The launch of Donald Trump’s new social network, Truth Social, has just taken place and its application is available for download on iOS across the Atlantic. For the time being, however, the platform is encountering many malfunctions by displaying error messages, it should not be fully operational until around the end of March.
Trump banned from social media for a year
It’s been more than a year now that the former president of the United States finds himself without a social network to communicate. Remember, Trump was banned from just about every major platform, including his favorite Twitter, after the Capitol storming on January 6, 2021. Donald Trump has since filed a lawsuit against Meta , YouTube and Twitter for banning him from their platform.
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Last May, he decided to launch his own social network, which was more like a personal blog, but it was shut down in less than a month. The future of Truth Social, however, looks brighter. After being available to 500 beta testers, the platform has just been launched on February 21, and this date is not due to chance since it is President Day, a holiday that honors various presidents of the United States. However, the social network should be fully operational in March only.
Separately, it’s important to note that its full rollout could be slowed by an investigation into a proposed merger of its parent company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, with a publicly traded company, Digital World.
The Truth Social logo on iOS. Image: Truth Social
More and more alternatives to mainstream social networks
If it is to be compared to any of the existing social networks, Truth Social is most akin to Twitter, which was obviously Donald Trump’s favorite platform. As reminded by New York Timesthe new flagship of the billionaire arrives on a market already well supplied across the Atlantic: that of alternative social networks intended for far-right activists.
Tired of the many measures aimed at regulating hate content and combating misinformation, which they deem to violate the First Amendment, some users want to register on platforms where they have more freedom. Parler, Gettr or even Rumble are thus part of the social networks created as alternatives to the existing behemoths. The best known is video host Rumble, which was created in 2013 to counter YouTube.
These platforms do not overshadow the usual sites
For these platforms, however, it is sometimes difficult to obtain financing. Indeed, traditional Silicon Valley investors do not want to meddle in such products for their image, and if there is an audience, it is not very large. Consequently, the existence of these platforms poses no problem of competition for mainstream sites. the New York Times Explain :
” Alternative platforms claim to have registered tens of millions of users. Most of these companies’ user counts — or how they define users — are hard to verify because they’re not often independently tracked. But, experts say, they are unlikely to pose a serious competitive challenge to traditional social media platforms, which boast billions of users. For example, there are more than 1.9 billion daily active users of Facebook and 211 million daily active users of Twitter who see advertisements “.
In addition, people presenting themselves on alternative platforms also remain registered on traditional social networks, where they can exchange with their relatives.
Truth Social could work very well
Teased for several months by Donald Trump, Truth Social could do well, especially since, if the merger of its parent company is validated, it will benefit from a very large sum to develop. One can nevertheless wonder if people will really exchange on the platform, or if they will simply use it to read the extremist posts of the former president.
Either way, it seems unlikely that Trump will manage to reach 88 million followers on Truth Social, as he did on Twitter.