Brace yourself as a new social network is making rounds as pure, clean, and devoid of toxicity where ‘likes’ earn cash for charities. Former Saatchi promoting maestro Dominic O’Meara wants to show everyone the way to online social entertainment enlightenment with his new startup, Supernova.
It is charged as a more ethical alternative to Facebook and Instagram, both of which have been hounded by allegations of ramping up misinformation and harming mental health. O’Meara wants to test his belief that a growing percentage of the populace is longing for an invigorating, glass-half-full outlook instead. Also, with a promise to give over half of its income to charitable causes, he explained that if Supernova can persuade at least one per cent of the social media publicizing market away from the big players, he’ll be able to hand $752,136,000 to charities every year. You read that right – over $700 million a year to charities!
“That one per cent is completely possible,” O’Meara said. “People are cheering us on: they think it’s about time someone brought an alternative to this market, and one that is ethically driven.”
O’Meara said that the Supernova idea started by envisioning a network that shared its wealth democratically with its content creators. But even taking Facebook – the largest of all – for instance, he determined the weekly share of the spoils for its three billion users would only add up to a couple of pounds each week. Instead, he pondered on the idea of pointing them up to a higher calling, an altruistic cause.
Studies have highlighted adolescents and youngsters have been abandoning Instagram and Facebook for a while now by droves. Yet, while Mark Zuckerberg might have been shaken by whistleblower Frances Haugen’s claims that the stage stirs up division in a quest for profit and benefit, it’s safe to say place among the rich first class is solidly established by an estimated $89 billion personal fortune.
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“I realized there’s no point in us trying to take these tiny crumbs off the table,” O’Meara said. “What we need to do is pool all that money together, and then channel it towards positive outcomes.”
Keeping that in mind, 60% of Supernova’s ad revenue is paid into an action fund, with users deciding how exactly the cash is to be split between eight causal areas. “A ‘like’ of your post is not a ‘like’. It’s like a vote for your post and it’s a vote for the share of the action fund,” O’Meara explained. Millennials and Gen Z’ers are the fundamental target audience.
What of business clients? O’meara explained that he’ll offer an option for brands to quickly to reduce most, if not all, the toxicity, citing 2020’s #StopHateForProfit boycott, in which in excess of 1,000 sponsors pulled over a million dollars in ad spend from Facebook.
“These mainstream platforms have become argumentative, tense environments – because that’s the way they’ve been allowed to grow up,” he said. “Advertisers are fed up with the status quo, the toxicity.”
Currently, they had a couple thousand Supernova clients to screen, as O’meara has selected the mildest of soft launches, eschewing an “uncool” assault of advertising for more of an natural, word-of-mouth growth. However, he insists that human moderation – paired with artificial intelligence – is achievable with explosive growth.
“If you set some kind of example, focus people’s minds and imagination on something more purposeful and positive, then you give people a different set of values right from the outset,” O’Meara said. “It’s not about having armies of moderators to weed out nasty content: it’s about conditioning people to not produce nasty content in the first place.”
This sounds similar in some ways to Trump’s Truth network. Which I’m all for, the monopoly Facebook and Instagram have allows them to skew certain stories or cancel anything that isn’t in line with their “fact checkers”. Sadly, Trump’s social network, ‘Truth’ is only for iPhone users at this time, but with Supernova android users can be included in moving away from seeing pure negative news, and toxicity.