22-Year-Old Bitcoin Entrepreneur Announces ‘Free Speech’ Phone for Trump Fans

Watch out Apple and Google, there’s a new phone on the block that’s promising to upend the market by baking FREE SPEECH into the device. It’s called the Freedom Phone and it’s the brainchild of Erik Finman, who is the self-proclaimed "youngest bitcoin millionaire,” according to a forthcoming press release about the phone. The Freedom Phone comes preloaded with Parler and is “the first mass-marketable mobile phone based on free speech.” 

According to the press release, “the main feature of the phone is that it includes: The FreedomOS App Store. An app store that is free from censorship. Parler, Gab, and any other app—banned or unbanned—can submit their app to our app store knowing that they are free from suppression.”

Parler and Gab are, essentially, right-wing Twitter clones that have been banned by the iOS App Store and Google Play Store. Not on Freedom Phone, however: When a new user boots up their Freedom Phone, Parler will be right there on the homescreen, ready for them to use. 

After the Capitol Riots, Google, Apple and Amazon AWS stopped doing business with Parler.  After the site crumbled, hackers archived every post and video its users had made, which helped lead to a lot of them being arrested for their roles in the January 6 Capitol Riots. Parler is back online, but its users have mostly fled to Telegram and other services. Gab, meanwhile, has been repeatedly hacked.

“The Freedom Phone company is encouraging a great split away from left-wing Big Tech companies that were made on free speech, and now have betrayed The American People,” according to the press release. 

Freedom Phone won’t use Android or iOS. It’s launching with something called FreedomOS, which sounds like an Android clone that Freedom phone claimed “doesn’t spy on you,” although it's unclear how that's been achieved or what it really means. What are the specs of the phone? “It has a 6 inch colorful screen, an amazing camera, and has 128GB storage,” according to the press release.

Finman is the galaxy brain behind the project. The 22-year-old bills himself as the youngest bitcoin billionaire and tweets milquetoast populist aphorisms about the shrinking middle class and Joe Rogan. 

“This is a historical time. With people, apps, and even The President of the United States banned,” he said. “Conservatives must create their own means of communication where we can’t be silenced anymore.” 

He’s also got big plans for the Freedom Phone, and claims it will “remake the entire political landscape by giving an unfiltered means of communication that we haven’t seen since the 2015/2016 election cycle that got President Trump elected into office.”

The Freedom Phone is the latest in a number of conservative-backed schemes to build a tech infrastructure free of major players like Google, Apple, and Amazon. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell announced he’s building a new social network divorced from Facebook and “Mr. Google" called VOCL.