Minds.com CEO Bill Ottman received an invite to President Trump’s Social Media Summit. CCN spoke to the crypto activist-entrepreneur on his way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Asked if Donald Trump might join Minds today, Ottman sheepishly said: “You never know.”
The subjects Ottman intends to address include algorithm transparency, privacy, censorship, alternative platforms, and competition.
…The Fake News is not as important, or as powerful, as Social Media. They have lost tremendous credibility since that day in November, 2016, that I came down the escalator with the person who was to become your future First Lady. When I ultimately leave office in six…
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 11, 2019
Minds recently grew at a rapid pace after Ottman appeared on an episode of the Joe Rogan Experience. On the show, Ottman discussed the many nefarious ways that social media companies can manipulate and use data people innocently surrender.
The New York Times has characterized the Social Media Summit as a “Summit for Pro-Trump Digital Warriors.”
Platforms like Minds and Gab view censorship differently than mainstream providers such as Twitter or Facebook, neither of which received invitations.
Censorship doesn’t promote better discourse, in their view.
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Ottman believes the solution to hate speech is more free speech.
It’s often said: We wouldn’t need free speech if we only wanted to protect popular speech.
Ottman told CCN:
“I think transparency is the key to freedom. We need to depolarize social media with civil discourse.”
Strapped for time, he then entered the White House.
Thus far, Donald Trump has never addressed the issue of cryptocurrency. The emergence of Facebook’s blockchain ambitions has awakened a dragon in Washington, however, with legislators like Maxine Waters almost single-mindedly focused on it.
Yesterday, Fed chairman Jerome Powell said that Facebook should cease building Libra until the government gives them the green light, in essence.
Minds is a platform which incentivizes participation by paying every user for what they do on the site. All activity, including just scrolling your feed, earns you cryptocurrency tokens from the network pool.
The tokens have a built-in utility for advertising on the platform.
A Minds token can be spent to get guaranteed views of content on the platform. You can “boost” a post up to 5,000 views (5 tokens) at a time.
The crypto tokens can also be used to subscribe to premium content on the platform.
