‘Freedom is under attack everywhere’: CloutHub CEO
Jeff Brain, CEO of the CloutHub social networking application, told The Epoch Times that freedom and liberty are being crushed in the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and other countries across the planet.
“There are those that want to push for socialism and tyranny against those that believe in individual freedom and liberty. And that’s the struggle we live in right now,” he said in a July 21 telephone interview.
Spurred by a shadow ban
Brain was inspired by his own frustrations with social media to start a new platform.
Like many other users, he suspected he was being shadow-banned. In other words, his posts were partly or completely concealed from other users.
“I was being censored, and I just found that outrageous,” he said.
Even apart from censorship, Brain saw many problems with existing social media platforms.
“Many people acknowledge that they’re toxic. They invade people’s privacy, and they’re addiction mills,” he said.
Brain thinks that many alternatives to Big Tech share those same flaws. He wanted CloutHub to be different.
For one, when you click on a CloutHub user’s profile, you can’t see how many friends and followers it has. In addition, the site does not show how many views a user’s post has received.
Articles in its “News” section do, however, display views. (Full disclosure: The Epoch Times’ articles appear in the app’s news section, alongside sources ranging from The New York Times and Vox to The Washington Times and Breitbart News.)
Brain believes the constant exposure to metrics like post views can make people anxious while undermining civil conversation.
He aspires to create a “virtual kitchen table”—a network of Facebook Group-like Hubs where users can forge deep bonds around common interests.
Groups are organized into categories such as Faith, Politics, Music, Technology, and Health.
