A little dispatch from inside Donald Trump’s purple place, Truth Social, where everything looks more or less like an emptied-out Twitter: https://t.co/zPCeYhQHsh
— Ruby Cramer (@rubycramer) March 5, 2022
Trump’s latest ‘social media’ venture, like every Trump enterprise, remains ten pounds of manure in a three-pound sack. Because cutting corners is his hallmark, not that stupid logo.
… Jimmy Carter built houses with Habitat for Humanity. George W. Bush learned to paint. Barack Obama hung out with Bruce Springsteen. And Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, created his own alternate online universe for the MAGA-loving, Big Tech-hating common man. After months of hype, the site was here — and it looked a lot like the thing it’s supposed to replace.
Inside Truth Social, everything once blue was now a bright, jewel-toned purple. Tweets, a.k.a. posts, were now “Truths.” Retweets were now “ReTruths,” capital T. And above my username, I saw the site’s default avatar: Twitter’s cream-colored egg icon, the image given to all new users, had apparently given birth to a proud purple eagle. The rest of the site appeared familiar: Replies were still replies. Likes were still likes. Direct messages, still in development, were still direct messages. And Donald Trump was still @realDonaldTrump — followed, as of this writing, by 140,000 people, a tiny fraction of his onetime total audience on Twitter. Only one Truth appeared on his page: “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” he wrote two weeks ago, before the app’s launch. The Truth displayed 7,750 ReTruths, 30,500 likes and 4,700 replies. (Inexplicably, unlike replies on other user posts, none of the responses to Trump’s message were visible to me.)…
The site promises a safe space for “free expression,” encouraging of “all viewpoints,” according to the welcome email, “as we do not discriminate against political ideology.” But inside the app, digital tumbleweeds blew through my feed. The site is a bit slow, and a bit empty. Its stalled roll-out, led by Devin Nunes, the Trump supporter and former Republican congressman from California, has become a source of frustration and confusion in MAGA-world, according to my colleague Meridith McGraw. Republican lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy already have accounts and appear to be posting similar or identical content to both Truth Social and Twitter, along with right-leaning platforms like Gettr and Parler. (Apparently, no one is quite ready to turn their backs on an actual audience yet.) But when they do finally get their welcome emails, the thousands of regular Trump fans still waiting in line, eager for their chance to search for truth, will find a Twitter knock-off with no immediately discernible improvement on the original — a vanity project that has yet to prove its utility.
Put simply, there isn’t much happening on the site…
On Truth Social’s own account page, @truthsocial, site administrators advised users to please be patient as the platform continued to move through its waitlist and address tech bugs and inconsistencies. The site is the marquee offering of Trump’s tech venture, Trump Media & Technology Group, founded last year as part of a SPAC deal, with $1 billion from undisclosed investors, according to the company (which is now reportedly under investigation by federal regulators). Truth Social’s page is filled with memes: a car veering off the highway, away from a sign for “Big Tech” to an exit ramp for “Truth Social”; two doors, one for Twitter, showing a vacant room, another for “Truth Social,” with dozens of people trying to get in. But from the inside, Truth Social feels empty…