It was supposed to be one of the great social news of 2022. Instead Truth, the application wanted by the former US President Donald Trump is struggling to take off. A little less than a month after its launch, which took place on February 21 in the US, the platform even ended up in position 57 of the most downloaded applications on the iOS App Store, behind Tinder and Planet Fitness Workout, among others.
The news
Trump tries again: the social network Truth will start in February. What’s behind it
by Simone Cosimi
The launch of the social network has encountered a series of obstacles which, according to Newsweek, are putting in difficulty even the users of the first hour, the supporters of the former US President. Truth, a kind of Twitter with a strong focus on news (we talked about it here), in particular has three big problems to solve, which, for now, are strongly affecting the launch.
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The endless waiting list
The first question that Truth is addressing concerns the goodness of its technological infrastructure. In particular, since its launch, it is extremely difficult to register on the platform. Or rather, you register, but then you end up in a virtually infinite waiting list, which does not go on and does not allow new users to enter and interact.
“The majority of people who downloaded the application, myself included, were assigned a number in a sort of waiting list – told Axios the journalist Dan Primack – nine days later, most of us remained in that list, with the number unchanged and no communication from the company. Incidentally, the icon doesn’t work either update”.
To date, according to The Guardian, there are about 600,000 users waiting to enter the social network. A circumstance that ultimately prompted former Republican MP David Nunes, now head of Trump Media & Technology Group (Tmtg), the company that manages Truth, to explain that the social network should be fully operational by end of March. In short, over a month after the official launch.
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Content moderation
There is another front on which the discontent of Truth users is focusing: it is the content moderation policy on the social network. The application was born as a free space, in response to the bans on the main social networks for the US President after the events of Capitol Hill. Truth’s approach, from its description on the App Store, is clear: “Even if we don’t always agree with each other, we welcome different opinions and the conversation they can generate.”
Social network
Trump is back on social media: you can download Truth
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Well, that’s not quite the case. In the sense that, by going to look at the policy content moderation, that of Truth seems much more severe than that of Twitter, despite the supposed desire to be a refuge from the censorship of Big Tech platforms. For example, Truth users may be suspended or completely banned from the platform for posting content that moderators consider to be false, defamatory or misleading. This does not generally happen on Twitter, except for particular situations, such as elections or vaccines against Covid-19. And not only that: on Donald Trump’s social network you can also be canceled for the publication of content deemed “slanderous, defamatory or otherwise objectionable”.
As, for example, happened to the Californian programmer Matt Ortega, whose profile was canceled for an offensive username against the number one of Tmyg Devin Nunes. Ortega was banned without having time to publish even a post, but only for the nickname he had chosen: @DevinNunesCow, which takes up an ironic profile that, on Twitter, he claims to be the cow of the former Republican MP.
The great absent: Donald Trump
To the two problems we have mentioned, there is a third, perhaps the most particular one: on Truth there is no trace of Donald Trump. Or rather, his profile exists and has around 80,000 followers, but he posted only a message – reported on Twitter with a screenshot from his son Donald Trump Jr. – even before the official launch of the platform. To date, he has not yet published any other updates, despite the fact that in recent weeks he has intervened, among other things, at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2022, to talk about the international situation.