New App Aimed at Fighting Social Media Suppression Wins FreedomFest Pitch Tank Competition
Liftable Media Inc., the parent company of The Western Journal, is an investor in Feedme Inc.
Feedme, a superfeed app designed to let social media users take control of what appears in their newsfeeds, won the “Shark Tank”-style Pitch Tank competition at last week’s FreedomFest in Las Vegas.
The Feedme Inc. team pitched their app Thursday to Angel Investor Network judges and was selected as one of the top five finalists. Then Friday morning, it was able to pitch in front of 2,000 attendees and judges Kevin Harrington from “Shark Tank” and John Mackey from Whole Foods.
Feedme emerged victorious with 27 percent of the audience vote, followed by 24 percent for Hotel Communication Network and 21 percent for Launch Cart. The company bested two other technology and two product-related finalists and won $100,000 in Amazon Web Services.
Feedme was No. 1 in the judges’ vote, which matched the audience’s vote.
This new app allows users to aggregate their social media accounts — including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube — into one app and set their own algorithms based on what the user wants to see of different types of posts.
“It’s how the internet should have been organized in the first place,” Feedme CEO Patrick Brown told investors. “With your own personal superfeed, you are assured that no platform throttles you ever again.”
Brown explained that Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change was meant to decrease the amount of public content and news in people’s newsfeeds to prioritize content from friends and family with the inevitable side effect of decreasing the amount of time people spent on Facebook.
“In effect, Facebook was leaving a very profitable market that they had come to dominate, and this opened up an opportunity for a solution,” Brown said. “Feedme is the solution.”
“Feedme is revolutionary, and it just may save freedom online,” he said.
The app gives users “easy-to-use tools to essentially build your own algorithm” for a number of different newsfeeds, Brown said.
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain was also present at the conference and talked about the importance of Feedme, explaining why he is an investor and adviser for the app.
“In an earlier life, I used to be a programmer, so I know what algorithms are and I know how they can be manipulated to achieve whatever result you want to achieve,” Cain said.
“They’re trying to silence conservatives,” he said.
Feedme is based on “human intelligence” instead of “artificial intelligence,” Cain said.
“You determine what news you want, when you want it. And nobody can filter it out,” he said.
The need for an app to allow a free and open flow of information is critical for the upcoming 2020 elections, according to Feedme Inc.
“The platforms that were in place during the last election to be able to reach, especially, conservative audiences are not in place now,” Feedme chief marketing officer Erin Brownback said.
For example, The Western Journal had 11 billion impressions in Facebook users’ News Feeds in 2016, but the outlet is projecting having only 2.4 billion impressions in 2020, based on current algorithms.
“So suppression is happening like crazy,” Brownback said, and that is where Feedme comes in.
“You can control your own algorithm,” she said. “You can create your own algorithm. You can tell Feedme what you want to see, and we’ll serve that to you.”
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