This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 21st, 2021.

Banned from the world’s biggest social media platforms — Donald Trump is now starting his own and taking it straight to the stock market. It is set up to fail. The only value Trump will manage to generate is fresh PR for an emerging election campaign.

“Account suspended” is what you see if you visit twitter.com/realdonaldtrump – once one of the most popular Twitter accounts in the world.

In the wake of the storming of the Capitol, the former president was kicked off, almost in unison, every tech company’s platform. Trump was instead reduced to issuing his many pronouncements via press release. The most recent one from this summer – a tribute to an American football coach – is just 25 words long. A tweet without Twitter, in other words.

Now Trump appears to have grown tired of speaking without an audience. In a newly formed media company – Trump Media and Technology Group – he is going straight to the stock market via a SPAC. The first product is a social network that will be called “Truth Social”. The aim, according to Trump, is to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the big tech companies in Silicon Valley”.

“Truth Social” is supposed to launch as early as the first quarter of next year, the company says. After that comes a subscription video service with news, entertainment and podcasts, and in the future also a competitor to the tech companies’ cloud services. Grand plans, to put it mildly.

Even if the company does make it onto the stock market, its first big bet — “Truth Social” — will almost certainly fail. Social media platforms are easy to criticize but very hard to make work in practice.

There are several reasons for this:

Politicians on both sides agree the law needs to change. President Joe Biden has gone as far as saying it should be repealed. The way discussions on social networks are conducted is likely to become harder to maintain if the law is removed or amended. And even if it can be done, it can get expensive. Facebook reportedly has more than 15,000 content moderators – before any change in the law.

The dependence on third parties also means you have to live by their rules. The right-wing social network Parler ran into exactly that when AWS shut it down for breaching its terms of service. Trump’s new service will therefore be reliant on other services wanting to host it. Given the volume of controversies that Trump’s followers, and Trump himself, have generated, that will be challenging.

What’s left is the attention this generates. After the announcement of the SPAC listing and “Truth Social”, everyone is suddenly talking about Donald Trump again. It can be read as the opening act of an emerging election campaign. The launch shows that Trump is back in the media game. But a successful social network it will not be.