Pledge to our users

Speakness's goal is to help people listen, actively. Communication is not only about speaking or writing, but listening. Our goal is to facilitate constructive communication, openly, honestly and with compassion for differing views.

We achieve this by promoting civil and useful news and discussions. We believe people have a great amount of good in them and with the right tools and social norms most will promote civil and useful discussions as well as combating ill intent and ignorance in themselves as well as others.

Transparency and Freedom of Speech

We strive to be extremely transparent about how Speakness works. We delegate moderation powers to appropriate parties, i.e. the media in their respective arenas. Speakness ensures transparency about the media's use of its powers and we give our members the ability to vote with their feet, by moving between media within the Speakness network. Thus we combine editorial responsibility with freedom of speech and moderation does not become censorship.

Our Collective Story: The Pursuit of Truth

It is Speakness's job, and the members' of the Speakness community, to work towards the truth. We do not believe in a post-truth world or a post-fact world. Truth and facts exist, even though they can be hard to find, may be highly nuanced and people can sincerely disagree about them. In order to approach truth, we must allow each other to speak in a civil manner as well as listening with the aim of understanding. We believe in a world where two people can disagree but at the same time both heroically pursue the truth.

Aligning the Interest of All

Speakness strives to align the interests of readers, media and other stakeholders, such as corporations and organisations in a complementary fashion, allowing them to flourish together within our environment. This means e.g. that Speakness respects the business models of media, be it ads, paywalls or other methods and Speakness directs as much traffic as possible to the media themselves. Financial soundness, resulting from benign business models, will decrease the incentive for media to resort to unhealthy methods of securing clicks and traffic. We support creators of value in benefitting from what they have created.

What is our business model?

We offer Speakness as a viewpoint and comment system to media. We will offer premium users extended services so they can better manage their accounts and influence. We will offer analytics to organisations or companies based on group sentiment towards various issues, both from voting and direct polling, while respecting the privacy of your vote. We will do that in a way that encourages the conversation between the public and organisations, through media. We encourage truthful communication on the basis of our analytics as we help the buyers of those services to address people's concerns with full nuance both by changing behaviour where applicable and by proper communication free of propaganda. We will not sell data on individuals for the purpose of ads. We will share your own data with you.