My friend Kristin Jackson alerted me to a piece about Freespoke on the left-wing (my opinion of it) Daily Beast website. It’s a feeble attempt at a hit piece. Anyone that knows anything about early-stage companies and product positioning, along with underlying trends with consumers can see that these authors didn’t do their homework.
Here is a link to the article.
For what it’s worth, Freespoke is a new search engine. Check it out yourself. They categorize news and search into three categories, Right, Center, and Left when you click on their “News” button after you search.
I have known about it for a while and I am friends with the founders. I am saying that in the spirit of Freespoke, full transparency.
For example, I searched for the Atlas Shrugged named “Inflation Reduction Act” and I got back a bunch of different articles about it. When I clicked on “News” at the top, it sorted the articles by category. It even put out tweets from the White House and others on the act.
You can see, the right-wing is writing about how the Act won’t cure inflation and increases spending. The left-wing is writing about how great it is. The center shows that the act will do nothing for inflation, and increase the deficit, but might have some benefits like higher taxes on Amazon. That is if you think higher taxes on Amazon are a benefit.
One information source quoted in the article said,
Jeffrey Blevins, co-author of the forthcoming book Social Media, Social Justice, and the Political Economy of Online Networks, added that tagging outlets based on their purported ideologies might worsen political bubbles, since readers will be disinclined to click labels they aren’t aligned with.
Blevins is a lefty. He doesn’t want lefty sights tagged. I thought “Democracy Died in Darkness” but whatever. Anyone writing about social justice is a lefty and if you check his Twitter feed it is apparent. Retweeting Rick Wilson isn’t conservative. Plus, he’s a Cardinals fan so he’s got a bias against the Cubs. I am sure he will read this so congratulations on Pujols and as a Cub fan, I am glad he is retiring.
This is what left-wing websites do when made transparent by Freespoke.
At the same time, when you talk to people they want transparency. It’s a big deal. Transparency keeps everyone honest. Louis Brandeis said, “sunlight is said to be one of the best disinfectants.” If you want to serve up the news from a left or right perspective, no big deal just be honest about it. Clear and Direct. Direct and Clear. By the way, the mainstream media still doesn’t get Trump. He was direct and clear. Most politicians aren’t and that’s why Trump stood out.
They are still pulling their hair out over Trump.
Most people I know want to see the “other side” of the news. I was at a dinner once with a bunch of hard left-wingers. Is there anyone else to eat with in Chicago? I joke. They were upset with my views and asked my daughter directly if “she got the other side”. I told them she went to school so yes, she was getting the other side and we were balancing it at home.
People like Blevins would rather hide. Of course, if people only click on lefty sights and they are lefty, the fact Freespoke labels them gives them feedback. That’s so that they know they are in a bubble.
Freespoke is trying to prevent groupthink and get you out of your bubble. By labeling, they help you do that. If they didn’t, you’d be blind to what’s really going on.
They get after my buddy Todd for appearing on right-wing podcasts and in right-wing sources. I am very sure he’d be happy to go on left-wing sources and chat about Freespoke if they would have him and treat him with the same kindness and respect. The problem is, the left-wingers are afraid of having him and exposing their clientele to other ideas and people. They’d rather do a 1000 word attack piece with no meat to it.
Plus, when you are an early-stage startup which Freespoke is, you have a very, very targeted audience. As the Techstars folks say, “be pointy”. Our advice to startups is not to boil the ocean. Get your first loyal customers and build. Freespoke is doing that.
The writers also interviewed people in what they label as “Trumpworld” without identifying it. Is it in Southern California near Disneyland? What is “Trumpworld”? Can I get a ticket? Is it like Epstein’s island?
Here is what they wrote:
it (Freespoke) doesn't have the trusted Trump stamp of approval.
“It’s not just about how much money you can invest in a project, it also depends on who is aligned with it and who are your biggest megaphones,” a former Trump administration official close to Trump’s inner circle told The Daily Beast. “Platforms like [Donald Trump Jr.’s news aggregator] MxM have both in spades, and that’s what is lacking for other platforms.”
Number one, I don’t think they asked for it. Number two, they don’t need it. This is especially true because they are going for the mass market, not a fraction of it.
As early-stage investors know, startups do well by serving their customers. What’s the target market for Freespoke? It’s not Trump supporters. They are a subset of the entire market. The market is anyone who wants unbiased and informed search. No one needs Trump’s approval to start a business or go after a conservative segment of the market.
If it made a difference who funded a startup and who had the megaphone behind it, the startup world would look a lot different. Big funds have a lot more failure in their portfolios than they do winners. It’s just that the winners are gigantic grand slam home runs which makes people want to put money in the funds to invest. If you hit home runs in the startup business and only hit .300, you are in the hall of fame.
Honestly, this article is the first I had heard of MxM. I have been on Truthsocial, but it’s not that great of an experience yet because there isn’t any diversity of opinion on it. Freespoke incorporated diversity into their search from the get-go. Now that the writers alerted me, I might try MxM. Maybe left-wingers that read The Daily Beast will give Freespoke a whirl.
To show how uninformed the authors are, they cited The Drudge Report. That site hasn’t been relevant to conservatives for over 4 years. That’s not Freespoke’s competition in the least.
They also look at Duck Duck Go. DDG started back in 2010. Its core reason for existence is privacy, since they don’t track your search like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo. I have used their search engine a bunch. As soon as Freespoke is able to be appended automatically onto my browser, I will hook it up.
Of course, it goes without saying the writers couldn’t help themselves and attacked the Ricketts family personally. Oh my gosh! They are conservatives that actually stand by their conservative values and act on them. Gee whiz, why couldn’t they be like those mush-mouthed conservatives like Mitt Romney, who the press can trot out and push around?
They conveniently forgot to mention the sister in the family who consistently funds far left-wing causes. They also conveniently forget to mention that they all hang around with each other and get along despite political differences. It didn’t fit their narrative of the way they wanted to spin the story to you. Let me say that again slower with italics, spin the story to you.
The funny thing is they even got how they were categorized wrong as evidenced by this search!
These writers proved exactly why Freespoke exists. If people think that unbiased and transparent search with privacy is important, Freespoke will succeed. I hope you will use it. I do every day.
Freespoke sounds promising.
Thanks for the information. I've been using DDG/brave for quite a while. Just downloaded this app for comparison.