Get ready! Your favourite president will see you soon!’ Donald Trump’s first post on his billion-dollar social media app, Truth Social, is not his best. But his moment of Truth hasn’t quite gone to plan.
Since the ‘free-speech haven’ soft launched on 21 February — President’s Day, natch — it’s been beset with bugs, outages and waiting times so long that even die-hard supporters are losing faith. ‘I created my account within five minutes of it going live,’ one Truth user complained on Twitter. ‘My email said my wait-list number was 25,021. I got up the next morning [and] it had jumped. It hasn’t moved in a week!’ Another user grumbled, ‘I started at number 1,800 or so. Now I’m 94k. And it’s not updating. I’m pretty much over it.’ Trump’s first post is his sole post in a fortnight. It won’t be ‘fully operational’ until the end of this month.
Users of the Donald-friendly answer to Twitter (and yes, some of us have access) post ‘truths’ instead of tweets. The equivalent of a retweet is called a ‘retruth’. Terms of service are strict. In fact, in some ways, Truth Social is even more restrictive on speech than Twitter. There’s a ban on ‘excessive use of capital letters’. Yes, really. It also makes it clear that you can’t ‘disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the site.’ In other words, Trump’s free speech app forbids disparagement of Trump. It’s easy to laugh. But we laughed at The Donald when he announced that he was running for president. And look how that turned out.
What truth does Trump really want? It’s been a little more than a year since Facebook and Twitter banished the former president of the United States after supporters — heeding Trump’s words, they say — besieged Capitol Hill. He took his enforced digital detox badly. ‘We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favourite American president has been silenced,’ he wrote in October, announcing plans to launch Truth Social.
We put a pretty darn lucrative offer in front of the president, in the nine-figure range. But someone put an even bigger figure in front of him
‘I’m frequently asked what one thing I’d have done differently in 2020 if I had a time machine,’ says Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Donald Trump in both of his last election campaigns. ‘I always say the same thing. We should have built our own social media app.’ Trump’s ‘superpower’, says Miller, was his ability to use Twitter to bypass traditional media and go straight to voters. His @realDonaldTrump handle had amassed 88.7m followers by the time of his ban (more than Ariana Grande and Elon Musk, but fewer than Barack Obama and Taylor Swift). One analyst, James Cakmak, told Bloomberg that Trump’s brand was worth £2bn to Twitter — a fifth of its market value.
Conservatives have tried to build what Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon calls a ‘Twitter killer’. Gab, founded in 2016, labels itself as the ‘free speech social network’. Melania Trump is on Parler, another social media platform built on the principle that conservatives have been disproportionately ‘censored’ by big tech. It was relaunched last year by megabucks Brexit campaigner George Farmer, 32, friend of Nigel Farage and husband of populist firebrand Candace Owens. Apple had kicked Parler from its App Store and Amazon terminated its web-hosting contract amid allegations that it was used by extremists to organise the Capitol Hill insurrection. Miller himself set up Gettr, used by controversial podcaster Joe Rogan, anti-lockdown former LBC host Maajid Nawaz and the surprisingly libertarian pop group Right Said Fred. It’s backed by the Bannon-allied Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui.
Everyone wanted Trump on their app. ‘We put a pretty darn lucrative offer in front of the president, in the nine-figure range,’ says Miller. ‘So much ice he could have skated on it, as Lil Wayne would say. A lot of zeroes. A lot of dollars. A lot of pounds. But someone came along and put an even bigger figure in front of him.’ That person was Patrick Orlando, an obscure financier who has become the power (and money) behind Trump Media & Technology Group (TMGT) from his WeWork office in Miami. Orlando, like TMGT, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.
Orlando’s Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a blank-cheque, special-purpose acquisitions company sits, as Bloomberg puts it, at ‘the convergence of two powerful forces — one financial, the other political — in a markets-meet-social-media craze akin to the wild run in GameStop’. Trump enthusiasts invest big, pumping up the share price. After Trump announced he was launching Truth, DWAC’s market valuation jumped to almost $3.6 billion (£2.74bn). It’s been called ‘the ultimate Maga stock’. Its chief financial officer is Luiz Philippe de Orléans e Bragança, a member of Brazil’s national congress. He is frequently referred to as a ‘prince’ because of his claim to the defunct Brazilian throne as a descendant of Emperor Pedro II. Those with knowledge of Trump’s new media company say CNN and Disney+ are target competitors. Dream big. To the moon, as they say.
TMTG CEO Devin Nunes, meanwhile, was a Republican California congressman of 20 years in line to chair the powerful US Ways and Means committee in a GOP-led House after the November midterms until he took up his new role in December. Like a conservative Nick Clegg, he has ditched backbenches for big tech. He earned bipartisan criticism for giving Trump preferential treatment during the House probe into Russian election interference in 2017, and wrote a memo accusing the FBI of unfairly going after the former president. Lastly, Rumble, a right-wing alternative to Google’s YouTube, is providing technology and cloud services to TMTG. Its investors include conservative venture capitalists (and Republican congressman) JD Vance and Palantir’s Peter Thiel.
Cracks are appearing. The US Securities and Exchange Commission sought records tied to meetings involving DWAC’s board of directors, its policies and procedures related to trading and the identities of certain investors, the company said in a December regulatory filing. ‘Alt tech companies are a complete joke,’ says Aubrey Cottle, a Canadian coder affiliated with the hacking group Anonymous who ‘f***ed around’ with (read: broke into) one of Truth’s beta tests in October. He wasn’t impressed. ‘The far right generally cannot attract talent, because anyone with skills and talent generally doesn’t put up with these close-minded, hateful mindsets, world views and, on top of that, they don’t want to sully their resume with these platforms.’ That, he says, explains the bugs.
Others argue that big tech simply isn’t muting conservatives. In fact, a 2021 analysis by New York University, which studied engagement metrics from Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool, found the reverse to be true: conservative voices are the most amplified online. ‘This whole notion that Facebook or Twitter is violating your right to a first amendment is a sham,’ says Hany Farid, a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. ‘The first amendment was designed to keep the government or police from incarcerating you or killing you based on what you say. Not empowering you to say whatever you want.’ These are users, he says, who are hateful and angry and people don’t want them on their services so they’re crying ‘free speech, free speech’. It’s ‘not about free speech, it’s about reach’ — and ego, and money.
Could it even be that Trump has been better off without his beloved Twitter? Robert Moore, the ITV News senior correspondent previously based in Washington, DC, and part of the only news team inside the Capitol Hill riots, told the i newspaper that tech platforms were ‘helping’ Trump by saving him from his own digital gaffes while supporting his narrative of being hard done by. Trump’s ‘favourability’ ratings with Americans have improved over the past year (albeit only to –9 from –20) while he has been off social. ‘It’s not clear to me that big tech, by chucking him off their platforms, have done much damage to him,’ Moore said. ‘In fact, maybe in some ways they have sanitised him — we can no longer read his incendiary and inflammatory tweets and that may have done him a favour. To some, he is now looking more like a martyr down in Mar-a-Lago than a wild-eyed political fugitive.’
Miller disagrees. ‘Trump gets in the news for what he says, not what he does. And if you take away what he says, he actually does very little. The president saying mad stuff every day captured the news cycle more than anything else.’ Who’s ready for round two?
