Etha

Etha is an American social networking and media service that’s focused on bringing transparency and accountability into the democratic process. The company’s online platform allows users to track and discuss recent policies and laws that politicians are working on, or have passed.
Registered users (members) are able to gauge public views about political candidates in an unbiased manner, submit their own content from/about each politician’s newsworthy actions, and compare relevant event coverage to see how the news media ‘spins’ stories on various media outlets. Unregistered users can see all content, but are unable to engage with, comment on, or view the profiles of other users. Those using the application can interact with Etha through browser or mobile frontend software with APIs.This service is provided free of charge by Elkool Inc., an NYC-based corporation with global operations in ten countries, mostly working from remote locations.

At its core offering, it provides a dynamically calculated public sentiment score for each politician, also known as the ‘LeaderQ’ score, which is algorithmically computed in real-time from a number of factors. These include the votes of support or disapproval from the platform’s users, as well as the contextual sentiment expressed in their commentary. Users are able to upload relevant content in the form of unlimited text, picture, and video pertaining to the focal political issues as they pertain to the politicians being covered by the platform. For each politician’s trending issues, the platform presents a curated list of related media coverage, from multiple sources representing a wide political spectrum. Each publication is accompanied by the political bias indicator, as determined by the platform’s AI. This informs the members of any bias inherently woven into each news story, without creating or modifying any news content. By doing so, the company avoids injecting any bias into discourse on its platform, while letting its users make better informed decisions by presenting a balanced perspective from publications across the political spectrum. The cloud-based platform is currently open to all countries, but its focus is primarily on US politics. Users are able to interact with others, across the entire political spectrum, to discuss the latest political developments, along with their political leaders, in a neutral forum designed to mitigate the effect of ideological “bubbles.” While the platform touts completely open access to the public, regardless of their political ideology, it still enforces constructive discourse by detecting and moving destructive or derogatory conversations into separate virtual rooms. Etha promotes political awareness by providing an educational content section, as well as a public polling serviceEtha was created by Nicole Ogloza and Aastik Saini in June of 2021, and launched on Independence day (US) of that year. The original founders have arrived at the idea behind the service as a way to reduce the widening divisions between the country’s Democratic and Republican voters. The political divisions have been growing at an alarming rate for over two decades, threatening to tear apart the very fabric of American democracy. The platform had over 3,000 users in the beginning of 2022, and is continuing to drive user growth while releasing a slew of additional social media capabilities in time for US Midterm Elections. The company is actively continuing to develop its cloud platform, adding new features on weekly basis. All user content is unmoderated, giving users a space to discuss important topics with others without restrictions to their freedom of speech. However, any discussion that takes a derogatory/destructive tone (as determined by in-house developed algorithms and community feedback) may be automatically moved into a separate virtual room.