Two Blockchain Projects Claim Medium is Restricting Cryptocurrency Content

The online publishing platform Medium is seemingly taking its own steps in the fight against cryptocurrency. Following a major reworking of its rules, Medium has suspended blog posts of a handful of cryptocurrency projects.

As New.Bitcoin.com reports, Blockchain.io’s Medium page was temporarily suspended, and even when restored back its most recent blog post, discussing its airdrop, now links to a largely blank page that says, “This page is unavailable.”

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Ethereum-based messaging platform Status also faced the same situation last week after failing to publish a blog post announcing product updates. Status explained that the post was immediately suspended, followed by an automated email noting a general violation, but without detailing any specifics, with only a link to Medium’s recently updated policy regarding cryptocurrencies.

“Though we had not violated any of these policies, we re-submitted several revisions that carefully edited out any potential trigger words, like “bounty”, “ETH,” and “SNT”. The post was never successfully published,” Status added in a post entitled “Status, Medium, and Censorship.”

While first pointed out last week, it’s entirely possible that the suspensions could have occurred earlier but gone unnoticed. The latest update to Medium’s rules, published in February, reflected a total overhaul for the platform’s publishing policy.

Specifically, Medium described itself in its previous set of rules as a “free and open platform for anyone to write their views and opinions,” and said it believes “free expression deserves a lot of leeway, so we generally think the best response to bad ideas is good ideas, not censorship.”

However, this language has been scrubbed from the latest version of its platform rules. Instead, Medium now is using defensive statements, with a particular targeted purpose, like the company can “remove any content you post for any reason.”

This could be only the beginning of a lengthy crackdown designed to give Medium more power to police not only the cryptocurrency content that is being posted to its platform, but also projects and people who are posting it. If confirmed with further steps, Medium is therefore joining Twitter, Facebook and Google in its recent clampdown that seeks to avoid giving publicity to potential ICO and cryptocurrency fraud.