Taylor Lorenz

Not because of our broken economic system and we ran a historically unpopular candidate and haven't done anything for our base in years.

No, it was because Facebook.

Facebook is why Trump won.

And social media is bad.

And actually, the government needs to be regulating speech and all this stuff.

Conservatives were a nasty platform.

Like, right, we saw Alex Jones kicked off.

Like, we saw a lot of conservatives lose their audience for good reason, right?

Exactly.

So they really invested heavily in building an alternative tech ecosystem, which included sites like Rumble, the YouTube alternative, DLive, a competitor to Twitch, Gab, Parler, Truth Social, basically a mirror conservative universe for everything.

There's a conservative Amazon right now as well.

Everything that you can think of that's a major American tech company, which is funny because now all the major American tech CEOs are just conservatives.

But the phone stuff started after this because like basically, so Gab, was it Gab that couldn't be downloaded in the app store or Parler?

Yeah.

So Parler is like Gab or Tooth Social or any of these other right wing social media apps.

Long story short, they already built this alternative app ecosystem.

And around this time is when you start to see conservatives be like, wait a minute, if they can ban this app, what else can they take from us, right?

Like, are they going to take our phones?

Are you going to be like China where they determine what apps go on your phone?

But the Freedom Phone was the beginning of a lot of these conservative phones.