Justin Sun, whose Rainberry LLC acquired BitTorrent in 2018, pushed a no-moderation policy at the file-sharing giant, as stated in documents received by Protos.
According to a deposition by former BitTorrent CEO, Jordy Berson, Sun regularly lied to the Apple and Google App stores, not only about moderation on his apps, but also about the 30% cut of sales promised to Apple once listed.
In the deposition, Berson repeatedly discusses how numerous employees, including himself, wanted Sun to implement some level of moderation on the ‘BT Live’ product — planned for launch in India and China in early 2019 — but were always advised against any moderation.
Berson claims that Sun’s catchphrase soon became “It will be fine. Let me worry about that.”
Meetings in India and China
Teams were sent to both India and China to build out the new product. TRON maintained a headquarters in Beijing, China, where executives from China and North America would meet to discuss new concepts and how they could be implemented.
It’s unknown if TRON still has any office space in China.
During this time, it’s clear that Sun was a micromanager at BT Live, with Berson stating that “even though [some budgets were as little as] $5,000… Justin needed to approve [them].” Sun also had a nasty habit of agreeing to a budget and then backing out of the agreement at the last second.
Dark Side of the (Justin) Sun: Money, it’s a crime
In the deposition, Berson states, “Justin communicated to me that users wanted an unmoderated experience; that the product would be more popular, would get more users if we allowed any kind of content in the product.”
According to Berson, despite numerous individuals proclaiming their fear that BT Live would inadvertently be aiding in the distribution of ‘elicit pornography, and, in particular, child pornography,‘ Sun ‘mentioned with conviction that [BT Live] should not have moderation.’
Sun’s plan to skirt by without moderation on the platform amounted to what he described as ‘two boxes’ — one box at the top of the app when you open it, featuring ‘PG content’ and a second box that would require users to scroll far down before encountering the unmoderated content.
Sun also suggested that the unmoderated content be paywalled through one of his numerous crypto tokens.
If and when BT Live was taken down from app stores due to a lack of moderation, Berson said, Sun’s… plan was to do what he often did and “temporarily fix the issue” only to “go back and unfix it so it was more about whether or not they (Apple and Google) noticed rather than whether we had to [have a moderation policy] or not.”
“Sun wanted a place where the users could do elicit activity, including… child pornography,” Berson added.
Besides creating a toxic work environment wherein many employees were either fired for insubordination or resigned due to not wanting to be involved with such terrible content moderation policies, BT Live was yet another example of decentralization theater from Justin Sun.
According to one longtime cryptocurrency executive on background, “It’s almost like an admission that he’s LARPing on a protocol level” with BitTorrent seemingly having the ability to moderate its databases but choosing not to — partially due to Sun’s desires, but also to present the appearance of no control.
Protos reached out to Sun for comment and will update the story if he replies.