Tired of Big Tech spying? A new search engine, Freespoke, offers unbiased search results



It’s no secret that our news and information sources have become overwhelmingly controlled by a handful of powerful corporations. These tech giants make their fortunes by monetizing your data, tracking your every click, and crafting search algorithms that shape how you see the world. In the process, your privacy vanishes, and your choices shrink. But what if it didn’t have to be this way? A new player, Freespoke, is offering an alternative, taking a stand against Big Tech with a bold vision for a fairer, more private internet.

Freespoke is one company offering solutions to these problems and pioneering a path away from Big Tech/Google’s monopoly on information. Return sat down with Kristin Jackson of Freespoke to discuss her company’s solutions to these problems in today’s online information environment.

'Every dictator in our history has known that if they can control information, they can control their people.'

The people at Freespoke noticed a considerable amount of media bias in mainstream search engines like Google. It is most likely impossible to eradicate this issue, so Freespoke does the next best thing: It labels media bias while also highlighting “multiple viewpoints.” Freespoke labels content “left, right, and middle,” but it also has alternative labels such as a “faith label” and an “independent label.” Freespoke seeks to level the media bias when you search for your news: “We've added an element to make sure you're getting different viewpoints in your search results.”

It also makes it easy to find controversial topics on the search engine since the developers know that those topics may be the most skewed to one point of view. For example, they've made it very easy to find stories surrounding elections: “We focus [on election information] because we know election-related information is an area where people aren't sure Google is telling them the full story.”

Another hallmark of Freespoke is that it “prioritizes American-made businesses” to give it a chance to fight against its biggest competitors. The developers want to support “that American ideal of a small business owner being the backbone of an economy.” They see this as a key to revitalizing the American economy from the bottom up: “We don't have strong national supply chains because we just haven't been supporting our small business owners and haven't been making sure they can get in front of a population and sell their goods.” This part of the search engine is beneficial for bringing American businesses to more people’s attention.

That’s not all Freespoke has to offer. It is also a pornography-free search engine, making it safe for all ages. Jackson said they weren’t initially sure how they would make this a reality, but then they just decided, “Let's just not show pornography.” From “day one,” they did not have porn on their search engine.

While these are all great search engine features, Freespoke “built a search engine based on privacy.” Privacy was the defining element of their vision for an alternative search engine.

“I will tell you that as a company, we believe protecting your privacy is important to you — it’s important to us and should be important to you. And in Freespoke, you can know from day one, as long as we exist, that we are going to stand by that principle of protecting your privacy.”

What sets Freespoke apart from other third-party search engines that offer privacy? Not only is it fully committed to protecting your privacy, but it also offers a bias labeling service that provides a more even playing field (not to mention being porn-free and emphasizing American companies). You get the best of both worlds with its service, as the website says: “Freespoke is here to show you what other search engines won’t and protect your privacy in ways they refuse.”

Freespoke is offering an alternative vision for the future of search engines. It must offer bias labeling and data protection since both issues are important to address in today’s media environment. There is also a more pressing issue that the developers are trying to combat. Freespoke understands what happens when one person or group controls the information for a person, and it never ends well:

“Every dictator in our history has known that if they can control information, they can control their people. And so we have to make sure one organization does not control our information.”

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Independent reporter Matt Orfalea has blown the lid wide open on the manipulation of American voters by the Biden-Harris campaign during the 2020 election.

Orfalea discovered a Zoom meeting from right after the election in which the Biden-Harris team reveal "how they manipulated voters to think Biden’s mental decline was ‘disinformation.’”

In the call, it was revealed that the Democratic National Committee created a program to protect, track, and have social media platforms flag misinformation narratives — which included conversation online about corruption.

The team had bragged that this campaign, which involved Big Tech collusion and the “targeting” of internet users in real time, resulted in 200,000 votes for Biden.

“This is your federal government and your Democratic National Committee putting a program together to target you,” Glenn Beck says, outraged.

Rob Flaherty, who was the 2020 Biden-Harris campaign digital director, called the program “one of the smartest things orchestrated by the Democratic Party.”

Then, Biden for President's director of rapid response, who later became the Biden administration’s White House deputy director of digital strategy, said on the same Zoom call that “there was a massive amount of disinformation relating to Biden’s mental fortitude.”

“She explained that people were making posts related to topics deemed disinformation, and they were targeted in real time online, based on their online behavioral cues, building out personas based on the kind of content that you were consuming and were searching for, and the kind of websites you were visiting,” Glenn explains.

“They are monitoring every keystroke you make. If you say something out of line with what the state wants you to say — this is KGB stuff,” he continues.

One of the most infuriating aspects of this entire campaign is that those who saw through it were all called conspiracy theorists.

“Remember how we were all told that it is a conspiracy theory?” Glenn asks. “As they’re telling us that they have to police us for mis-, dis-, and mal-information, they told us that he was fine, that he was top of his game.”

Then after his disastrous debate, it became impossible to keep up the charade.

“All of a sudden, it was okay to question his mental acuity, and so they did, to the point where they operated a coup on him,” he adds.


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Sexual politics online makes for strange bedfellows



A report from the field

For reasons I’m not entirely clear on, I happen to be someone who often finds himself in wildly different social circles through Facebook groups, email lists, and IRL gatherings. And when I say “wildly different,” I mean woke media and academic types, so-called TERFs and third-wave feminists, anarchists, MAGA, new right, tradcaths, rationalists, postrats, classical liberals, and more. If you have thoughts on some fringe, I’ve probably been in its group chat or at an event in the past two years. (Except tankies — I draw the line there.)

Why it is that I somehow end up circulating in all these niches is a weird topic for another day, but the point of this piece is not to brag about my network but to report on a phenomenon I’ve observed at work in many of these groups: People are turning on each other over sex.

Honestly, I’ll just go ahead and say it: "ladypenis is not actually real" is a profoundly weird confession for a group to come together over.

This is so wild to me that it has taken me a long time to come around to admitting that every group everywhere on the political and social map seems to be crisscrossed by the same set of unstable fault lines around sex and related issues of gender, porn, prostitution, stripping, drag, and the rest of the rainbow.

I’ve seen groups on the left and the right turn on each other over the exact same handful of issues — mostly around porn and sex, especially with regard to minors.

That infamous New York Post story on the high school “porn literacy” class? I’ve found Jacobin types and Reason types on both sides of the following question: Is that class an appropriate, mature society’s response to the present ubiquity of smartphone porn, or is it an offense against man and God that should probably see some folks go to prison?

Feelings about sex are a spectrum

I wish I could give more color on the various lefty and righty versions of the Big Sex Split I’ve seen play out over and over again in the past two or three years, but I can’t because I wasn’t in those venues to report on them and those aren’t my stories to tell. But you’ve all seen this kind of thing by now, no doubt, so you know how it goes.

What I can do, however, is characterize the way I’ve seen this split play out more generally — and especially on what’s now being called “the new right.” (I guess I’m now on the new right? I know a lot of people who are in that category, myself included now, but none of us seem to know what “the new right” is.)

In my experience, which, as I said above, is quite varied, I’ve seen the reactions to what we might call “pride-coded,” sexualized practices involving kids fall along the following spectrum:

  1. It’s compulsory. To not involve your kids in this is to teach them to hate.
  2. It’s good, actually.
  3. Eh, it’s fine. Whatever. Why do you care?
  4. It’s gross, but people should be able to decide for their own kids.
  5. It’s gross, and theoretically, we’d like it to stop, but we don’t see a viable strategy for shutting it down that doesn’t also violate other principles we care about. So what can you do?
  6. It’s gross, and we will stop it ASAP by any means necessary, leaving no power or capability or method on the table out of some misguided commitment to principle. The only principle at work here is: You don’t get to do whatever the hell this is.

In my time in varied lefty and righty circles, I have absolutely seen all six of these points of view articulated and affirmed. I’ve even seen #6 crop up in extremely woke circles around straight-coded sexualized practices involving kids (child beauty pageants, purity balls, conversion therapy).

My thesis is that where you fall on the above spectrum of sex reactions is now far more important for sorting you into a tribe than any other issue in any other sphere (politics, economics, religion, etc.). People are asking if we're post-liberal, but the sex controversies have me wondering if we're not almost post-ideological. In the age of outrage, we're all the way back to drawing our primary identity lines around animal basics.

Take this quiz!

So where exactly do you fall? I’ve found that you can take any sexy or sexualized practice, event, or spectacle, run it through the above sex reaction spectrum, and which bucket you end up in will determine who your people are and which members of your own scene you’re willing to tolerate vs. which members you want to purge.

Here’s a sample list of scissors to run through the above list and see where you land:

  • Drag Queen Story Hour
  • Drag Brunch for kids
  • Kids putting dollar bills into strippers’ thongs, doing pole dancing with strippers, or some other sex-work-related activity
  • Schoolbooks that present sex work to kids as just another kind of work
  • Pride parades with kink on full display and kids present and even participating
  • Drag kids
  • Child beauty pageants
  • Evangelical purity balls
  • Gay conversion therapy
  • Porn use by teens (especially 16 and up, since 16 is where I’ve seen some lefties drawing the porn age line lately)

(I threw a few right-wing ones there just to mix it up. But you get the idea.)

For any given scene you’re in, no matter what it’s nominally centered on or what its professed norms and commitments are, you can reliably toss out one of the items in the list above and watch people turn on each other like Greek gods over a golden apple.

You know I’m telling the truth because you’ve seen it too, haven’t you?

Indeed, nowadays, whenever I find someone I really vibe with, I’m always mildly terrified I’m going to find out they’re on a part of the sex-reactions spectrum on one of these issues that I simply cannot tolerate or that I’m on a part of it they can’t tolerate. Even more terrifying for me as a parent is the thought that one or more of my kids will end up on the opposite side of some schism from me.

These splits are happening so often that I now believe there is no existing coalition, polity, scene, or tribe of any size or level of diversity that has not or will not eventually shatter into subgroups based on the spectrum.

  • Feminists have split over whether biological sex matters for women’s oppression.
  • New Atheists have split over biological sex’s reality.
  • Christians have long been divided into “affirming” and non-affirming camps on gay marriage.
  • Classical liberals are often bitterly divided over whether restrictions on internet porn are an unacceptable infringement on liberty (resulting from an '80s-style “moral panic”) or regrettably necessary to the continued functioning of civilization.
  • The evangelical right is split over whether Drag Queen Story Hour should be permitted by law on pluralist grounds or should be outlawed on “holy cow, David French, are you for real with this?!” grounds.

Whenever I find myself in a new scene, I immediately start trying to sniff out where on the spectrum different clusters of members fall, because those are the splinter groups that will form when the whole thing inevitably blows up over some sex scissor.

Strange bedfellows

One of the more bizarre effects of this shattering and fracturing is how these schisms bring former enemies together into social formations that are so surreal they have to be experienced IRL to be believed.

You can walk into some “based” or “new right” events nowadays and encounter an incredible variety of ethnicities, religions, classes, and economic ideologies, but they’re all united in the following deeply held conviction: There is absolutely no such thing as “ladypenis,” and if you’re telling kids there is, then you should definitely not be allowed to do that and you should probably also be on some kind of watch list.

Honestly, I’ll just go ahead and say it: “Ladypenis is not actually real” is a profoundly weird confession for a group to come together over. It’s pretty gonzo, right? Yet here we are … and, honestly, here I am. I fit right in.

You can feel the weirdness, too, when you’re at some gathering and you’re like, “Wow, look at this crowd … surely there has to be something that brings these folks together besides their willingness to publicly confess that ladypenis is a lie?” But right now, that’s often enough.

A ray of hope?

The beast is coming for all of us eventually. As long as the social graph is powered by advertising, it will continue to rage, and all of us will eventually run into one of two camps: “it is compulsory” or “it is illegal.” The center cannot hold, and if you think it can … well, have you seen the center lately?

If there’s a ray of hope out there, I look for it in Musk’s subscription model. I think Musk correctly apprehends a dynamic I’ve covered in detail in my newsletter: The social media advertising machine feeds on engagement, and the best way to drum up engagement is to stimulate outrage. If he can move the revenue base away from the spiritually corrosive ad model to a model where users are paying for the value they get from the network, he has a shot at turning Twitter into a net benefit for society.

Obviously, the incumbent class of successful outrage merchants hate this plan and have pilloried it since it was announced. That’s a good, crowd-sourced signal that what he’s doing might work. Because in any world where being a human scissor is a losing strategy, they’ll all fade back into well-deserved obscurity.

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Supreme Court takes up landmark free speech case against Biden administration with major ramifications for censorship by big tech platforms



The U.S. Supreme Court agreed on Friday to take up a landmark free speech case that could have major ramifications for censorship by big tech platforms.

The Supreme Court is challenging a ruling a lower court made in favor of the Biden administration.

"At this time in the history of our country, what the Court has done, I fear, will be seen by some as giving the Government a green light to use heavy-handed tactics to skew the presentation of views on the medium that increasingly dominates the dissemination of news," Alito wrote in a 5-page opinion. "That is most unfortunate."

CBS News reported, "The case, known as Murthy v. Missouri, stems from a suit brought by five social media users and the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana. They alleged a host of federal agencies and officials coerced social media companies to suppress speech on their platforms in violation of the First Amendment."

The Supreme Court said on Friday:

This application concerns an unprecedented injunction installing the United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana as the superintendent of the Executive Branch's communications with and about social-media platforms—including senior White House officials' speech addressing some of the most salient public issues of the day. The lower courts held that federal officials had transformed the private platforms' content-moderation decisions into state action and violated the First Amendment by urging platforms to remove COVID-19 misinformation, highlighting the risk of disinformation from foreign actors, and responding to the platforms' inquiries about matters of public health. The courts then entered a sweeping preliminary injunction governing thousands of federal officials' and employees' speech concerning any content posted on any social media platform by anyone. That injunction flouts bedrock principles of Article III, the First Amendment, and equity.

Justice Sam Alito was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — who dissented from the decision to stay the injunction.

The case notes that "two lower courts found to be a 'coordinated campaign' by high-level federal officials to suppress the expression of disfavored views on important public issues."

The case claims that "popular social media companies had either blocked their use of the companies' platforms or had downgraded their posts on a host of controversial subjects, including 'the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.'"

The case accuses federal government officials of being the ones who were "pulling the strings," meaning that these officials "coerced, threatened, and pressured [the] social media platforms to censor [them]."

The Court of Appeals found "the district court was correct in its assessment — 'unrelenting pressure' from certain government officials likely 'had the intended result of suppressing millions of protected free speech postings by American citizens.'"

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