PRIMARY
SOURCE
The Emptiness Inside Donald Trump’s New Social
Media Platform
I joined Truth Social. Why do I feel like the only
one?
By RUBY
CRAMER
03/05/2022
07:00 AM EST
Ruby Cramer
is a senior staff writer at POLITICO Magazine.
Around 9:02
a.m. on Friday, an unexpected flash of purple appeared on my iPhone’s
lock-screen.
“Your wait
is over! Tap here to start using Truth Social.”
Tap I did,
and inside the new social media platform created by the former president, I
found a nearly exact dupe of Donald Trump’s first love, Twitter, the site that
kicked him out more than a year ago.
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.)
A Truth by
Trump on the Truth Social platform reading 'Get Ready! Your favorite President
will see you soon!'
In my inbox,
an unsigned email welcomed me to “our Truth Seeking community.”
Most people
are still awaiting entry to this purple-shaded landscape. Eleven days after its
launch on Feb. 21, timed for the indistinct federal holiday that is President’s
Day, I was welcomed to Donald Trump’s new online home after holding the
169,685th spot on the waitlist. (The line is hundreds of thousands of users
long, according to other people waiting to get in.)
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.
After
setting up my profile under my name, a list of suggested users appeared on the
screen: Donald Trump held the number one spot, followed by pages for Truth
Social, the NFL, USA Military News, the Daily Mail, Sean Hannity, Kyle
Rittenhouse and an account for paranormal news and discussion.
Scrolling
down, I saw ordinary users and trolls on the list: @CreepyJeffBezos,
@HypocriteTrudeau, @FakeHunterBiden (bio: “Celebrating Hunter Biden’s love for
art, prostitutes, and laptops”).
As I
scrolled through the list, another notification popped up at the top of my
phone. My first follow! “LET’S GO BRANDON TOKEN ($LGBT) is now following you,”
the app informed me. Tapping on the page, I found an account promoting some
kind of new crypto offering, the Let’s Go Brandon Token, also described by the
anonymous user as “THE PEOPLE’S TOKEN.”
Minutes
later, my second Truth Social follow came, hitting the full spectrum of Trump
enemies, lest we forget 2016. “HilaryHater [sic] is now following you,” the
notification read. The account’s avatar showed Hillary Clinton sitting on a
witch’s broom, flying past a purple-shaded Earth. “Father of 4 grown men,” the
bio explained. “Couldn’t be prouder of not having snowflakes for kids.” I
followed both accounts back, hoping to strike up some engagement.
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.
The most
vigorous conversation on the site seems to be the entirely made-up one that
appeared on the mock-ups before the launch. In the images available on the
Apple app store, an account called @jack is seen corresponding with a man named
Rick, making conversation like “What’s your favorite place to go in the world?
You won’t believe how beautiful Jamaica is.” Another mock-up, demonstrating the
yet to be unveiled direct message feature, shows @jack asking someone named
@jane to ask Truth Social’s moderation team to take down an offensive account.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” @jane replies. “I mean it’s a pretty big
deal censoring that content. Kinda an overreach… right?” In the mock-up @jack
(perhaps a reference to Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey) writes back, “JUST TAKE
IT DOWN!” with a red-faced angry emoji. What the mock-up was meant to
demonstrate — a user experience free of censorship, or safe moderation — is unclear.
But on the site, there was little engagement between users. In response to a
post from Nunes advising “another day with more people joining the platform,”
149 replies included messages of encouragement. “Making Social Media Great
Again!” one user said. “It’s already better than Twitter if anyone can read
this message!!” said another.
A Truth by
author Ruby Cramer reading 'Anybody out there?'
Dan
Scavino, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, appears to be one of the most
active users on the site, with 74 Truths and counting. At the bottom of his
feed, his first post on the site, published about two weeks ago, showed a
picture of a blood-red wave crashing violently on the sea. Above a row of
emojis — red heart, white heart, blue heart, American flag, flying eagle —
Scavino wrote, “THERE ARE MORE OF US — THAN THERE ARE OF THEM!”
Around 10
a.m., I Truthed my first Truth.
“Anybody
out there?” I wrote.
By the end
of the day, no one had responded.
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