checkboxes above the comment field one for ‘post on your gab account’ and one for marking the content as ‘NSFW’. You then post the comment and it is carried on the Dissenter site for others to see. It really is as simple as that.

I haven’t, in my so far limited use of Dissenter, found that many downsides to it. The only problem I have found so far is that when used in Firefox’s incognito mode, it does not automatically read the URL and to use Dissenter in this mode you have to log in again and manually input the URL.

I think that Dissenter has the potential to be a really big thing for Alt Tech and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to all those on the Gab team who have worked extremely hard in creating Dissenter. It has all the hallmarks of being a very useful tool. Dissenter has the capacity to become a portable comment section for any website anywhere in the world and on a wide variety of operating systems and web browsers. Dissenter gives many of those in unfree nations yet another tool by which they can speak freely.

It only remains for me to personally thank the developers of Dissenter, Mr Andrew Torba and Mr Ekrem Büyükkaya for all their skilled and inspired work that they’ve put into creating Dissenter. If you see these men then buy them a beer or two as they’ve given a lot of freedom to speak to a lot of people.