MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s new “free speech” social-media site apparently will ban patrons from using naughty language or saying the lord’s name in vain.
Oh, also, without any hint of irony, the site—which the pillow mogul created after he was booted from various platforms for peddling outright lies about the 2020 election—will prohibit users from pushing “out-and-out” or “complete” lies.
Earlier this week, Lindell appeared on right-wing radio host Eric Metaxas’ program to promote Frank Speech, which is scheduled to go live next week. (Lindell had to change the original name of his social network, Vocl, after lawyers for the publicly traded company Vocal intervened.)
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While Lindell has long asserted that his platform will be a haven for free speech and a place for users to falsely claim the 2020 election was stolen by a supercomputer, he told Metaxas that there will be strict limits on what people can say or share.
“People asked me, ‘You’re going to let everything go? Porn? Swearing? Everything?’ And I said, ‘Absolutely not,'” Lindell declared. “We have a thing we found in the Constitution and our founding fathers that defines what free speech is.”
He added: “And Eric, get this, this Judeo-Christian platform we’re going to have here, they go by biblical principles—you know, you get to the Supreme Court, you have the Ten Commandments there—so, in other words, you’re not going to have porn up there!”
Besides barring pornography, Lindell also pointed out that his apparently Christian social-media site will prevent users from using certain curse words or engaging in blasphemy.
“You’re not going to be able to swear,” he proudly said. “There will be four words for sure you can’t say: You can’t say the C-word, the N-word, the F-word, and you can’t use God’s name in vain. What a concept, right?”
Metaxas, for his part, reacted positively, saying that he liked that the site sounded “really puritanical.”
Lindell, insisting that he would not “suppress true free speech,” went on to say that Frank Speech would adhere to the Ten Commandments—specifically, that users of the site cannot bear false witness.
“When someone goes out there and says, ‘I don’t like what’s going down at the border,’ or ‘I don’t like that our country was attacked and nobody’s trying to know you did anything about it or is doing anything about it,’ that’s free speech,” he exclaimed.
“Another thing you can’t do—what we define in there is totally defame someone. What’s the Ninth Commandment? I can’t even think now, but in the Ninth Commandment, you’re bearing false witness, I believe it is,” Lindell concluded. “So, if you’re putting a complete lie against Eric; if I say, ‘Eric Metaxas did something terrible,’ and it’s an out-and-out lie, that’s not free speech. That is not free speech.”
Lindell’s latest business venture comes as he faces legal and financial turmoil. Voting software company Dominion has filed a $1.3-billion defamation lawsuit against the pillow salesman over his absurd and unfounded claims that the company’s machines flipped millions of votes from Donald Trump to President Joe Biden. His embrace of crazed election conspiracies, meanwhile, has resulted in major retailers pulling MyPillow products off their shelves.
