About five months ago, a public relations firm reached out to me. They wanted to know if I would be interested in interviewing Bill Ottman, the creator and CEO of Minds.com.
Because I contribute to Townhall.com, the firm thought they could
Minds is a new social media platform to combat the lack of transparency and the essentially liberal bias of Facebook.
I interviewed Ottman for an hour, learning about his background, his investment in the program, his interest in effective competition against the current social media giants who are shutting down conservatives and limiting free speech of all kinds.
There were a few things that I took away from our interview, with the larger portions of the article which I had intended to submit:
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Social media has become anti-social. They mine people’s
private information. Different sites block, suspend, or shut down opposing
views. Milo lost his Twitter account.
I wanted to give up Facebook last year, but outreach from
supporters across the country induced me to come back. I went live a number of
times on my restored Facebook account, along with my back-up account. Then I
kept getting banned for months at a time.
Then I was disabled. For good. Honestly, I am glad it
happened. Social media is taking up people’s time and resources like never
before, and it’s not good.
A fellow Trump supporter shared a sense of relief after his
forced vacation from Facebook.
But now it’s nothing but schadenfreude for me. Facebook has
been losing users by the multi-millions over the last three months.
Post-Millennials are generally turned off to social media. More studies suggest
that
Then came Minds.
This is a new platform, started by Connecticut native Bill
Ottman, who attend the University of Vermont. During his undergrad years, he
developed a different social media platform: Minds.
One of his chief interests with the platform? He wants a
social media site which respects your privacy.
A PR firm reached out to me, offered to have me interview
Ottman.
I asked him what he wanted to do, why he wanted to do it:
“I knew that the world needed an open source more community
powered social network.”
New to the whole social media tech-talk, I asked him to
explain “open source”:
“All of our software is publicly available to be inspected
and used. It also has to do with content to be shareable.” Ottman also prides
his program as seeking ideas from other people. I had suggesting reaching out
to Buffer and Hootsuite so that users can share their content on Minds along
with other platforms.
In contrast, Google, Facebook, Twitter, --all of them are
proprietary software “they give no access to the public what their code is
doing. It’s a major privacy issue. Transparency of the software is essential
for user freedom and user rights. Otherwise, they could be doing anything to
you. Any number of things.”
He predicted the information abuses which Facebook has
become notoriously well-known for.
“I knew that that was going to happen, so it was going to be
transparent, encrypted for privacy, reward users instead of exploiting them.”
Unlike Facebook, which explicitly requires users to purchase
add time to expand the reach of posts and information, Ottman’s program created
a points system. Visitors and users to the platform get points, which they can
spend to increase the algorithms to share their content.
The free market, the enterprise system of supply and demand
is forcing innovation, and bringing in much needed competition against Google,
Facebook, Twitter, and the other titans of Silicon Valley. Ottman wants to
disrupt the Facebook monopoly.
The same way that Wikipedia disrupted the encyclopedia
industry.
The same way that Wordpress disrupted the organization
system industry.
People have complained about the dominance of Mark
Zuckerberg, comparing their tyranny to the Robber Barons of Gilded Age Post
Civil War America. Although the progressive accounts of these corporate firms have
been debunked, it is quite true that social media titans have become
anti-social in their tyranny. Is the answer more regulation?
Or competition?
You can go to your page, and then click boost “and you can
boost your post for a thousand views. We will share that through the community.
Facebook’s algorithm makes it that you can’t reach all of
your followers. We want to reward people with more exposure instead of taking
it away.
In terms of revenue, users can earn or by these points. It’s
our versions. It’s a form of promotion
Now, why did Ottman reach out to me?
“I noticed your articles and that you wrote about Jordan
Peterson. He is on Minds. We are dedicated to free speech. There are lots of
censorship issues. A lot of content creators are getting banned or demonetized.
This has happened.”
Free speech issue: undermining the YouTube Monopoly.
As long as you are not inciting violence. We are not going
to ban people for their political views. If people are malicious or harassment
on the site, but we have a much more free-speech oriented policy. Probably the
most liberal free speech content policies out there.
I had to ask about his political views, and I liked what he
had to say.
“I honestly try to stay away from labels. I think it’s
really important to not politicize. We are certainly a freedom-oriented
network. A number of labels could apply to me.” He cited more populist,
anti-Establishment types like Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.
His reticence to label himself is refreshing, actually,
since platform founders have created problems for themselves precisely because
of their driven agendas.
“We have created a
platform that free speech advocates on both sides of the platform can coexist.
A lot of social media platforms are not able to maintain any sense of balance.
That’s any specific organization.”
He then brings up a great point about what’s hurting the
tech titans:
“Facebook and Google are losing half their audience because they
are politicizing their platforms.”
But he brought up other angles:
“I noticed the problems with Facebook right away. One of the
original problems I noticed was the negative impact on people’s psychology.
They never came off as any kind of transparent. They didn't seem like a
down-to-earth company. They wanted to extract value out of users get people
addicted. They were conducting psychological experiments on the users. They did
a secret mood study. The would inject happy or sad articles into people’s
newsfeeds.”
CREEPY!
I then asked Ottman what he’s going to do about the growing
disillusionment among Millennials?
It’s not so much social media that worries them, Ottman
posits: “They are turned off to the narrative, they are getting abused, they
don’t resonate with that. They want real connections with people, especially
for Millennials, because they don’t know a time without the Internet. They have
no experience with being away from the screen. It’s not about being pro- or
anti-social media. Most millennials are pro-social media.= -- it’s how people
communicate, it’s part of the fabric of our society.
It's time to end the top-down model of social media, and start
working from the ground up. Emerging tech companies need to have that
conversation with their communities.
Are you developing a counterweight to Silicon Valley?
“Yes, there is a whole movement for decentralized tech,
personal currencies emerging. More freedom based platforms. There’s a lot of
heat that Silicon Valley is getting. IT’s a similar tone with what’s happening
to Facebook and Google, acting in weird group think.”
I asked for his views about regulating social media as a
public commodity, just as Tucker Carlson has suggested.
“ I would say that it’s better to need more decentralized
solutions as opposed to more government regulations, but it may be a
possibility to consider. I think the conversation needs to be had, like with
Microsoft. I don’t know the answer on that.”
That’s refreshing! “We want to build an alternative. Get
people off them as opposed to worrying about.
“I think there’s a lot of illegal activity that these
companies are engaging in. Surveillance, for example. to array of abuses of
power. One of the biggest ones was how they drew everyone to their platform, telling
everyone that you would be able to reach your target audience. They told all
the news sources that they would. These companies paid Facebook millions of
dollars, but every six months, they change their algorithm. Now the companies
are only reaching 3% of those fans organically. Facebook wants you to pay more
to reach the very fan base that your created. They changed the platform all of
a sudden. That’s false advertising.
They also comply with rogue states like China – it’s an
issue that we will be facing – international law, dealing with laws in
countries based on what they think about data privacy. It’s a big regulation in
other countries. Then you have speech laws in other countries that are much
worse than in the US. They have gone down the rabbit hole of censorship. They
have started censoring other people’s content like mad.
Unlike them, Ottman want his community feedback. On these
more severe speech codes, like in Germany and China, the question remains up in
the air. Should social media sites comply with the speech codes in a country,
especially social media platforms based in freer countries. Perhaps these
social media platforms should not provide their apps in those countries to
begin with.
What’s the
fundamental basis for your commitment to freedom of speech?
I am doing some deep research on this right. The studies
show that censorship actually makes hate speech worse. There as a study done by
Reddit – started censoring their contented. They analyzed 1 million reddit
posts. By censoring content, you can sort of slow down hate speech or racism.
But, it makes the larger global problem worse. It will just pop up somewhere
else.
It’s called The Toothpaste tube effect, the Streisand
effect—and it becomes more popular. People want to know more about it. It
infuriates the people getting censored. Our approach – someone needs to be
mature enough to deal with this more extreme content, so that in the battle of
ideas, the good ideas win on the basis of their own merit.
You’re not just infuriating troubles. There are still
blocking and filtering tools
Studies prove that censorship makes the larger rise in
extremism worse.
The Streisand effect—She didn’t want something about her on
line – she made a big fuss about it – and then everyone was talking about it!
She wanted to get rid of the content. This is exactly what happens when people
get banned on Facebook – they go to other accounts.
Facebook thinks that they are solving bullying—but they are
actually making it worse.
I don’t think that this is specifically a libertarian idea –
it’s a classic liberal, libertarian, common ground issue. Even if the Left is
being dominated by the censorship narrative. Not everyone on the left really
wants this. They are bullying their own side into thinking this.
Freedom of speech—I don’t necessarily think that freedom of
speech and inclusion are exclusive, I think that you can in a sense that you
are being MORE inclusive by supporting freedom of speech.
Why are you committed to freedom of speech? When you start
getting into making these subjective decisions about content, that sort of a never-ending
rabbit hole that these kind time after time getting social media.
Twitter was marketing itself as the free speech wing of the
free speech party. There are lots of internal struggle in Twitter. A lot of
people who wanted to maintain their committee. Twitter has become so
inconsistent with their policy, even though there is violent speech coming from
the left and right – they only ban certain people. You have to have a
principle, whether certain content is offensive to some people.
There is a duty of social networks to have principles and to
help maintain a healthy community, but I don’t think that requires censoring
legal content. A lot of the feedback that you get – you are not taking responsibility
for the content on your site.
Movies getting illegally downloaded – copyright issues. The
legal line in the US, that is consistent that people can hold onto. The other
sites do not have a consistent policy.
Ultimately, I want to engineer ourselves out of the position
--- of potentially being able to get corrected by those subjective decisions We
are moving toward cryptocurrency, which is less subject to censorship.
Anything else?
Funny, that the momentum is not slowing doing. The Establishment
networks are not taking any cues, getting worse, and we grow more. They are not
learning from the consumer feedback. Facebook just had another loss of millions
of users.
