In the days following Jan. 6, 2021, when many Americans were trying to comprehend how a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the founders of a new technology firm, RightForge Holdings LLC, saw an opportunity.
Major tech firms had already been clamping down on misinformation and hate speech, and three days after the attack, Amazon Web Services signaled it would cut ties with Parler, the social network that had become a popular alternative for Donald Trump’s supporters.
Political consultant Martin Avila started to draw up plans for a new haven for those who believed their opinions were being censored, he said during a recent interview with Bloomberg News.
RightForge, Avila’s web hosting company, announced in October it would undergird Truth Social, the social media platform that Trump acolytes have teased for months. Truth Social, with its plan for “conversation without discriminating against political ideology,” became available for download in the Apple app store on Monday — President’s Day — though users on social media complained about glitches when trying to sign up or view the terms of service.
RightForge, a small upstart just over one year old, is directly positioned to influence whether Truth Social will be a success.
“The goal of RightForge is to be a depoliticized server space, basically the good old days of 2020, before internet servers were making these decisions,” Christopher Bedford, a founding partner of RightForge and senior editor at The Federalist, a conservative online magazine, told Bloomberg News. “I don’t think that was an awful time for the internet.”
RightForge’s founders are hoping to capitalize on what they say is a desire among web users to speak without limitation, following a crackdown on misinformation and hate speech from bigger technology companies. Twitter Inc., Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook, and Google’s YouTube recently have taken measures to curb violent or false rhetoric on their platforms, while web infrastructure companies GoDaddy Inc. and Cloudflare Inc. pulled the plug on white supremacist sites, making it increasingly difficult for extremist groups to find online homes.
RightForge’s leadership has stopped short of specifically outlining whether it will tolerate the incitement of violence, for which Twitter banned Trump, or content that poses a risk to public safety, for which AWS ended its relationship with Parler. RightForge will remove content when it is legally necessary, said Bedford.
“We have aspects of politics, of course, because of some of our clients, but I don’t want to be a conservative server company,” he said. “I want to be a Bill of Rights server company.”
As Avila put it, RightForge will be “the only place where you can be free to express principles that are governed by our government,” rather than terms of service defined by Silicon Valley firms. The CEO previously founded Terra Eclipse, Inc., a consultancy that worked with clients including U.S. Senator Mike Lee, Republican from Utah.
“We’re not going to de-platform people for asking basic questions,” Avila said, adding that the mentality made RightForge a “perfect place” for Trump’s service.
Unlike social media sites like Parler, RightForge is an infrastructure company that can host other websites. Neither AWS, Cloudflare nor other hosting providers would have the ability to remove RightForge, or its clients, from the web, Bedford and Avila said.
“We’re just the servers,” Bedford said. “We’re the highway that people drive on. So that’s another way to kind of stay out of being overtly political.”
Truth Social has provided a significant boost to RightForge’s funding. The company has raised at least $1.41 million as of December 2021, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Four months prior, the company had reported $260,000 in raised funds.
RightForge’s business address is in Washington, D.C., according to SEC filings, but the company also lists locations in Tampa, Florida, Raleigh, North Carolina and Los Angeles, California on its website. It is now supporting nearly 1,000 sites, Avila said. RightForge declined to identify any clients other than Truth Social by name.
The company also declined to identify its funding sources, though Bedford said some investors hailed from Silicon Valley and New York City, which he referred to as “places that you wouldn’t really think of as hotbeds of this kind of thinking.”
Even if RightForge doesn’t remove sites, other platforms may still be able to disrupt RightForge’s clients, said David Thiel, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory. Running a website requires more than servers. App stores and internet service providers, for instance, could all choose to revoke services from Truth Social and any other hosting customers.
“There are any number of plugs that can be pulled if things go badly, and given the cooperative nature of the internet, they can’t control every single service necessary to stay online and widely accessible,” Thiel said in an email.
