In a perfectly aligned joke, rumors emerged about Facebook renaming itself, Donald Trump has launched a new social network named Truth. That’s a bold choice, given how Trump has been accused of making more than his fair share ofmisleading statements over the years.
Trump’s team said the new social network will be a rival “to the liberal media consortium and fight back against ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley.” Like we haven’t heard that one before. Okay, well, maybe not from a former US president.
The ex-US President has established a new entity for this venture called Trump Media & Technology Group. The company is already inviting users to join the waitlist on its website while placing its app for pre-order on the App Store.
The app description reads that it’s a social network that encourages “open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.” Good luck with that: as other social media giants have shown over the years, it’s pretty hard to moderate user-generated content reliably and keep things civil.
The firm will launch the social network for a limited number of users next month, and it aims to make it open up to all next year.
Earlier this year, Trump got banned from a number of platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Shopify. In March, his team announced that he is building his own social network. That was almost inevitable, given he had no other place to rant.
This is not the first attempt at building a right-leaning social network in the US. Weeks after Trump’s ban from social media, a platform called Parler emerged. However, it was infested by user privacy issues and violence-inciting posts. So Apple and Google removed it from their app stores, and cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS) also banned it.
If you want to know why Trump’s new social network might not take off, my colleague Tristan has got you covered.
Did you know we have a newsletter all about consumer tech? It’s called Plugged In – and you can subscribe to it right here.