Here are All the Right Alternatives to Big Tech

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Topline

President Donald Trump started most social media sites and Republicans claiming they were censored by Big Tech, conservatives are trying to build an alternative online ecosystem with everything from payment platforms to smartphones .

The talking logo was photographed on an iPhone 8 plus

zz / STRF / STAR MAX / IPx Key Facts

The Freedom Phone: Introduced Wednesday to cheers from right-wing icons Laura Loomer, Ali Alexander and Dinesh D’Souza, the $ 499 cellphone created by 22-year-old bitcoin trader Erik Finman is advertised as a free speech and privacy first focused on the phone.

GETTR: A social messaging app launched by former Trump spokesman Jason Miller last month, the platform is billed as an unbiased successor to Twitter. Even former President Donald Trump has not yet joined the site.

Alignpay: A payment platform that describes itself as engineered to cancel the canceled culture, it was created by Fox News host and online conservative personality Dan Bongino as a competitor to Stripe and Paypal, which banned Trump after the turmoil in Capitol on January 6.

Parler: A cross between Facebook and Twitter that describes itself as the world’s premier free speech platform, it became a favorite with conservatives last year but has struggled to stay online.

Gab: The darling of right-wing commentators and a haven for racist memes and QAnon content, the platform emerged in 2017 as a successor to Twitter before drawing criticism after discovering that Robert Gregory Bowers had posted on site before allegedly conducting the 2018 Pittsburgh shooting at the synagogue.

Rumble: Launched in 2013, the video site gained momentum among conservatives as an alternative to YouTube after it banned Trump in January.

Signal and Telegram: Encrypted instant messaging services exploded after the unrest at the Capitol, with tens of millions joining the sites within a week in January.

MeWe: A Facebook competitor created in 2016 that also pays for itself as a privacy-focused app and which gained millions of followers in January.

What to Watch

In March, Miller, then Trumps spokesman, said the former president would launch his own social media platform in two to three months. So far, Trump hasn’t delivered, though he debuted a blog in May called From Donald J. Trump’s Desk, only to close it a few weeks later. Despite being kicked off almost all social media sites, Trump joined only two of the platforms listed above: Rumble and Telegram. In Rumble, Trump has more than 490,000 subscribers while in Telegram he has more than a million followers. However, this is different compared to his reach on Twitter and Facebook: before Trump banned Twitter, he had 88.7 million followers on the platform, while on Facebook he had 32 million.

Key Background

Calls to the right to join new social media platforms were picked up last summer, as Twitter began to label Trump’s tweets, and reached a fever in January, when Big platforms banned Trump is tech and has promised stricter moderation policies following the unrest at the Capitol. However, Republicans have claimed for years that Big Tech censors conservatives, despite studies that find no evidence to back up this claim. Last year, Trump signed an executive order attempting to restrict the liability protections of Big Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter that President Joe Biden repealed in May.

Tangent

Last week, Trump filed class action lawsuits against Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and their companies, claiming the platforms has violated his First Amendment rights. Experts say the lawsuits are likely not far off, even though Trump has already begun raising funds from publicity from them.

Large Count

550 million. That’s how many Telegram users are around the world. Parler had about 15 million before it went offline in January, while Gab had 4 million in March. GETTR, launched on July 4, has gained 1.5 million users so far. The rumbles average monthly users jumped from 1.6 million in the third quarter of 2020 to 31.9 million in the first quarter of 2021.

Further Reading

Trumps Replacement of Twitter? Former Speaker Launches New Social Media Platform (Forbes)

Fox News Host Launches Anti-Cancel Cultural Payment Platform Aimed at Trump Fans (Forbes)

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