Monday, April 04, 2022

Truth Social Users Are Being Censored . . . When They Quote Trump!


Truth Social, the centerpiece of Donald Trump's revolutionary technology company, stumbled out of the gate in February and face-planted in the marketplace. It hasn't moved since then.

It was reported on Monday that Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, the chiefs of Technology and Product Development, respectively, at Truth Social, have resigned. One source told Reuters, the "brains" of the operation are now gone. "All bets are off."

When Trump announced last year that the app was coming, he promised it would be "a haven for free speech". However, Truth Social's Terms of Service state that you can be banned for making fun of Trump. Long-time Trump ally Roger Stone alleged last week that one of his recent TS posts had been "censored". Users who use Trump's "own words" in their posts are being censored.

In February, Truth Social chief executive Devin Nunes promised that the site would be "fully operational" by the end of March. It's now April 4 and absolutely nothing has changed. The news content is auto-generated, popular hashtags revealed mostly bot-generated posts, many of the app's functions don't work at all, and the site is overrun by crypto-hawking bots. The app's infamous "waiting list" is at least 1.5 million names long and moving slower than Trump walking up a flight of stairs.

Truth Social has been a punch line since Day One and Trump reportedly has been livid at the constant negative and humiliating coverage, demanding: "What the fuck is going on?" MAGA-dolts have complained about signing up, being unable to login, and then hearing nothing for weeks. Downloads of the app have dropped by 95%.

"Nobody seems to know what's going on", a Republican ally of Trump's said. "It should take a few days to fix, not six weeks."

Since it launched on February 21, Trump has posted exactly zero times. (His one and only "truth" was posted several days before the launch.) A source explained to The Daily Beast why Trump has been a no-show: "He wants it to be a hit first." (lol)

Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast, April 4, 2022:
The app is now just the 355th most popular app on Apple devices overall. And those who have downloaded it don't seem to be using it that much.

Daily active users—a metric that social media and tech companies use to measure how many engaged users an app has—stood at just 513,000 as of last week. By contrast, daily active users at Twitter—Trump's erstwhile and beloved social media home—were around 217 million . . .
Perhaps this was all merely a grift: a way for Trump to get tens of millions from investors, stick the money in his wallet, and make a semi-perfunctory effort at the app before letting it slowly die.

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