TRUMP’S NEW SOCIAL NETWORK “TRUTH SOCIAL” IS ANYTHING BUT THE TRUTH

 

             …Perhaps this should be Trump’s logo for his new social media offering

 

Will Trump rue the day he decided to develop a Social Network?

 

I find it ironic that the former U.S. president, that had previously spent so much time giving out misinformation, that he started a network called “Truth Social”.  For him to have a new social network with the word “Truth” in its name, is definitely outside the bounds of what should be considered acceptable.

However, the botched debut of his long promised social network speaks loudly for a site with so many technical glitches.  That kind of says it all.

Just the fact that Truth Social has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut, and because of its 13-hour outage and having a 300,000-person waitlist, it is just so proper for the beginning of Trump’s so called “Crown Jewel”.

Even Trump supporters made jokes about the early slog event. Even Ms. Jenna Ellis, a former member of Trump’s legal team, posted to Instagram, a photo showing Trump with his finger hovering over a laptop, “letting us get on to Truth Social, one person at a time.”

The new site had been heralded for months as the key to Trump’s post-presidential business ambitions, with his allies pledging it would revolutionize social media and take down the mainstream social networks where Trump is banned.  So much for all his site’s failings…. so far.

Early glimpses at Truth Social suggests its offerings are almost identical to what Twitter and other sites have offered for years.  That is except the tweets on Truth Social are called: “truths,” and retweets are: “retruths.” The site’s early struggles also have fueled doubts that Trump’s company will be able to handle tougher, long-term challenges, such as policing for dangerous content and guarding against cyberattacks.

“The basic thing they needed to actually get right, getting someone in the door, and they couldn’t get it right,” said Bill Fitzgerald, a privacy researcher. The “ineptitude of the rollout,” he added, could be a warning of future issues ahead: “There is no better sign of a rushed implementation than the fact that you can’t onboard anybody. So I’m hard-pressed to understand why anyone would trust that these people would keep their information safe.”.

It’s already been a full year into Trump’s media exile.  This site is his endeavor in trying to get back to being online.

But as expected, he has already blown his attempt to make a splash by having a logo that is identical to a logo for “Trailar”, with his broken capital “T” with a period.  Trailar is a British seller of truck solar panels.

A Trump company executive told The Washington Post that it is “seeking legal advice to understand next steps and options available to protect our brand.”

Although Trump has criticized the other social networks’ “wildly aggressive censorship,” his site’s “terms of service” also marks some extensive restrictions for acceptable speech.  People are banned from trying to “trick” or “mislead” other users, violating anyone’s “privacy or publicity rights,” or posting messages that “depict violence” or include messages related to “sexual fetishes,” or “sexually suggestive” phrases.  People are also forbidden from posting anything “false,” “indecent,” “misleading,” “profane,” “obscene,” “filthy” or “otherwise objectionable.”

In other words, Trump himself won’t be able to express himself as he previously did on Facebook and Twitter.  That is the reason he was banned from both of those sites.

Trump’s company, the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), also prohibits anyone from attempting to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” Truth Social has already banned an account that targeted former congressman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who had resigned from Congress to become the Trump company’s CEO.  (So far, Nunes hasn’t made much of an impression as the new Trump media CEO.)

Trumps site’s “terms of service” also shows that it has been designed to benefit from Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  It must be noted here, that Trump had previously said that section 230 should be “completely terminated” because it protects tech companies from being sued for what their users post.

Truth Social’s problems were evident from the start, even though the site’s developers have had months to retool already-used software for the site’s launch.

Many of those who tried to actually sign up to use Truth Social’s app faced obstacles immediately.  People reported they’d been given error messages or “failure to register” warnings when they entered their birthday date. Or when they submitted their email address as requested, then they never received a sign-up response that it had worked.

The site was unavailable for most of its first day, on Presidents’ Day, and its operators reported that “overwhelming demand” had triggered an outage lasting more than 13 hours. During that time, even the company’s terms of service were off-line.

The site’s developers wrote on an internal updates page that they had “stabilized the account creation process.” But many were still reporting that they were around 300,000th in line.

(It must also be noted here that on top of all these problems, Trump ended his former blog after only 29 days because he was infuriated by the blog’s measly readership.)

There were other signs that Truth Social’s growing pains were just getting started. The app for now is available only for iPhones in the United States. On a ‘help’ page, the site’s own name is misspelled.

The Truthsocial.com website, which allowed for early sign-ups, got about 350,000 visits last week, down from 2 million visits the week of its announcement in October.  This is according to estimates from Similarweb, an analytics firm that tracks and estimates Web traffic. Facebook and Twitter each get hundreds of millions of visits each week.

CEO Nunes predicted that the site would be “fully operational” by the end of March.  Last week, he told Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, “We’re having to build this from scratch to make sure we can’t be canceled and can’t be shut down.”

But far from being built from scratch, the site’s code shows it is based heavily on the open-source software Mastodon, which provides free, prebuilt social-networking sites that users can then edit and customize. Truth Social also depends on code from eight other outside development teams to handle text, images, security and other data.  This is shown by its own documentation.

It is also interesting that Trump site’s newest business partner is a Chinese firm that has a history of SEC investigations.

The site’s glitchy debut also suggests Trump will face big challenges as he scrambles to secure his place in the online spotlight.  Also, as he builds an alternative social media platform that can compete with similar sites.  Those sites include: Gab, Gettr, MeWe and Parler — the latter “Parler” of which Trump’s wife, Melania, said she would make it, “Her Social Media home.”

During the months of waiting, several copycat sites also beat Trump’s Truth Social network to the punch, including a totally unaffiliated “social app for truth” that charges users $4.99 a week.

I think that Donald Trump may find out that he has gotten himself into a situation that may eventually bite him in the butt.

Copyright G. Ater 2022