Last Updated on January 24, 2022
Trump Media & Technology Group Devin Nunes revealed during an interview with Fox Business on Monday that the upcoming TRUTH Social “free speech” platform touted by former President Donald Trump will use a Silicon Valley algorithm to make the site “family friendly.” Content censored by the algorithm will include “nudity, drugs, violence, hate speech, spam and bullying.”
“We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place, and we are focused on making sure any illegal content is not on the site,” Nunes stated, touting San Francisco-based Series D start-up Hive’s content algorithm.
“Hive has a great track record in this, and they have been good to work with,” Nunes proclaimed “They are very helpful for our team and because of their experience, I think they’re helping to craft the right spot for us.”
Nunes later added, “We want to be the most family-friendly site.” Critics pointed out that TRUTH Social was originally pitched as a free speech platform, not a “family friendly” website like YouTube.
“These are not things that are left or right or have any political baggage,” Hive CEO Kevin Guo said. “When you think about these bigger companies, what they have put in place around things like misinformation, what they deem that to be, for instance, that’s their prerogative.”
“Our moderation is based on these core concepts that, we think, are universal,” Guo continued, touting the AI’s ability to “identify this type of content and proactively prevent it from reaching their users.”
Guo also stated, “They are not doing things like trying to censor any political talk—we don’t have models for that or models for misinformation,” said. “We focus on a problem that is more objective.” Guo said Hive’s algorithm has the ability to identify content like “nudity, drugs, violence, hate speech, spam and bullying.”