This past Sunday night former President Donald Trump launched his own social media platform on the App Store: Truth Social. Since its launch, the app has been listed number on the free app charts with over half a million downloads in the first forty eight hours of being live. However, due to its popularity, many users were met with error messages when attempting to sign up. Additionally, over 500,000 hopeful users are on a waitlist to join the app.
Since its launch on February 20, search terms “Trump” and “Truth Social” have generated 125.96K mentions and reached 2.77 billion users. Twitter dominates hosting these conversation with 94,254 mentions. Twitter dominates this conversation topic with over 101,839 mentions.
As with most conversations related to politics, the reactions to this launch were mixed:
Jimmy Kimmel on the disastrous launch of Trump’s social media site Truth Social: “Truth Social has been such a disappointment so far, Trump may have to rename it to ‘Don Jr’”.
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) February 23, 2022
We love our TRUTH Social gear! Trump’s new social media company is about to revolutionize everything 🔥 pic.twitter.com/bMev3NtqLt
— Grace Saldana (@gracesaldanaa) February 24, 2022
The idea for this social media platform came following the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill riots. Trump took to social media to claim that election fraud had occurred after Joe Biden was announced the winner of the 2020 US Presidential Election. Because these claims were viewed as baseless, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter pushed back on the misinformation and banned Trump from their social media platforms.
This was arguably detrimental to Trump’s communication with his supporters; he primarily used Twitter to communicate with almost 90 million followers before he was removed. In a press statement on October 20, 2021, Trump stated “I created Truth Social and TMGT to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech.” Most likely as a consequence, Truth Social’s platform design is almost completely identical to Twitter.
The app will most likely not be fully operational until sometime in March. It remains to be seen if this platform will face similar obstacles to relevance and success like the previously popular Parler platform.
Author: Eden Wallace
