Unsure of where your neighbor or second cousin stand on the issues? Now, there’s an app for that.
A new app called Brigade is the “Tinder of politics” according to one of its major investors, a reference to the popular dating program, and it lets users exchange political beliefs with a couple of swipes.
Brigade, the beta version of which was released Wednesday for iOS and Android devices, also allows advocacy groups and candidates to gauge people’s perspectives on the issues — which could help them mobilize voters.
Matt Mahan, the company’s CEO told CNN, he was inspired when he realized that discussing political issues with friends, families and neighbors — and learning about yourself, as well as the people you care about — is fun and engaging.
“That’s the part where everyone says they don’t like politics,” Mahan said. He said that instead of focusing on matters regarding political parties, politicians and the topic of money, the starting point for Brigade should be the things that people care most about and the issues they are frustrated with that they would like to change.
The app tracks trending topics, each of which present the user with three options: agree, disagree and unsure. If one agrees or disagrees with a position, they’ll learn the breakdown of percentages of where other users stand.
For example, a recent trending topic was the “Confederate flag,” which has been under heavy scrutiny since the Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting. The app presents several positions:
A) License plate messages are private speech protected by the First Amendment:
B) The Confederate flag should be banned in public schools;
C) The Confederate flag is part of American heritage and should be left alone.
Users can create their own opinions as long as they are limited to 110 characters per post. The most popular topics on which people shared their opinions were drug policy, minimum wage, health care, discrimination and immigration.
Once users have taken their stance on certain issues, they will automatically be matched with partners from national advocacy groups, such as Represent.us, Drug Policy Alliance, Color of Chance, Forecast the Facts, Fight for the Future, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans, according to Andrew Noyes, Brigade’s vice president of communications.
So far, there is an estimated 13,000 users registered on Brigade. Users — 83% of whom are under the age of 33 — have shared more than 1.1 million opinions on a multitude of topics. Beta testers have shared at least 258,000 opinions on varying issues since Wednesday, the company said.
So why is it called Brigade?
“We were looking for something that would invoke people to come together to do something they couldn’t do alone and then we thought of Ben Franklin and the Bucket Brigades,” Mahan said.
Franklin’s Bucket Brigade, or Union Fire Company, was created in 1736 and was a volunteer firefighting group. The Bucket Brigade would gather buckets for carrying water to extinguish the flames and line up, one-by-one, to respond.
“There was no better symbol for citizens coming together by working in a coordinated way they couldn’t do alone,” Mahan said.
When the app was announced in November, Sean Parker, the tech tycoon who’s been associated with Napster, Facebook and Spotify, invested millions of dollars. He described the mobile app to be the “Tinder for politics” in an interview with The Washington Post. Tinder, a popular mobile app, allows users to “match” with dates close to their location.
Brigade has raised approximately $9.5 million thus far.