Free-Speech, Uncensored Browser Launched for Conservatives

 

A free-speech, anti-censorship browser for conservatives was launched Tuesday.

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

He said he built Tusk because he felt that free speech for conservatives was being censored by the current browsers in the market. “They really don’t carry the views of conservatives,” Bermant told TechNewsWorld. “The browser world isn’t giving conservatives a fair shake.”

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

Available for both Apple and Windows products, Tusk includes a media feed that allows users to curate the news sources in the feed. According to the FAQ posted at the browser’s website, the news feed shows only articles from media outlets trusted by a user in order to promote free speech and uncensor stories buried in the search results of other browsers.

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

According to the FAQ, the news feed features popular media organizations like Fox News, The Daily Wire, OANN, Newsmax and Epoch Times, that are pre-selected 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 password manager and automatic updates.

Search Engine on the Horizon

“At the moment, I don’t see much that makes Tusk unique as a chromium-based browser,” observed Will Duffield, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

“It includes a news feed that features conservative outlets, which might be relevant to conservative users, but at the moment Tusk doesn’t offer its own search product,” he told TechNewsWorld. “Search is usually the subject of browser-bias claims, so, while Tusk’s news feed may offer an alternative way of reaching conservative outlets, it can’t currently replace other search providers.”

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

“No doubt they think the results we get from Google, Bing and whatever else is out there skews to the left, and they want to come up with one that skews toward the right-wing sources of information that they want us to consume,” said Dan Kennedy, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University in Boston.

“Google is set up to give you search results that you as a customer will find most helpful,” he told TechNewsWorld. “In doing that, they’ve set up their algorithms so disinformation doesn’t rise to the top. What Tusk is proposing to do is make their favorite sources of information rise to the top.”

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