A news-sharing social media site called Moptu allows people to share news without censorship, memes, private messaging, or algorithms that decide what surfaces.
Americans have become increasingly reliant on social media and apps to get news; 18% of Americans get their news from social media, and 25% get their news from a news website or app, a Pew Research Center analysis conducted between October 2019 and June 2020 found.
"About 10 years ago ... I was a reader of the Drudge Report, and I realized that the Drudge Report was great, but all Matt Drudge was doing was putting links up on a page," Moptu co-founder Josh Namm, 51, told. "He was really good at aggregating links and putting them on Drudge, so we could check it 5,000 times a day,"
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At about the same time the Drudge Report started growing in the early 2000s, Namm and several of his friends were giving four or five articles to each other via email every day.
Eventually, Namm and his best friend, Charles Haspel, came up with the idea for Moptu; a platform that would consolidate everything that made the Drudge Report and social media so charming to people interested in politics, news and research in general.
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Think: Pinterest but for news. Moptu users get to choose which categories best fit their matters out of 27 options from politics to sports, recipes, history and so on; give those categories customizable names and sub-categories; and classify news articles in any way they want on their account pages, similar to Pinterest "boards."
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Users can follow other users, like posts, comment on posts, and mute other users. Unlike other social media sites, however, Moptu permits users to toggle comments on certain posts and does not have any algorithms.
Bloggers can also post articles to Moptu so long as they fit into one of the topic categories.
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Moptu has terms of use that ban racism and calls to violence like any other social platform but does not otherwise flag, remove or censor posts on people's feeds.
"There's fake news on both sides," Namm said. "And if you read an article and you're susceptible to something that's completely fake -- well, that's kind of your fault."
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Republican lawmakers have slammed Facebook and Twitter in recent months for what they claim to be a prejudice against conservative users and posts, an accusation the companies reject.
That criticism intensified when both websites decided to temporarily limit the publication of -- or completely block -- a report about 2020 Democratic candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter.
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