Donald Trump’s social media app launches on iOS
Truth Social, Donald Trump’s new social media platform, was launched late Sunday by becoming available for download on the Apple App Store.
While the app rose to the number one spot among free apps downloaded on iOS, most new users were unable to get on the platform. Some users reported they were placed on a wait list with more 150,000 users and others were prevented from gaining access when the account setup process halted during email verification.
According to Inside, the Twitter-like app experienced a partial outage as of 7:15 a.m. on Monday which lasted for more than seven hours. A status page said, “The Truth Social application is online, although user creation is currently rate-limited during our rollout. We will expand capacity over the coming hours to enable more users to join Truth Social.”
Through his media company Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the fascistic former president and January 6 coup plotter announced the app on October 20 in a press release from Palm Beach, Florida. The statement said the mission of the media company was to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.”
The press release then quoted Trump himself, who said, “I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced.”
Actually, Trump was suspended and then permanently banned from using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube beginning on January 6, 2021, during his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and remain in power through a violent mob assault on the US Capitol.
Twitter, which had been Trump’s primary method of promoting his right-wing populism, racism and xenophobia prior to the 2016 election and throughout his presidency, blocked his account for twelve hours on January 6 and warned of a permanent suspension for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy.” His account was reactivated and, following three more Tweets of further incitement of his supporters, Twitter permanently suspended Trump from the platform on January 8.
In the case of Facebook, Trump was indefinitely suspended from the largest social media platform and its subsidiaries Instagram and Snapchat on January 7, at least until the end of his term in office. A statement from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor.”
In June, Facebook extended this ban to two years, saying his actions “merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols,” and the company will reconsider the decision in January 2023. A large Facebook group called “Stop the Steal,” associated with Trump’s campaign to block the election results from being certified by claiming it had been “stolen,” and its hashtags were permanently banned two days after the election on November 3, 2020.
A report in the New York Times on Sunday said that start date of Truth Social was being pushed back to March and the app available on the Apple App Store was a “limited test” version. The Times also reported that Trump’s merger with the blank check company Digital World Acquisition Corporation (DWAC) that created his TMTG media enterprise was facing a regulatory investigation.
A blank check company is a firm that exists for no other purpose than to make acquisitions. Also referred to as special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), these businesses sell shares to investors and then go around and find businesses to merge with. In December, the Securities and Exchange Commission requested information about the deal between DWAC and TMTG, the identities of some investors and documents and communications between the two firms. At the time of Trump’s announcement of the media business, he claimed it had a cumulative valuation of $1.7 billion.
Aside from the politics of Trump himself, the individuals whom he has assembled around him in support of the social media initiative shows something of the political forces that are lining up and participating in the ongoing development of a fascist movement in the US.
Former California Republican congressman Devin Nunes, who had been chairman and then ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, resigned from office at the end of 2021 to take a position as chief executive of TMTG and work on Trump’s social media platform.
The far-right Republican has called global warming “nonsense,” supported Trump’s Muslim travel ban and, during the early days of the pandemic in March 2020, told families who were “healthy” to “go out and go to a local restaurant, likely you can get in easy.” He also said at that time that the developing public health disaster would be over by Easter 2020. He has repeatedly referred to Democrats as “followers of neo-Marxist, socialist, Maoist or Communist ideals.”
Nunes proved his loyalty to Trump by publishing a four-page memo on February 2, 2018, that said the FBI “may have relied on politically motivated or questionable sources” to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil Trump adviser Carter Page in the early days of Mueller probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2020 elections.
Another significant figure joining Trump’s tech team is billionaire Peter Thiel. The New York Times reported on February 7 that Thiel is resigning from the Meta (formerly Facebook) board of directors to focus on candidates who support Trump’s agenda in the midterm elections in November.
The Times report, based on comments from an anonymous source, said Thiel views the midterms as “crucial to changing the direction of the country.” Another unnamed individual told Fortune that Thiel’s focus, “will be on supporting Blake Masters, JD Vance and others who support the Trump agenda. He wanted to avoid being a distraction for Facebook.”
Thiel, 54, is a German-American venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, the US intelligence and defense department big data firm. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, and his estimated net worth is approximately $10 billion. In his business advice book, Zero to One, Thiel argues in favor of corporate monopolies and says that monarchies are the most efficient form of government.
A friend of far-right media personality Ann Coulter, he campaigned for Trump in 2016, publicly announced a $1.25 million campaign donation to his candidacy and was a featured speaker at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. After Trump won the presidency, Thiel was named to the executive committee of the President-elect’s transition team and nominated several of his friends for White House positions.
As of February 14, Thiel had contributed a total of $20.4 million to 16 different Republican Party candidates running in the 2022 elections. At least two of these candidates for US Senate, Masters in Arizona and Vance in Ohio, have maintained that Trump was defeated among massive election fraud and Masters stated in a campaign ad, “I think Trump won in 2020.”
Amanda Silberling@asilbwrites /February 21, 2022
Image Credits: MANDEL NGAN / JOSH EDELSON/AFP / Getty Images
Donald Trump’s media group released its TRUTH Social iOS app today in the U.S., but a scan of the app’s API using publicly available tools revealed that it already closed itself to registrations (also, the scan showed that its “proprietary account registration microservice” is named “Pepe,” which is also the name of a meme with racist connotations).
Though TRUTH Social sits at the #1 spot for free downloads in Apple’s App Store, most users can’t get into the app. When you download TRUTH Social, you’re prompted to enter your email and date of birth (users must be 18+) before waiting for a verification email. But at every step of the process, TechCrunch received error messages. Once we received a verification email, the link yielded more error messages, making it impossible to create an account. Some users have reported being placed on waitlists with over 100,000 users, while others never received verification emails or couldn’t move past the verification step. TechCrunch reached out to the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) for comment on these sign-up difficulties.
Former President Trump became interested in building his own social media platform after he was removed from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for violating their policies following last year’s attack on the Capitol. In an October press release, the TMTG wrote that its mission is to create “a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the Big Tech companies.”
Image Credits: TRUTH Social
The announcement of TRUTH Social was also rife with growing pains. The new social network used open-source code from Mastodon, yet claimed the code as its own.
“The terms of service included a worrying passage, claiming that the site is proprietary property and all source code and software are owned or controlled by them or licensed to them,” Mastodon wrote at the time. “Notably, neither the terms nor any other part of the website contained any references to Mastodon, nor any links to the source code, which are present in Mastodon’s user interface by default. Mastodon is free software published under the AGPLv3 license, which requires any over-the-network service using it to make its source code and any modifications to it publicly accessible.”
In December, TRUTH Social finally added Mastodon’s source code to its website on a section labeled “open source.”
“Our goal is to support the open source community no matter what your political beliefs are. That’s why the first place we go to find amazing software is the community and not ‘Big Tech,'” TRUTH Social’s website says.
In December, Congressman Devin G. Nunes (R-CA) departed from the House of Representatives to join TMTG as its CEO (Trump serves as Chairman of the company).
In an interview with Fox News this weekend, Nunes said that the full launch of TRUTH Social is a few weeks away — currently, its only available for download on iOS.
“Every day we bring on more and more Americans, and we’re getting to you as soon as possible,” Nunes said on Fox News.
Source
Independent.ie
'TRUTH Social is but the latest attempt by the far-right to monetise support through social media. Platforms like Parler and Gettr have each tried to dethrone Twitter as the destination for conservative voices. It all ended about as badly as you’d expect.'
A funny thing happened when I tried to sign up for TRUTH Social, Donald Trump’s new social media platform. It asked me to agree to the terms of service and privacy policy, which is fair enough; most websites do. No, the strange thing was that when I clicked on them, I got a 404 error. “Sorry, but it looks like this page does not exist,” I was informed.
othing better sums up Donald Trump — as businessman, as reality TV star, as politician — than a 404 error. As an entrepreneur, Trump was famed for overpromising and overdelivering. Producers of The Apprentice have claimed that his persona as a billionaire business mogul is a “scam” they created.
Trump’s latest gambit looks to be no different. It is already plagued with glitches, placing users on waiting lists and hoping to be “fully operational” by the end of March. The company claims that the high demand is responsible for the problems.TRUTH Social is but the latest attempt by the far-right to monetise support through social media. Platforms like Parler and Gettr have each tried to dethrone Twitter as the destination for conservative voices. It all ended about as badly as you’d expect.
Parler found itself offline for much of the first half of 2021 after Google, Amazon, and Apple stopped hosting the platform for allowing violent, threatening posts in the run-up to the January 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, Gettr has banned one right-wing pundit for using a racial slur against Black people and has banned the racist term “Groyper” from its platform. headtopics.com
Indeed, history suggests there is as much appetite for Trump’s TRUTH as there were for Trump Steaks. I’m old enough to remember Menshn, the right-wing gadfly Louise Mensch’s foray into social media. Like most pretenders to Jack Dorsey’s throne, it went the way of the Fail Whale — the cartoon cetacean from the halcyon days of Twitter — and disappeared, existing now only in the digital graveyard that is the WayBack Machine.
Whether this is arrogance or ambition on the part of Trump is in the eye of the beholder. This kind of gambit, though, is classic Trump. In the 1980s, he tanked the United States Football League with his hubris.Back then, Trump bought a team (the Generals) and then insisted that the USFL compete with the NFL in the fall instead of the spring. Lacking the resources and network contracts of the NFL, the USFL suffered. At Trump’s urging, it sued the NFL under antitrust laws and — in the definition of pyrrhic victory — won a $3 settlement which bankrupted the USFL.
Is TRUTH Social another example of Trump’s Icarus complex? The Trumps themselves seem to acknowledge the deck is stacked against them. Last week, Parler announced that former First Lady Melania Trump has entered into “a special arrangement for her social media communications” and will exclusively use their app. That’s right: even Donald Trump’s own wife doesn’t trust his TRUTH.
And none of these apps — not TRUTH (even once the bugs are worked out) or its competitors — can compete with the behemoth that is Twitter. According to analysis published last month by the Washington Post, following Trump’s ban from Twitter in January 2021 platforms like Gab, Rumble, Parler, and Gettr saw a surge in popularity. “But those audiences have barely grown in the year since,” the Post reports. “in some cases, they even declined.” headtopics.com
Daily Digest NewsletterGet ahead of the day with the morning headlines at 7.30am and Fionnán Sheahan's exclusive take on the day's news every afternoon, with our free daily newsletter.Enter email addressSign UpRight-wing influencers who saw steady growth in their audience on Twitter found their platforms severely diminished on the alt-right alternatives. Those who have dutifully followed Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene and others to these apps are their most loyal acolytes. They’re preaching to the choir, and they are increasingly doing it in a vacuum.
And therein lies the problem. One can certainly debate whether Twitter has gone too far in policing speech — I think it has — but no one can argue that it markets itself as an echo chamber. You can still find robust debate and a plurality of thought and belief. Imperfect as it is, it still functions as a modern-day agora.
When viewed in this context, TRUTH Social and its predecessors are seen for what they are: far-right safe spaces. They are marketed and intended as platforms where one can espouse the most outrageous conspiracy theories or their vilest bigotries without challenge, reproach, or consequence.
If Twitter is a modern agora, Gettr is a 1970s biker bar, or a Trump rally held in cyberspace. (Tomayto, tomahto.) As The Verge reported last year, shortly after Gettr launched, “multiple hashtags with racist and anti-Semitic slurs hit the app’s trending section… and multiple reports found a torrent of porn.” headtopics.com
How does an app that purports to be dedicated to free speech at all costs confront hate speech? That’s a problem Twitter has yet to solve, and it doesn’t look like Gettr, Parler, or TRUTH Social can do it any better. Because of that, I can’t see these platforms lasting long term.
After all, part of what made Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so successful is how inclusive they were. They appealed to the widest possible audience in order to attract as many users as possible. And it worked because, if we are all being honest with ourselves, part of what draws us to social media is interacting with those who disagree with them. There’s a reason the algorithm keep us outraged. If we are arguing in the comments or tweeting our disgust, we are using the product. Social media has won.
A social media platform where everyone agrees with you sounds great in theory, but it quickly becomes boring in practice. TRUTH Social may experience a boost of initial interest, but I anticipate it will quickly go the way of the USFL — a pale imitation of an established stalwart that Trump will crash into oblivion, walking away with about $3 before declaring it a success.
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