4244 Open Source is Free Speech! A Conversation with Bill Ottman, CEO of minds.com
Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio discusses the incredible value of a decentralized open source social network environment with William Ottman, CEO of minds.com▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux here with William Ottman, a.k.a.
Bill. He is an American internet entrepreneur and freedom of information activist based in New York City, best known as the CEO and co-founder of Minds.
Bill, thanks for taking the time tonight.
Thanks for having me, Sylvain. It seems like kind of an opportune time to be talking about all this kind of stuff, but why don't you take me back a little bit to help me understand how you got started with Mines, what the initial impetus was, and seed funding, and partners in arms, and so on.
For sure. So we've always known that there was almost an inevitability that an open-source, decentralized social network was Going to emerge.
It had to because there was such dominance and monopolization by the mainstream networks and none of them were open source.
None of them were decentralized.
And, you know, they had all of these censorship policies and users were being abused in numbers of ways from surveillance, both hard and soft, to demonetization.
You know, you know all the scope of the problems.
And so we started building years ago and Um, just spend years just building out a scalable infrastructure, launched our first mobile apps in 2015, got a big surge around our privacy features.
And that was around the time of all the NSA surveillance leaks.
So, you know, there was a lot of attention through that phase and then the algorithm started getting worse and then the censorship started getting worse.
And we just have been naturally experiencing this, this wave of growth Just sort of as like a natural balancing mechanism, it seems like, with the internet.
Right. How far down the pipe did you see this lefty, controlly, semi-socialistic slash fascistic takeover of the social media giants?
I feel like that's been a little bit more recent.
You know, it's really odd because I'm Positive that there are internal wars going on within these companies.
It's not so monolithic to the point...
I mean, people like, for instance, Peter Thiel is on the board of Facebook.
You know that he's sort of contrarian with regards to the rest of the thought there.
Twitter, I've read extensive articles from insiders who talk about just battles they have about all of these free speech issues.
We see what just got leaked today, the Google, quote-unquote, the good sensor piece, where they're clearly having an internal dialogue about how to attack these issues.
But we are seeing the proof that which ideas are winning, and those are the more authoritarian ideas, unfortunately.
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is a business battle and an ideological battle.
And business and ideology can work hand in hand, but I think it generally is best if the business ideology mixes libertarian and free market, then I think it works really well.
But it's almost like there is this ring of power that was really revealed in 2016 in the Trump election, was really revealed with Brexit, is being revealed.
I think even Judge Kavanaugh, I think social media had a lot to get out, the skepticism about some of these allegations.
And there is this really wild push To curate, to control, to nudge.
And it's all supposed to be very sensitive.
You know, while our listeners don't know the difference between this, that and the other, it's like, that's a deep philosophical question.
It's an epistemological question.
What is truth? What is reality?
What is perspective? What is nuance?
These are all very difficult questions, and they should be answered in the free market of ideas, not by some people with their curation code.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the...
The levels have gotten very extreme with the censorship and content policies.
And I think that what strikes me as just odd is that you have to imagine they're looking at the data and the analytics in regards to the effects of censorship.
And what we know is that censorship from dozens of peer reviewed studies, including one that just hit the Atlantic today, Called Hidden Tribes, where they surveyed thousands of people and found that they're pretty much all PC and anti-PC. But the studies show that censorship increases exposure to those issues.
It causes further radicalization.
It causes more attention to be brought to what is being censored.
So even if your intention was to censor things, the way to go about censoring things is actually not to censor.
Well, okay, okay. Now, there's a tipping point, though, right?
So, for sure, the Streisand effect occurs when you're beginning to encroach censorship, but I'm pretty much guessing not a lot of citizens of Brezhnev's Russia were thumbing through their copies of Atlas Shrugged.
You know, if you go full tilt boogie on the censorship and you get it pretty much where you want it to be, there's not a lot of von Mises floating around North Korea these days.
That is true. And that's why it's still inexcusable.
And it certainly does have a social effect to censor.
But at the same time, if they're really looking long term, you know, with the growth of crypto and more peer to peer decentralized technologies, I just have to think that they know that the Internet is, you know, Going to route around these issues and that they would want to be ahead of the curve in that regard.
But, you know, maybe they're just thinking more short term in, you know, political gain and profit.
I mean, that might be the reality.
But the problem is that we can't even talk to these people because these executives just hide behind closed doors and won't have honest conversations about what's going on in the back end.
Oh, I mean, they won't even tell you if your data has been breached by some hacker on Pluto.
I mean, the idea that they'd come and tell you, here's how we are curating the news and here's why.
And it is, I think, fundamentally, Bill, an attempt to solve a problem caused by bad education.
With technology, it's like saying do some sit-ups to some guy who's 400 pounds and having his third heart attack.
It's like sit-ups some time back ago might have been helpful, but right about now they're not going to help.
Because the fundamental question for me, Bill, is if the tech giants are saying, well, there's all this fake news out there, the question is, well, why do they perceive that the average citizen can't figure out what the truth is?
Well, the government has these kids for 12 years, can't it teach them a little bit about how to tell the truth and how not to tell the truth?
And if they feel that people can't tell the truth, isn't the solution to bring more philosophical rigor and critical thinking into the classroom rather than play whack-a-mole with every species of undesirable opinion out there on the internet?
Exactly. That's our approach with quote-unquote disinfo.
You know, our policy is that if it's legal in the U.S., it can be on the site.
And, you know, providing people with tools to learn about how to research and how to vet information and even how to protect yourself online in certain degrees from There are malicious people online, and there is bad information circulating, but it is so much more a service to people to teach them how to think as opposed to what.
Well, and the argument, which I'm sure you've heard perhaps even ad nauseum, is, okay, let's say there's some guy out there who's touting some, quote, fake news.
Maybe it is real fake news. I don't know.
Whatever, right? But That guy's not dragging us into war.
He's not dragging us into close to $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities.
He's not destroying the school system or the nuclear family.
I mean, it's all the stuff that they skate over to get to what they call the fake news that I find particularly astonishing.
Yeah. I mean, to think that a few think tanks that are just subjectively making these decisions are dictating what is getting flagged and I mean, the Facebook algorithm has gotten literally thousands of different variables feeding in to what you're seeing in your newsfeed.
They got exposed a few years back for actually working with Princeton on a mood experiment where it was proven that they wanted to see if they could influence people's behavior in a positive or negative sense in terms of being happy or sad.
And yes, they found that they could.
They could feed you with more negative, sad articles and find that the effects were that it could make you sad.
I mean, literally mind control.
And then they later apologized for that.
And then in the Zuckerberg testimony, they point blank asked him, are you looking at studies of dopamine And addiction, and are you targeting users in this way?
And he just completely denied it.
For him to deny that they aren't having very high-level data analytics experts and studies To deny that they're looking at that information is just so obtuse.
It's unbelievable. Well, that's when they even bother showing up for these Q&A periods.
Sorry, we're busy. Now, this, to me, has happened before in history, and I go particularly to the Gutenberg Press and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular and the spread of that throughout Christendom, particularly, of course, in Western Europe and Central Europe as well.
And before, we had this kind of monolith I sort of idly sometimes look back in history and say, what would it have been like if there had been social media around the time of McCarthy, right?
So McCarthy trying to root out all these communists.
Now McCarthyism has become a symbol for fruitless, paranoid witch hunts, which it technically wasn't at all.
I mean, a lot of communists probably still are.
Now that there's not this monolith of narrative—when I grew up, there were basically two television stations in England when I was a kid.
Then there were more television stations, but overwhelmingly left-wing.
Then Fox came along, of course, and there was one bifurcation there.
But now it seems that, just as happened when Christians got their hands on a copy of the Bible in their own language, everybody put their emphasis on different things.
Christendom kind of split apart— I have to unfortunately skate over the 250 years of religious warfare to just point out that It can produce some wonderful diversity of thought over the time, but when a monolith breaks up,
the media, academia, and public school education, when that monolith breaks up, I think you see this kind of sentikon hold and centrifugal force spinning people out into, I don't want to say radicalization, but just encapsulation in their own belief systems.
Yeah, this is the next level of that.
We see these flows between centralization and decentralization of power with regards to information.
The internet sort of started out a little more decentralized than it is now, and then we moved into these big silos of social networks.
To be fair, I think that it is part of the natural growth of the internet, the cloud.
It emerged for a reason.
It is actually useful for certain functions, but certainly shouldn't be the future of how we're storing information.
Obviously, we want to move back towards the peer-to-peer structure.
And now that machines are advancing and we're having really interesting peer-to-peer protocols, we're playing with a new framework called DAT protocol.
Which is sort of a torrent-based system, and we're going to be playing with that in connection with Ethereum public-private key cryptography so that, you know, literally none of our servers are even involved.
And, you know, we're going to start to see scalable solutions like that emerge.
But, you know, for Mines.com, we do use some central servers now and some decentral stuff, and we're really more hybridized but constantly pushing it As far towards the more distributed system as we can.
So let's help people understand the difference in the model between obviously the the major competitor Facebook and how Mines is set up and why it's set up that way.
What is designed to avoid? Yeah, I mean that there are there are similarities and differences.
So we We do use central servers right now.
We have a dramatically different content policy.
So we allow, as long as it's legal in the U.S., we allow it.
And that just creates healthy discourse.
Now, we are using Ethereum for our advertising system and for our payment system between users.
Ethereum is a blockchain, a general purpose blockchain.
And we launched a token on the Ethereum blockchain, which you earn on mines for Receiving engagement and referrals, then you can use the tokens to get more impressions on your content or send to other users, sort of creating this micro-economy.
And we also use WebTorrent for video serving so that when videos go viral, everyone's browser is actually helping serve that, which is really valuable.
But we do use some central servers now, too.
But we just launched a project at the Ethereum San Francisco conference called Nomad.
Which is our prototype for moving into more of a fully, truly decentralized architecture.
And yeah, it's exciting that finally things are catching up so that we don't have to trust Facebook or Google or even Mines.
I don't want to trust Mines.
And I don't want to trust our servers.
It's better if everyone is Right.
There is no central code that controls what people see.
There's no curation of the news.
And the spread of information is as decentralized as humanly possible so that even if some evil internet warlord wants to come over and start taking control of that, it's virtually impossible to do.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, yeah. Creating more of an uncensorable environment.
Now, the nuance here is that with regards to user control, when you're dealing with distributed systems like blockchains and torrent structures and these kinds of things, you can't delete from the blockchain.
It's immutable. Same with torrents.
You're pushing it into literally the ethereal realms where it's out there and there are purposes where you want that.
You don't want a piece of information to be able to be taken down.
There's other situations where maybe it's something that you do want to be able to delete and you want that control.
So this is where I think sort of a hybridized approach is where things are going, just where we can individually decide, okay, on this post, How do I want that to be treated?
What do I want to do with it, depending on the context of the specific situation?
So, I mean, I fairly well understand the distributed technology and parallel processing that drives that information from place to place, but the weak point still seems to be, and I think we've seen this with a number of other people and thinking of the Daily Stormer, that the ISP, the domain name and so on, is that not a place or point of weakness if actions want to be taken against minds?
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Domains, they can be attacked.
But with DAT, actually, it's its own protocol.
So it's actually, the only way to access DAT now is through a tool called the Beaker Browser.
And I think Chrome and Firefox and Brave are going to start supporting DAT and IPFS and some of these other, this is a little esoteric, but it's actually DAT colon slash slash Whatever.
So it's actually completely independent from HTTP. And domains are nice and they're pretty.
Minds.com is really good for just helping people.
It's a knowable, recognizable domain.
But I think that ultimately domains aren't the point.
You can always get a different domain.
It's really about the application.
And, you know, if it, if it can really work to suit people's needs.
So, uh, there's many points of failure, whether it's ISPs, servers, or, you know, social networks or, um, for, for typical censorship, but I tend to think things are going to find their way around it, but that all, that doesn't mean that we should just abandon, uh, holding these companies and, you know, governments or whoever accountable for it.
I think we should do as best we can to preserve The existing infrastructure so that it would be nice if we didn't have to build a totally new internet.
It's kind of reinventing the wheel.
I say this a lot, but it's just so obnoxious to me that Google and Facebook and Twitter, literally, they're all proprietary.
None of them share the source code of their main applications.
So they've forced companies like us and a lot of other really cool emerging alternative projects to rewrite what they've already done a pretty good job of designing.
I mean, you know, Twitter and Facebook and Google, like it's cool software, but it's, you know, totally secretive.
And so as opposed to having us build on top of them and taking society forward in putting our mental energy into something even more productive, like A cool phrase in the open source world is standing on the shoulders of giants.
We're constantly building upon the great ideas of people in the past, and they're basically not allowing us to do that.
They'll open source tiny little back-end tools, but there's really serious detriment in Yeah, but I mean, having stood myself in front of people and asking them for money to build a business, one of the first questions is, you know, how much control do you have over it?
How many people can reproduce this and how long would it take?
And so, of course, you know, if you have proprietary stuff, you tend to get the big bucks going forward because they can look at just the kinds of returns that Google and Twitter and Facebook have been able to provide.
I think that that is true with certain types of inventions, but especially when it comes to software, I mean, so we use a license called the AGPL v3, which is a version of the general public license.
And, you know, for the first few years, it wasn't open source.
We always knew that we were going to.
And then, you know, you're scared.
You're like, oh, people are going to steal my idea and they're going to compete with me and I have to keep it secret.
And then, you know, it's just, I don't feel like it really works like that.
I think that are the terms of our license state that if anyone, anyone can take our code, use it, create their own app, they can create their own minds, they can sell it, they can do whatever they want.
But if they change it, they have to show the changes with everybody else.
And that allows them to be commercial.
It allows us to protect ourselves so that, you know, they're not getting too much of an unfair advantage over us.
And that's really the difference between a free software license and a typical open source license or like a public domain where people can just take it and do whatever they want with it, including keep it secret.
This is why you see like really great thinkers like Richard Stallman and in the free software movement, which is distinct from the open source movement in that specific regard about, you know, having to share with the rest of the community.
Now, look, I mean, people I think have Have the right to do what they want to do.
It's not necessarily a judgment, but I found that our growth has come from sharing our code.
It's the network effect that we achieve by being fully transparent.
I mean, we even publish our financials yearly because we did an equity crowdfunding Um, through the jobs act in the U S where we could bring in like accredited and non-accredited investors.
And so we publish our financials yearly with the sec.
Um, and we share all our code.
I think that transparency is just so appealing.
And I think specifically in the social networking market, there's such a demand for that.
So I'm not like applying this to every type of invention that you might be mentioning, but I think it, it is very important with the, you know, the global communications platforms to be like Very transparent with the people who are using it.
Otherwise, you run into problems with the inability to understand what the algorithms on YouTube and Facebook, et cetera, are doing.
You just, you can't know because, you know, They're not showing it.
Well, IP is kind of like cocaine in that it gives you a big boost right up front, but it costs you in the long run.
I mean, I sort of think of the origin of classical music.
Before, there was copyright for music, and they were sharing, and they were growing, and now it's all so restrictive that we don't have another round of classical music.
It's like It started in a state of freedom, and then people started directing these barriers to entry and barriers to sharing, and everybody became paranoid of copying and adapting, and it just kind of died on the line, and that's a real tragedy.
And I think the same thing happens with IT, that you get a big boost, but then because it's so centralized and proprietary, it becomes a magnet for the power-hungry and the controllers who want to use it for their own ends.
Exactly. I mean, look at Linux.
Look at, you know, not, you know, Wikipedia has its own, I think, censorship issues, but Wikipedia, I think, is a beautiful example of an open source community driven project.
It's the only site in the top 10 on the internet that is open source.
It, you know, is that they somehow have similar traffic to mega corporations of, you know, a small, a small team, Mozilla, Firefox, WordPress, It's open source.
It's a very successful enterprise technology company.
You know, the model is proven.
Mongo database. I mean, there's massive growth occurring in the enterprise open source software world.
And so I think it's sort of proving itself.
And yeah, I mean, I completely agree.
With music, there's a really cool documentary called Everything is a Remix, which sort of goes into...
It's sort of hard to deny that that's sort of what we're all doing is remixing our experiences and sort of channeling it in a unique way.
And so if that's how almost like physics works, you know, trying to mask and put these sort of wrappers over our creations, I mean, yeah, there could be some short-term benefits, but I think ultimately it's at least not the path that we're taking.
Right. Where do you think, I mean, society is this big giant blob, so it's hard to make collective judgment, but Bill, where do you think society is regarding all of this political correctness?
I'll just give you a few thoughts and then feel free to take it from there.
So, it's one of these sort of thin edge of the wedge issues.
Like, at the beginning, it's like, okay, yeah, these words are pretty rude.
Yeah, these words are pretty insensitive.
Okay, you know, we'll make these adjustments.
And then you think, okay, good, we're done.
And then it's like, now, the amount of self-censorship that you have to do in yourself, not just online, but, you know, if you're in college or in the workplace, has become...
Such an escalation.
And I think there's two kinds of reactions to this.
One is that people become more and more sensitive to negative information or negative perspectives or negative judgments.
And then they really need this shield of language to keep bad words, bad thoughts at bay.
And other people feel very claustrophobic around that and just want to break out and burst through and hopefully not throw the baby out of the bathwater, but just leave it all behind.
Yeah, I mean, I think that there is this Tim Pool who, you know, he posted a really cool article that I mentioned earlier from The Atlantic, which is covering a study called Hidden Tribes, the study of America's polarized landscape.
And it basically suggests sort of the opposite of what you would typically think in that there's this mass movement towards political correctness.
I think that A lot of the establishment media is trying to make that the narrative, but when you actually talk to real people, this study talked to 8,000 people, did 30 hours of in-person interviews, and they found that 80% were anti-PC across the racial and economic spectrum.
And so I'm not convinced that that's the state of I typically think that most people are more reasonable.
And it also concluded that the people who are more anti-PC are more wealthy and have more education.
So that makes sense with a lot of the university stuff going on.
And I think that we're going to be okay.
I actually am a little bit of an optimist, I have to admit.
Right. So for those who don't know much about minds or the decentralized information sharing as a whole, what is the pitch?
Why should they leave, you know, the network effect of Facebook, the network or the detail effect of Google, the network effect of Twitter and places like that?
What is the plus?
What is the sales pitch that you would make to people who are not even sure why they bother?
So, I don't think it's a cold turkey thing, necessarily.
I mean, I'm off those networks now, and it feels better.
But I think that there is some value there, maybe.
So, you know, supplementing open source solutions that are actually abiding by potentially your principles, you have to support projects That are abiding by your principle.
Same thing with supporting your podcast or supporting all of these podcasts and platforms.
You have to walk the walk and at least show some support, check in once in a while, do a few posts, just be there.
A sign up matters because metrics are what drive the growth of internet projects.
This is how This is the distribution of power on the web.
Is the micro-movements in terms of just signing in?
It matters. And then, you know, additionally, what I would say is you could spend years on Twitter or any of these platforms, especially if you're not an influencer, and literally not have many people hear you and not grow.
And we created a system that's specifically designed to help people be heard.
Which is, so you can, when you sign up, you start earning tokens.
You get some just for signing up and one token will give you a thousand views.
So you'll be earning tokens and you will be able to boost your your content out of the void and people will see it.
So we're finding even though we're a fraction of the size of the major networks, people are finding an easier time gaining a following and reaching their audience, which is just which is crazy.
But it's sort of that that's what the evidence is showing based on testimonials.
Well, and you get to pick and choose the content that you want rather than the content that other people can't choose.
And there's not also this weird suppression and view counts going down and people being shadow banned and you somehow got unsubscribed and all of that monkeying that people talk about.
I don't know how much specific proof there is, but there does seem to be some Going on and knowing that you're on a kind of stable environment, that if you choose to follow someone, by golly, you're going to be able to follow them and see what they've got to say, and there's no centralized way to track, manipulate, or control the information that you're exposing yourself to.
That is the most basic feature of a social network, is to be able to post and know that the people who are following you are going to see that post.
The fact that they have drifted from that basic principle Of communicating with your network is just sort of unforgivable.
I mean, it's borderline false advertising just because we spend so much time building up followings on these networks and then you can't even reach the people who you spend time getting.
It's like that was the whole point.
So we will never put algorithms into the main newsfeed.
It will always be raw and chronological.
I think that if people want to, you know, curate their own secondary feed, like based on their own interests, that's fine, but it would never be default.
And that is something that has become, you don't even notice it until you're not on it.
And that is something that's very powerful.
It puts you back in control of the information that you want, and you're not going to be manipulated.
And It not being talked about.
I mean, the fact that you guys are open source is really cool because it means that you can't slip stuff in, you know, like the old butcher with his finger on the scale.
It gives you an extra couple of ounces of meat.
The fact that you guys will allow people to simply see what they want to see, to post what they want to post.
And it is back to the early days.
You know, I joined YouTube in 2006.
I mean, I was like...
Guy number four, back when it was a good old 240p.
You know, as I get older, the resolution gets better.
It's just tragic all around.
But I never...
I never once, until a couple years ago, Bill, I never once thought, oh, wow, wow, you know, this is going to get flagged.
This is going to be a problem. I was just like, you know, obviously I wanted to obey the law and I don't ever want to threaten or anything like that.
But when it came to just making good arguments and having great conversations and bringing unusual data to the attention of people, I never used to think about, oh, what effects this is going to have?
I never used to check into my email saying, oh, I wonder what problem I have now.
When it creeps up on you like that, it is kind of insidious.
It's like this sort of carbon monoxide poisoning.
It's like you don't even notice it. Yeah, you don't want to think that the chilling effect can affect you.
But then when it's your platform that is at risk, it's really scary when it starts creeping into your own head.
And that's why we're just trying to get the...
The power out of our hands so that we don't have to worry about that.
The other thing I want to mention is just with regards to content and nuance and comedy.
I think that the biggest issue, comedy or whatever subject, that when the algorithms have control, what's happening is that the AI and the algorithms are just sweeping the content and they're looking for all kinds of triggers and it's just They've decided that the fallout is worth it.
And so, literally, the machines are in control.
And yes, there's humans controlling the machines, but the humans have decided that in order to achieve this environment that they deem appropriate and safe, they're willing to have that fallout.
In terms of AI being able to understand nuance of speech and sarcasm, we're not even close.
That's why we take everything on an individual basis.
Obviously, there is malicious behavior and there is illegal stuff.
There's stuff that It's not like spam attackers, like certain violent threats that actually pass the Brandenburg test.
The Brandenburg test has to do with the imminence of a violent threat and the specificity of a violent threat.
That's what the Supreme Court talks about.
And so as long as it is not an imminent specific violent threat, it actually passes the Supreme Court's test.
But I think that in regards to censorship, you have to Humans have to look at it in order to understand.
And it does matter.
Every individual takedown matters.
And so if you are existing in a policy where Literally half the content on your site is against the terms, then the amount of overhead that Google and Facebook and Twitter have to censor, they have so much stuff that's against their terms.
They have to hire thousands and thousands of people to be policing that.
So it's just not even feasible or intelligent to be operating in a system like that.
Yeah, it is tragic.
And I always had this idea based upon science fiction books and movies from my youth that we were going to get encased and used as batteries or something.
But instead we're kind of encased by these soft tentacles of self-censorship for fear of losing access to a world audience that only wants to listen to what we have to say in general because we say something unusual or startling or interesting or revelatory.
And so it's the originality and the curiosity that leads the growth of the audience, which drives these social networking sites to have this power and relevance.
And then they kind of turn on you as a creator a little bit, right?
And they're like, okay, well, now that we've used your resources—no, don't get me wrong, I've used their resources, other people have as well—but now that we've used your creativity to get an audience, we're now going to start to turn things around.
You know, it's just not anywhere in the terms of service because they have all these vague terms.
And whenever the terms are vague, you know lefties have crafted them knowing that they're going to be holding most of the reins of power or the leaves of power.
So they can just say, well, if it's a negative experience for a user and it's like, well...
I don't know, somebody who's pro-abortion would be offensive to somebody who's pro-life and vice versa.
So who's going to end up moving these levers?
The less defined they are, and that's why in law they tend to be, at least in America, very clearly defined, but the less defined they are, the more open they are to abuse, and you really are walking into a sort of mind-control situation.
Leftist dungeon that is either people are going to just blow out of it one way or another or go to Mines.com or other places.
I don't think there is another option because I don't even want to think of that.
The blowback hits the left too.
Telesur, which is Venezuelan state media.
Actually, one user on Mines who's But somewhat rational, Abby Martin, she's on Mines.
She had a show on Telesur.
The whole Telesur page got wiped from Facebook.
And I think you hear voices like the Glenn Greenwalds of the world, the Chomskys, these types of people.
They know. They know that the censorship doesn't work.
And so even organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Which, you know, definitely has both liberal and conservatives in their leadership.
They all know that censorship is not a feasible solution and there's gonna be blowback.
It even blows back to LGBT communities because, you know, of the more racy stuff.
So it's suicide.
Right. So for those who want to escape, Minds.com, easy to sign up for and easy to use.
Anything rolling down the pipeline that people can be looking for after they sign up?
Yeah, we have a lot of stuff.
We're working on video conferencing right now.
We are hiring.
If you're open source developers, hit us up.
Find us on GitHub.
Hit me up. I'm minds.com slash ottman.
Follow Stefan on there, too.
And yeah, thanks for having me.
Oh, a real pleasure, Bill.
And that's minds.com.
And it's well worth checking out.
And I've been a user for a long time.
And although I have no financial stake in the company, just everyone so clear on that, no conflict of interest.
I really, really appreciate your time.
And of course, I really appreciate the foundations that you're laying for a kind of new world that people can get to if the old world gets too claustrophobic, which it does seem to be heading that direction.
