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April 30, 2021 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
17:29
PureSocial founder Doug Wade interviewed by Mike Adams
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All right, folks.
Welcome to BrightTown.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of BrightTown.
Today, I am pleased to be joined by Doug Wade, the founder and president of another very important technology company, a platform called Pure Social.
And it's found at PureSocialNetwork.com.
And Doug joins us today to talk about freedom of speech, technology, and how they help support each other in this new fight for freedom and liberty and faith for all of us.
So welcome, Doug.
It's great to be able to talk with you today.
Thanks, Mike.
I'm glad to be here.
Well, it's awesome to have you here.
Now, just for our listeners who aren't familiar with your platform or your work, just give us a quick introduction of what it's all about.
We've been in business for a little over two years with the platform.
We formulated the company in 2017.
With the idea in mind that we were going to rebuild a social media platform.
Since then, we've seen a lot of platforms kind of grow over that time.
And we recognize that the timing was good because of all the censorship that we're seeing now.
So I think the planning was very strategic in just planning this out and working to provide people a place, a platform, so they could have their voices heard again.
So that's kind of been a little bit of the background of it, but it's growing steadily.
We're seeing a lot of really good organic growth.
We've not spent any money in advertising, so all of it's been organic, and we're growing at about 2,000% right now.
Per month?
Per month.
Wow.
That's a lot.
Okay.
So, well, tell us, what differentiates Pure Social from, let's say, Parler?
Or dare we even say, you know, Twitter, Facebook, but I don't think any informed person is going to be there for long.
They're going to go to platforms like yours, but what differentiates your platform?
Not a whole lot other than the fact that we're not on every App Store right now.
We were denied access to the Apple App Store.
I'm not surprised.
It's something we can actually work around.
It's just that we're putting a lot more time and effort into the rebuilding of it now.
So we didn't want to try to focus too much on that.
It's very strategic in the way that we've been trying to plan it out into having the social media platform launch, and then we moved quickly into the video network launch, and now we're at the phase of building this kind of an integrated platform app, web app launch.
And so it's all been very strategic in how we've planned this out.
So, you know, I'm someone who built a platform, Brighttown, so I know there's a lot of costs that goes into this.
How are you funded, and how do you have sustainable revenue to keep this going?
I know it's challenging.
It is very challenging.
You know, it's been from the ground up.
It's been, you know, bootstrapping.
It's been, you know, investing our own personal finances with several of the partners that we have.
You know, we've not had any significant investment.
We've just kind of slowly just grew it and built it.
And, you know, just continue to use the skills that we have.
I personally have some web development experience.
Launched a, well, I'll go back a little further.
Started in kind of the tech space with the internet in the late 80s.
Well, before most people knew there was an internet.
Right.
I was transferring print files to printers through the internet before we even had the applications to do it.
Wow.
And I was on the IRC chat, which is really what social media is now.
That was the beginning of social media.
That's right.
So we were out there finding chat groups on whatever topic.
That was even pre-AOL, I guess you could say.
But then from there, being in that business of commercial art, which is where I was at the time, I put all my markers and paper aside, and I had this box on my desk with a keyboard, and so I learned how to use it, and I got really deep into how does this function.
So I'm a right brain, left brain guy, so it was challenging, but fun, so that I could learn more about I was on a Mac at the time, and the internet.
Just how does this now help me do my job better or quicker?
So I quickly got into more animation, enjoying that aspect of the business, and got trained, got formal training.
And then in 1994, I launched my own business because I was working kind of in the agency side of the business for many years.
So I launched Wade Design, which was a custom web development company.
And we ran that for about 11 years and sold it.
And so then right around 2005, that was right when the social media things were starting to happen with the Facebooks and the Twitters and the YouTubes, all that was kind of growing.
At the time, I had a team of folks, developers and designers, and we kept talking kind of in a fun sort of way.
We're like, well, how can we rebuild this perfect social media network and just put Facebook out of business?
I mean, we were just throwing around ideas early on like that.
And so it's always been in the back of my mind.
And one of the things that really motivated me to kind of get into the space of social media is I saw what kind of damage Facebook was doing in families and in my own family with my kids.
They were young at the time.
And of course, kids in this generation of Generation Z are very tech savvy, right?
They could pick up a phone and know how to figure it out like within minutes.
But my kids, the same thing.
They were online, they were chatting, they were doing stuff, they were on Facebook, and it got to be to the point where it was scary.
I mean, there was things happening with the conversations that were causing physical harm and threats And I remember, you know, with my son, it was like some friend of his, they were having bricks thrown through windows.
And it was all over some conversation that happened.
Wow.
And I thought to myself, well, the social media platforms have become a dangerous place to be.
They can be.
What can we do to use technology for good?
So then what about your censorship policy or your limits on speech?
There have to be some limits, but we don't want to obviously have viewpoint discrimination.
So what's your philosophy on that?
Well, I think that it can change over time, but my foundational beliefs about how it should be handled is anything that's legal in our country right now, Should be legal online.
Now, that's not to say that, you know, I don't think that any of these platforms should be supportive of, like, pornography, because I think that's dangerous.
Right.
I think that's very destructive.
I don't think we should have anything that's violent, where people are threatening.
I don't think that we should obviously have anything that's terrorism-related or, you know, drug-related or any of that stuff.
And again, that's all stuff that's not legal in our country anyway.
So, I think that if we keep that as our foundation and we use What's working well in our country and just mimic that through technology is a good start.
Well, let me bring up a case that we've dealt with on Brighton as well, which is a personal stalking, doxing type of situation that's not illegal.
It's usually like an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend thing.
Right?
Somebody goes online, posts a video and says, oh, my ex-girlfriend is a horrible person.
Here's where she lives and kind of implies that you should burn her house down or something, right?
So we ban those types of videos, even though they may not be illegal, but they are potentially dangerous to an individual.
I think there's going to have to be some times where we'll have to make a call.
It's kind of in the middle.
It's kind of fuzzy.
But here's the thing.
Where I think the best approach as these new platforms are being built is to consider that this is what we're doing.
We're flipping that whole idea upside down as far as The Facebooks, the Twitters, the YouTubes, they're all top-down oligarchies.
They are top-down, so they can decide, right?
They get to decide what's right and what's wrong, who can say what, when you can say it, if you can say it.
It's all top-down.
So we're flipping that upside down.
I think that the community itself are smart enough, they're intelligent enough to be able to decide Who can stay and who can go?
And you can do that through the technology, which we're building right now, which is our crowd score.
So through ratings, like I rate you, you rate me, if you're contributing to the network and you're contributing a lot of positive things to the network, then obviously you're going to have a better score.
If someone's doing things that are damaging or dangerous or toxic or they're a threat, Related posts, then they're going to get lower scores by the community, just naturally.
People are going to see that and say, that's not right.
I think that we could shadow each other.
We can shadow ban each other because of the activity and the contributions that are being made.
So again, we've taken that idea and we've flipped it upside down, and we're going to create this crowd score system that will be now integrated into our newer platforms.
Well, it's an intriguing idea, but just as a skeptic on that, we've seen cases where crowdsourced information can be really gamed or weaponized against someone.
And it's interesting, too, that I think YouTube is using that very argument to ban dislikes on videos of Joe Biden.
Right.
So, people would vote it down because they don't like Biden.
Regardless of perhaps what he was saying in that video, they would just say boo Biden and vote it down.
So, YouTube says we're going to ban dislikes.
So, But it can also be gamed the other way, where, let's say, some leftist says, oh, this conservative person is bad, and publishes a story in the New York Times, or NBC News, their reputation hit team, and then, you know what I'm saying.
Sure.
Yeah, and we've talked through that.
So we've been planning out the idea of CrowdScore for the last five years.
I mean, it's really more about being able to provide a system And obviously there's data, and there's technology, and there's algorithms, and everything's considered in this, but a balanced and a weighted system.
So let's say that we have an audience of 20 people.
Hopefully we'll have more than 20 people.
I think we already have more than 20 people.
We do, yeah, we definitely do.
We have 20 people.
So let's say that eight of those people are conservative, and two of those...
I'm sorry, I'm getting my math wrong here.
Eight of them are...
Let's say that it's weighted in one side or the other.
So we've got, if the scores are, like if someone wants to gang up on someone else who you don't agree with politically, right?
So a group, and they're saying, oh, you know, and maybe the whole community itself is weighted in one way or another.
We can balance the weight based on the amount of people and where they stand or where they position themselves.
In this kind of political spectrum.
So that's one way to do it because now you've kind of made it a fair game.
You haven't literally given people the ability to use that and game it like you're saying.
It's really recognizing that, oh no, well this group right here is kind of split down the middle or this group is weighted on one side.
So we can use that Knowledge based on people's, you know, the way they comment, right?
The posts they like, the types of articles they read.
And it's not like spying like what's happening now.
It's more just like taking that information so that it's helpful and useful.
You know, it's like we're kind of using that so that we can kind of have a fair conversation.
And the idea...
What we've done with Facebook, for instance.
We've been on the Facebook group page now for over two years.
I think it's been closer to three years.
But we use that as research.
We've been collecting the data on how people are interacting.
And what's interesting about Facebook, you know, as they ban and they censor people all the time, they shut down people's pages.
They've never touched our group page.
And why?
It's because we're having people from all sides of this political spectrum talking about serious issues, whether it's BLM, racism, COVID, the elections, all that stuff.
They've never shut us down because we have people from all sides talking.
And that, to us, is where the magic is.
If we can start bringing back conversation and have meaningful conversations around the things that are plaguing this nation, I think that we can see positive change.
So that's the model that we use to build our platform.
That's very interesting.
I look forward to talking with you more about some of your algorithms and your technology.
But you also have this available, I believe, as something that you can license to other platforms.
Independent publishers that want to have their own branded social media platform perhaps focused on particular issues, such as vaccines or faith or whatever, you know, Second Amendment, you know?
Right.
Give us a little explanation on what that is.
Yeah, so it was an exciting opportunity that came to us, and it's interesting because when I get people requesting things for us to build or, you know, solutions that they need, we start to think about, well, how can we change our business model in a way that's It's going to be just good for the growth of the business.
We had an opportunity to work with Dr.
Andy Wakefield.
We've been working with him all year.
To help keep his content out there.
And so they approached us and they had some requests from people saying, hey, we want to build this for you.
And they've had a lot of people wanting to work with them.
And they said, well, we know we need to do this because so many of the frontline doctors, so many people involved in this whole conversation around vaccines and health care Or just being left and right.
You can't even find the information anymore.
It just doesn't exist.
And so that's a terrible thing.
So they said, we need to build our own network.
And they were approached by several other groups to have it contracted to be built.
And they said, well, we know Doug.
We know he's reliable.
We know he's got great tech.
And we think that he can pull this off, so we had the conversation.
And so the idea was, look, we love what you're doing.
We love the fact that you were able to not be so closely tied to big tech providers Right.
To build your business.
Right.
We've never been shut down.
They're announcing now the vaccine.
What's it called?
The Health Freedom Hub.
Health Freedom Hub.
And that's your technology.
That's our technology.
It will be powered by Pure Social.
Okay.
Fantastic.
So we're going to have a turnkey solution for any group out there that wants to grow a social media network.
And it will be...
As good as, or at least Facebook-esque, with hints of Twitter and all the beauty of YouTube and live stream.
That's awesome.
So how can people contact you just to learn more or participate or even talk about that Well, they can contact us through our website with PureSocialNetwork.com.
I'm pretty easy to find on there.
You are.
We see your stuff all the time on there.
You've got the highest crowd score, by the way.
You need to know that.
I did not know that.
You actually surpassed me.
I'm like, well, these guys are really killer guys.
Well, I'll have to be more outspoken.
If I have such a high score, I'm not doing my job, I guess.
That's right.
So you can get on puresocialnetwork.com, puresocial.tv.
It might be a little harder to find me there because I don't really necessarily have a channel there, but we do have our Pure Social channel.
Or they can just email me, info at PureSocialNetwork.com.
On Twitter, I'm on RealDougWade.
Facebook, I think, is RealDougWade.
I'm on Instagram.
You can usually find me if you just search Pure Social or Doug Wade.
Okay.
Well, thank you, Doug, for what you're doing and for spending time with me to describe this.
And we'll help get the word out there.
Yeah, I really appreciate it, Mike.
You guys are awesome.
I love what you're doing.
I really do.
We're working hard, just like you are.
Yeah.
And this is how we win, is we build infrastructure.
It is.
This is real infrastructure.
This is.
This is how we win.
This is how we win the battle.
And we don't need Biden's infrastructure money.
We do not need it.
We don't need it.
Yeah, because it comes with strings attached, by the way.
That's right.
All right.
Well, thank you, Doug.
Okay.
Thanks, Mike.
Okay.
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