22 Facts About Minds

Minds has been described as more privacy-focused than mainstream social media networks.

Minds describes itself as focused on free speech, and minimally moderates the content on its platform.

Minds was co-founded in 2011 by Bill Ottman and John Ottman as an alternative to social networks such as Facebook, which the founders believed abused their users via "spying, data mining, algorithm manipulation, and no revenue sharing".

In January 2021, after YouTube and Facebook removed tens of thousands of Trump supporters and alleged white supremacists from their platforms in the wake of the 2021 United States Capitol attack earlier that month, Minds was among the alternative apps those users adopted.

Minds is a website as well as a desktop and mobile app.

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Minds offers a monthly premium subscription that gives users access to exclusive content, the ability to become verified, and the ability to remove boosted posts from their feed.

Posts on Minds appear in reverse chronological order, unlike many mainstream platforms that use more complex and often secret ranking algorithms to determine which posts appear.

Minds has been described as an alt-tech platform, alongside other services including Parler, Gab, BitChute, and MeWe.

Minds has been described as more privacy-focused than its competitors.

Minds is open source, so its codebase can be freely audited for vulnerabilities or other privacy concerns.

In 2015 an application security consultant posted to the Full Disclosure mailing list to say that the Minds client was accepting encryption keys without any identity verification, and that Minds was using its own weak cryptography protocol.

Bill Ottman, Minds' CEO, acknowledged the issues reported in the security company's full disclosure and said that the company had addressed them.

Minds has been described as less rigorous about removing objectionable content than more mainstream social networks.

Nathaniel Popper wrote for The New York Times in 2021 that Minds "became an online home to some of the right-wing personalities and neo-Nazis who were booted from mainstream social networks, along with fringe groups, in other countries, that have been targeted by their governments".

In 2018, Minds had a small team that was responsible for policing content on the site, and was not using artificial intelligence to try to detect content that violated the site's terms of service.

Minds has partnered with Daryl Davis on a deradicalization project called "Change Minds".

Davis has said he hopes to use Minds to teach people how to engage civilly with one another even when they hold opposing views.

Minds told Business Insider it had experienced 60million visits in 2015.

In January 2021, the New York Times reported that YouTube and Facebook removed tens of thousands of Trump supporters and white supremacists from their platforms, and that Minds was among the alternative apps those users adopted.

Minds has been funded through venture capital and equity crowdfunding.

In October 2018, Minds raised $6million in Series A funding from Medici Ventures, an Overstock.

Minds was later succeeded by Stanton Huntington, General Counsel at Medici Ventures.