Status: 04/07/2022 03:32 a.m
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When Twitter banned ex-US President Trump in the aftermath of the storming of the US Capitol, Trump vowed to start his own social network. “Truth Social” has now started – and is already a disaster.
By Florian Mayer, ARD Studio Washington
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On January 8, 2021, shortly after the brutal and deadly storming of the Capitol in Washington, then-Twitter boss Jack Dorsey made a decision. He banned the then US President Donald Trump from Twitter.
Florian Mayer
ARD-Studio Washington
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Trump was rid of his most powerful mouthpiece in one fell swoop. 88.9 million people followed him at that time. And it wasn’t 24 hours before the Trump clan swore revenge. Nobody cancels the most powerful and best US president, said Donald Trump’s son, Donald Jr. on Fox News.
Launch of the app turned into a fiasco
The ex-president announced a counterattack. He will develop his own Twitter and bring the big techs to their knees. The social media app is called Truth Social and is an exact copy of Twitter, even in terms of design. The only difference: the tweets are called truths there.
And the truth about Truth Social is: the network is a fiasco.
At the end of March, Trump’s Twitter competition will be fully operational, Devin Nunes said at the beginning of the year on Trump’s house and court broadcaster Fox. Nunes, a former Republican congressman, heads the Trump Media and Technology Group, which develops Truth-Social.
At the end of March, however, nothing was going on at Truth. The number of downloads in Apple’s App Store shot up – over 200,000 downloads a day. But almost nobody could create a user account or even read messages on the network. Those who managed to register were given a number on a waiting list. It should now be in the millions. However, the self-experiment showed that the waiting number increased or decreased arbitrarily every time the app was opened.
Promises and reality are far apart
A great opportunity is the launch of the app, Nunes explained. For Trump, for Nunes himself and the whole team working on it. What opportunity Nunes meant by that, he did not explain. However, one thing is clear: For Trump and his company, Truth is above all an opportunity to collect a lot of data. If you want to register, you have to reveal a lot about yourself. Name, email address, address, date of birth, interests.
But what do you get if you pay this “price” and are “lucky” enough to be able to take a look at the actual network? A safe, family-friendly place on the internet – not an internet ghetto, according to Trump confidante Devin Nunes.
Here, too, the truth is different. Right-wing conspiracy theorists cavort next to gun enthusiasts, right-wing US media celebrities, tasteless jokes about minorities and an account that only shows women in the skimpiest outfits possible playing golf.
App makes smartphones overheat
Around 840,000 people follow Donald Trump’s own Truth account – no comparison to Twitter. There is only one message from the ex-president, which started on February 21:
Get ready! More coming soon from your favorite President
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Nothing has happened since then. Except that the app apparently also has major technical problems and makes the smartphone overheat for some users – which even made it into the US comedy show “Saturday Night Live” as a sketch.
Only the donation emails work smoothly
Additionally, two key figures have turned their backs on Trump’s media conglomerate this week. Head of Development Billy Boozer and Chief Technology Officer Josh Adams. And while there’s no official information as to why, there are suspicions within the tech bubble in the US.
Building and expanding a social network is indescribably difficult – especially if you have neither money nor talent, explained technology expert Dan Patterson on CBS.
Trump apparently has less and less of both, because what has actually worked smoothly since registering with Truth are spam emails from Trump asking for donations and supporters.
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