An anti-censorship and free-speech browser for conservatives launched on Tuesday.

Called Tusk, the new browser is the brainchild of Jeff Bermant, a Santa Barbara, California real estate developer and founder of Cocoon VPN.

He said he built Tusk because he felt conservative free speech was being censored by current browsers in the market. “They really don’t carry the views of conservatives,” Bermant told TechNewsWorld. “The world of browsers is not giving a thumbs up to conservatives.”

Also behind the Tusk business are two prominent Republicans who are listed on Tusk’s advisory board: Stanton D. Anderson, who has held several positions in Republican administrations in Washington, D.C., and Scott W. Reed, who served as director of campaign for Bob. Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign and former executive director of the Republican National Committee.

Available for Apple and Windows products, Tusk includes a media feed that allows users to manage news sources in the feed. According to the FAQ posted on the browser’s website, the News Feed only displays articles from a user’s trusted media to promote free speech and uncensored stories buried in search results. other browsers.

“We made it easy for a conservative or someone with center-right views to view a newsfeed and see news from the right,” Bermant explained, “but because we believe in freedom of expression, we have also set up a lot of other news feeds. So if you want to see MSNBC, ABC, Mother Jones or something else, you can do it. You can change it easily.

According to the FAQ, the news feed features popular media organizations such as Fox News, The Daily Wire, OANN, Newsmax and Epoch Times, which are pre-screened for conservative users.

The browser also includes features found in competing browsers, such as bookmark and tab management, the ability to import bookmarks and settings from other browsers, support for many Chrome extensions, a built-in passwords and automatic updates.

Search engine on the horizon

“Right now, I don’t see much that makes Tusk unique as a chromium-based browser,” observed Will Duffield, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a Washington, DC think tank.

“It includes a News Feed that features conservative outlets, which might be relevant to conservative users, but at this time Tusk does not offer its own search product,” he told TechNewsWorld. . “Search is commonly subject to allegations of browser bias, so while Tusk’s News Feed may provide an alternative means of reaching conservative outlets, it currently cannot replace other research providers.”

According to Tusk’s FAQ, a search engine is in the works. Until online, the browser uses Yahoo’s search engine, although the software’s default search engine can be changed by a user.

“They definitely think the results we get from Google, Bing and everything else are biased to the left, and they want to come up with one that skews towards the right-wing sources of information that they want us to. consume,” said Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Google is set up to give you search results that you, as a customer, will find most useful,” he told TechNewsWorld. “By doing this, they set up their algorithms so that misinformation doesn’t rise to the top. What Tusk proposes to do is raise their favorite news sources to the top.

“I think most of us would consider Google results more reliable than results that emphasize right-wing sources,” he added.

Speech without hindrances

While Tusk touts itself as an alternative to mainstream browsers that censor content and muzzle free speech, Greg Sterling, co-founder of Near Media, a news, commentary and analysis site, argued that these browsers don’t do any of these things.

“Tusk is really about search results and information sources, not the browser itself,” he told TechNewsWorld. “It integrates its own search engine and news feed on the right.”

“Claim for free speech only makes sense if you think conservative or right-wing sites and content are being discriminated against, which according to several studies is not the case,” he said. added.

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The same goes for censorship, he continued. “Browsers can filter out adult content, but there’s no ideological censorship going on,” he said.

“Tusk doesn’t avoid censorship,” he noted. “It’s just about promoting right-wing news sources and sites.”

Vincent Raynauld, assistant professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Emerson College in Boston, agrees. “This is more of a public relations stunt than truly transforming the way people are going to use a web browser,” he told TechNewsWorld.

“The web browser is a new market for this type of thing,” he said. “It taps into the resentment that exists in certain segments of the audience at not being able to access content that interests them.”

Bad business of stuffy speech

“This whole idea of ​​curating research and curating information seems to fuel conspiracy theories by curators who feel like they’re not getting the information they want,” added Karen Kovacs North, director of the Annenberg program on online communities at Southern University. California.

“They’re fueling people’s paranoia that Big Brother is controlling what they see and data is being collected so they can be targeted because their beliefs are unpopular,” she told TechNewsWorld.

Stifling free speech would be bad business for a browser, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, a technology consultancy in Hayward, Calif.

“Browsers often display a handful of links that users visit often, are generally popular, or are promoted by advertisers,” he told TechNewsWorld. “You could say that if a browser somehow tried to stifle speech or deter users from visiting the sites they prefer, it would be essentially useless to track consumer behavior and promote advertisers’ products and services.”

fierce competition

If Tusk wants to be competitive with other browsers, it will have to distinguish itself from them, which will not be an easy task. “Tusk’s main feature appears to be to provide a frictionless method of accessing curated news and content, but users can do this themselves by bookmarking sites they like best or visit regularly,” King said.

“The company says it doesn’t monitor users, collect data to sell for profit, or create user profiles, but these features are readily available in existing browsers, like DuckDuckGo and Firefox, or using incognito mode in browsers, like Chrome,” he observed.

“No doubt there will be right-wingers using it, but it will still be a niche player,” Sterling predicted. “If the economy works, however, it could be sustainable with modest use.”