Sez Us: A Healthy, Respectful Social Media Platform Launches In India

Business Standard

3 days ago

VMPL
New Delhi [India], August 14: Sez Us, a trailblazing new social media platform, launches today in India following a successful launch in its home market, the United States. India is a significant market for the mass adoption of the new platform focused on re-making the social media experience into a healthy and respectful digital space where real people have real conversations. Sez Us is focused on removing anonymity, preventing bots and driving authentic engagement.
With the introduction of a revolutionary reputation engine, Sez Us enables civil and respectful dialogue by encouraging its members to score and prioritize content they want to see or to block content and topics they don't want to see, which fosters an environment that is healthy and real, not toxic and fake.
At its core, Sez Us addresses four essential challenges facing today's digital communities:
1.Healthy, transparent and respectful conversations vs. addictive, algorithmic-controlled feeds where toxic, rage-driven engagement and fake news dominate feeds.
2.Real members and user-moderation using an innovative reputation engine vs. fake accounts, bots, and trolls.
3. Digital independence and ownership of identity, content and followers vs. traditional platforms that own and monetize every aspect of you and your behavior.
4. Establishment of trusted identity with single sign on and user-controlled digital wallets via the Frequency blockchain, vs. traditional walled gardens, prescribed algorithmic chains and user identity and freedom controlled by major platform's payment systems.
Sez Us has also developed a blockchain-powered single sign-on experience in an effort to empower users with full ownership of their digital identity and the freedom to navigate freely and easily across social platforms. Built in partnership with Project Liberty and the Frequency Network Foundation, the collaboration is a major advancement toward an open, interoperable social web. Through this integration, Sez Us users can create a self-sovereign digital identity, giving them control over their reputation, followers and content across participating platforms.
"We're thrilled to bring Sez Us to India as a meaningful social media platform for free, fair, and vibrant conversations," said Akshay Gupta, Chief Operating Officer. "Where other platforms are algorithmically controlled with technology incentivizing virality and toxicity - Sez Us is algorithm-free and promotes healthy, civilised engagement between real people, having transparent and authentic conversations. Our innovative reputation engine allows users to moderate and influence discourse by rating posts--encouraging meaningful, curated engagement and discouraging disruptive bursts of disrespectful behaviour."
By mandating a verifiable mobile phone number for registration, Sez Us strives for a bot-free environment. Bots have historically plagued other social media platforms - a global analysis of automated bot traffic across the internet shows that 49.6%* of all 2023 internet traffic came from bots. Highlighting the urgency of this mission, the 2024 World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report identified India as the leading country in the prevalence of misinformation and disinformation.
Gupta also said, "India presents a tremendous opportunity in the tectonic shift from toxic social media to anti-toxic social media by focusing on real users and their reputation. Sez Us is minimizing the key drivers of fake news, rage and toxicity considering that:
* 33% of toxic content is produced by 3% of accounts,
* 0.1% of users share 80% of fake news,
* 74% of online conflict stems from 1% of communities.
The impact of fake, toxic social media content on Indian society is profound. We believe Sez Us is taking a monumental step toward addressing these issues, and in building healthy, transparent engagement that empowers members by returning their digital self-sovereignty."
Unlike traditional, oligarch-controlled social platforms, Sez Us members have true digital ownership of their identity, content and followers, and are not subjected to the addictive algorithms or force fed pay per click content. Sez Us empowers members with digital self-determination. Personalized content filters give members control over what they see, and the platform never stores user preferences or activity history, eliminating the risk of data scraping or commercialization. Each member retains lifetime ownership of their profile, content, followers and browsing data--none of which is ever shared or sold without explicit consent.
As part of a focus on India, Sez Us is currently running internships with Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai and has plans to use a significant part of its growth capital to build groups and communities across India where clusters of interest groups - such as sports, entertainment, politics and general interest - will attract content creators and users specific to the Indian market. Gupta added, "Our vision is to create healthy and fair social media, therefore we will present new business opportunities to India's vibrant content creator communities. We invite content creators to join Sez Us now to build a thriving environment that empowers all members and help design the next generation economic model."