This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on May 31st, 2022. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.
Kicked off Twitter, Donald Trump filled his own void. But the social network Truth Social is a clumsy copy — and here’s why Trump will almost certainly come back to Twitter.
What is Truth Social? It’s a social network that looks — and in all essentials works — exactly like Twitter. But instead of “tweets” you write “truths”. A “retweet” is therefore a “retruth”. At least it’s consistent.
Trump says he started the service to “stand up to big tech’s tyranny”. In that you can probably read his displeasure at being kicked off Twitter in connection with the storming of the Capitol in 2021. After extensive technical problems, the service is now up and running for real, though only for users in the US (it didn’t, however, take much skill for a Swede to get an account).
Even if the service looks like Twitter, there are a few clear differences. I chose to follow the first 50 accounts that were recommended to me when I logged in, and there was an obvious theme among them. Fox News, Bongino Report, Breitbart and of course Donald Trump himself were among the suggestions. I drew followers of my own like “Redneck Humor”, “Julian Assange Fans” and “Conservativeforchrist”. That last one appears to be some sort of advertisement for a cryptocurrency called “Prayercoin”.
To paraphrase Trump’s former spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway, you could say the site consists of “alternative truths”. It is almost exclusively profiles from the American political right here, and accounts like “The New York Times” are obviously fake — they’ve only posted three times, two of them promoting Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Extra piquant, given that Trump wrote this week that Elon Musk shouldn’t want to buy Twitter precisely because of the volume of bots and fake accounts. Trump’s own service doesn’t seem much better.
Trump has previously been very critical of the American law known as Section 230, because it means social networks don’t have to be held legally responsible for what’s posted on them. Now he benefits from that very same law. The first result after searching for the word “covid” suggests the account “covidtruth”, which in turn posts vaccine-critical information sourced from Russian RT, Russia Today. But this is permitted under American law, and apparently under Truth Social’s own rules too.
For a platform that claims to stand for free speech, however, there are some things that aren’t tolerated. The web developer Matt Ortega tried to register an account referencing a joke about Truth Social’s CEO, Devin Nunes. It didn’t last long — the account was immediately deleted. Free speech has its limits at Trump’s place too.
Yes, most likely he’ll return the moment he’s let back in. The point of social media for politicians is to a large extent reach — being seen by as many people as possible. On Twitter, Trump had over 79 million followers; at the time of writing he has just over 3 million on Truth Social. Those numbers suggest he’s coming back.
Trump will, however, have a hard time abandoning Truth Social, given his financial interests in the service. In a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, he has also promised to post his posts on Truth Social at least six hours before he posts them anywhere else. The exception is “political messaging” — which, generously interpreted, could cover most of what he posts during a coming election campaign.
There’s no word on whether the service will open up in other countries, but don’t count on it anytime soon. Running a social media platform is complex — both technically and legally. Diving into that and having to handle the EU’s legislation on top of everything else is probably very unlikely in the short term.
So how do you sum up Truth Social? It’s a clumsy copy of Twitter, full of Republicans. It doesn’t appear to be particularly satisfying even to them, since they’re still on Twitter too. There’s no innovation to speak of in the service, and no draw beyond Trump posting now and then.
Back in October last year, I wrote — to the dismay of Swedish Trump supporters — that Truth Social would be a flop. After actually using the service, there’s nothing to suggest otherwise.
