This US app examines the political values of the brands you consume, to ensure they are in line with those values. But who is behind it?
What if our values became a marketing argument? Many American companies do not hesitate to communicate on their values or their political positioning. The Align Us application precisely proposes to check whether these values and those of consumers are aligned.
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It’s a sort of search engine that identifies companies on a range from far-left progressive to conservative, liberal, neutral, and moderate conservative. Each ideology is associated with a color. Dark blue for progressive, light blue for liberal, green for neutral, orange for moderate conservative, and red for conservative. You can filter the search by categories: business, travel, media, automotive, technology and by region. When the search is launched, a quote appears on the screen to make you wait, this one from Ronald Reagan for example: “All great change in America starts at the dinner table“. So for the moment, the database remains limited. We do not find many companies yet and most, like Starbucks or the Disney Store, are classified as neutral.
How does the site determine these rankings?
To classify companies, the site uses several criteria: the display of virtues (i.e. the tendency to denounce situations to give themselves a good image without taking concrete action), to which cause a company makes donations, whether the company respects individual freedoms such as freedom of expression, but also the obligation or not to be vaccinated, the existence or not of positive discrimination within the company.
And then, last criterion, what Align us calls the “public security” by defining it by respecting or not carrying weapons and law enforcement. As on Yelp, users can leave a review. American Girl, a shop selling dolls, is, for example, classified as progressive A user complains that the company bowed to pressure, quote, from “the beast woke encouraging young girls to imagine themselves shemales“. We can clearly see with the definition of each criterion by the site that Align us leans rather on the conservative side.
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A Trump sympathizer, face of the application
In any case, his public face is Carl Higbie, a former elite Navy Seal soldier, presented by the site as a “media icon” and one “defender of freedom of expression“. He is also a supporter of Donald Trump, who served as his spokesperson during the 2016 election campaign and who later worked in the administration of the 45th President of the United States, at the head of an agency federal.
He had to submit his resignation when remarks made a few years earlier came out publicly. He explains in particular that birth control should be promoted among black women because their children too often grow up in single-parent families, that there is nothing wrong with shooting those who want to cross the border illegally, that ‘he is not Islamophobic since he is not afraid of Muslims, he “just don’t like them“.