SOAR creator Paul Allen previously built a social networking app for families on top of Facebook, which amassed 120 million users.
Project Liberty says it will be the largest bidder for TikTok’s U.S. assets, should they become available.
Project Liberty, a decentralized social media offering, is making official a so-called “deep partnership” with SOAR.com, a series of AI-powered data sharing and social networking portals created by Ancestry founder and serial entrepreneur Paul Allen.
Backed by real estate billionaire Frank McCourt to the tune of $250 million, Project Liberty involves creating a publicly accessible database of people’s social connections, called a Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP). The project also uses cryptocurrency in the form of Frequency, part of the Polkadot ecosystem.
It’s hard to imagine how power could be any more concentrated than it is now in the hands of social media platform owners like X’s Elon Musk, suggesting that this is now an ideal opportunity for decentralized alternatives to acquire new users to pull.
Allen’s SOAR AI studio includes a Family Portal (an application he originally built on Facebook with 120 million users), which will use AI-powered transcription technology to log and store a universe of family interactions. Also included is a Citizens Portal, an easily searchable local government data service with more than one million hours of transcripts and information from city, county and state meetings.
One of the main reasons Allen was attracted to Project Liberty is the promise to users that they will forever remain in control of their data – a trust that has been abused in the case of Facebook and at Ancestry.com after he bought the company to leave. company, he said. This must be done at the technology layer and not through a service agreement that can be changed further down the line.
“Do we want these kinds of results with a few trillion-dollar companies controlling the internet? Not really,” Allen said in an interview. “We have sovereign citizenship in the countries we live in. We must have sovereign citizenship in the future of the internet, with respect for our human rights in the digital world.”
Since the founding of the Frequency blockchain, Project Liberty has recruited 1.3 million users. SOAR’s Family and Citizens will raise tens of millions more in the future as people look for alternatives to the existing, all-powerful social media platforms, says Tomicah Tillemann, president of Project Liberty. Not only does it allow for decentralization, it is also an opportunity to “do AI right,” he said.
Project Liberty is also one potential bidder for the American version of the Chinese company TikTok (the so-called “people’s bid”), the company should do be forced to sell to an American owner.
Tillemann said there has been a lot of activity surrounding the TikTok bid and the commitments of tens of billions in capital to participate in the effort.
“We are currently widely considered to be the leading bidder for TikTok’s U.S. assets, should they become available,” Tillemann said. “We are working with a wide range of stakeholders to ultimately bring TikTok and its 170 million US users onto the same infrastructure we are talking about in our partnership with the Frequency blockchain.”
Project Liberty will organize the inauguration Future of the Internet Summit in Washington DC on November 21-22.