The MyPillow Guy Is Making His Own Social Network and It Sounds Awful DMT.NEWS
Want the best of VICE News straight to your inbox? Sign up here.
Mike Lindell has a lot on his plate.
The MyPillow CEO is facing a $1.3 billion lawsuit over election conspiracies. He’s still promoting his three-hour lie-filled “documentary” called “Absolute Proof.” He’s suing a British newspaper over a report he allegedly had an affair with 30 Rock actress Jane Krakowski. And he’s trying to keep his business afloat after numerous retailers stopped carrying his products.
But in the middle of all of that, Lindell apparently found the time to build a new social network, which he says will boast features “that no one in the world has.”
VOCL, (pronounced vocal) will launch in a couple of weeks, Lindell said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast Thursday. The tagline for the new platform is “voices of free speech,” and Lindell said it would be a combination of “print, radio, and TV.”
The new site will be a cross between Twitter and YouTube, according to Lindell, who added both other platforms would soon be obsolete once VOCL launched. YouTube is owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and Lindell seemed to be a bit confused about who was running the video hosting site.
"Jack Dorsey, and Mr. Google, they are gonna be a thing of the past as far as those two entities go because you are going to go where the people go,” Lindell said.
In an era when far-right extremists, QAnon supporters, and conspiracy theorists have never had more options for alternative social networks that openly welcome their worldview— places like Parler, Gab, MeWe, and Telegram — it may seem foolhardy to launch yet another site. But Lindell said he has a secret weapon up his sleeve: technology.
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1370072480233234432
The pillow company owner promised cutting-edge features that will allow users to do all sorts of futuristic new things like “livestream,” “put things up,” and so much more.
“This technology where you're going to be able to livestream and you're gonna be able to put stuff up there, where you're gonna have like a 24/7 platform here…it’s gonna be print, radio, and TV…it's like a Twitter but it's…" At this point in the conversation, Lindell’s call dropped.
But Lindell’s ramblings didn’t end there. He called back in to the podcast to make his biggest claim of all: that VOCL users could look forward to an audience ten times the size of the one they get on other mainstream social media platforms.
“People are going to have more followers, 10 times more followers, I can't even tell you that part, that technology where you're going to have 10 times more of an audience,” Lindell told Bannon. “Steve, your own audience will be 10 times bigger. You're never going to have to worry about YouTube or Twitter again.”
Lindell didn’t really get into pointless details about how the site would work, how it would look, how he plans to monetize it, or how exactly it would differ from platforms like Gab or Parler, which already offer the “amazing technology” Lindell talked about.
But he did talk about how the site would differ from the likes of Parler in one significant way.
Predicting cyber attacks, Lindell said the site would be “impenetrable,” and wouldn’t rely on Amazon’s cloud services, but use his own servers to ensure that no outside forces could take the platform offline. He added the site would have “the best security in history, we have got some patented technology that nobody in the world has."
While Lindell has refused to say who he was working with to build the platform, he said it was “divine intervention” that brought them together.
But for all the energy that has seemingly been poured into VOCL, Lindell may have overlooked a very basic issue: the fact that the name VOCL has already been trademarked.
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, two companies have already trademarked the VOCL brand name.
One is a software company that improves the quality of audio in digital videos, podcasts, television, radio, and film download music. The other is an acronym for Voice of Change Leaders, a group that promotes the voices of women in music.
via https://www.DMT.NEWS/
by David Gilbert, Khareem Sudlow
