Echo Labs

Subsidiary of the Lucky Star Corporation

* Carlos Herrera
* David Johnston (COO)

**Echo Labs** is an American social networking service and technology company founded in 2018 by James Hannigan, Carlos Herrera and Brad Thomsen, based in New York City. The company owns and operates the Echo, a social media platform.

Echo was operated by its two founders until they resigned in 2022, and Alexander Chu was eventually brought in to replace the two.

## History

Echo Labs was created by James Hannigan and Carlos Herrera, who attended Harvard University and sought to create a viable alternative social media website to combat perceived bias against conservatives and the right-wing in tech and on college campuses. The two were able to obtain funding from Brad Thomsen, the CEO of the Lucky Star Corporation and the three founded Echo Labs. The company is a subsidiary of the Lucky Star News Corporation, a large American-based worldwide media organization that operates conservative news outlets around the world.

Hannigan and Herrera left in 2022 and in 2023 after Lucky Star began to demand stricter content regulation policies in their platform. After their departure the company saw its biggest change with more industry-standard content moderation policies being implemented on the app. Long-time investor Arturo Elizondo pulled funding from the company shortly after. Echo Labs was converted to being a direct subsidiary of the Lucky Star Corporation following the shake-up that occurred at the Lucky Star News Corporation and the sale of the controversial Liberty America News Channel. The company brought in Alexander Chu, a businessman and philanthropist in as their CEO following the departure of the two founders of the company in late 2022.

## Organization

### CEOs

Echo Labs has had three Chief Executive Officers since its founding in 2018.

* James Hannigan and Carlos Herrera (2018–2022)
* Arturo Elizondo (acting, 2022)
* Alexander Chu (Since 2023)

### Notable investors

* Arturo Elizondo, son of Helena Elizondo and real estate tycoon
* Eliana Thomsen

## Echo

### Release

The Echo app was first released on the App Store on March 22, 2019 as an alternative to Twitter and Parler.

In 2023, the company hired Alexander Chu as their new CEO and replaced a lot of the executives. The company changed its model to be a more suitable social media platform for all users. Many conservatives were outraged by this and moved to other social networking services in protest. Echo saw its user base jump from 1.2 million active daily users in 2022 to 11.5 million by July 2023.

### Moderation policy

Echo is touted as a free-speech platform that is free from any and all censorship. The team at **Echo Labs** do not closely monitor content on the site, including minimal fact checking. The website has thus become popular amongst conservatives who either leave or are banned from mainstream platforms because of their more interventionist moderation policies. According to the team at Echo Labs, the only moderation that occurs are clear threats or intentions to carry out acts of violence against another member or group of people. The site has also attracted criminal activities such as coordinator of terrorism, pedophilia, drug trafficking and more.

The app's moderation policy was changed in 2023 with the new ownership and more strict crackdowns on misinformation began on the app. Patent company **Echo Labs** hired 55 people to serve as content moderators and formed the Content Moderation Committee to weed out any hateful for false content on the platform.

## Controversies

### Content moderation and censorship

Initially, Echo Labs did little to moderate content on their platform, preferring a hands-off approach. The company claimed that this would allow for the "marketplace of ideas" to weed out any bad ideas in favor of better ones. However, this would quickly be proven to not be the case.