Bill Ottman is the co-founder and CEO of 📝Minds.com, the open-source, free-speech social network. He is an internet 🏷️#entrepreneur and information-freedom advocate who has spent over a decade building an alternative to mainstream platforms.
Ottman co-founded Minds in 2011 as a transparent, decentralized counter to the data-mining and algorithmic control of incumbent social networks, positioning the platform around free expression, privacy, and user revenue sharing. His free-speech stance led him to collaborate on the 📝Censorship Effect research, which examined how deplatforming and censorship intensify radicalization and harden echo chambers rather than defusing them. He appeared alongside deradicalization activist 📝Daryl Davis on Joe Rogan Experience #1792 to discuss the findings.
The Censorship Effect collaboration put my research in front of a far broader audience than academic channels ever could. Bill's willingness to test his platform's free-speech convictions against rigorous social-science scrutiny is rare, and our work together on radicalization and moderation models is some of the most consequential applied research I've been part of.