A new social media site launched by former President Donald Trump was said to be hacked within hours of its unveiling on Wednesday. Trump’s announcements that day involved the roll-out of a new company called the Trump Media & Technology Group along with its “Truth Social” offshoot, which is meant as a rival to social media platforms like Twitter. Side note: how on earth is the name so clunky, with the former president’s vast resources at his disposal?
Although Truth Social wasn’t meant to officially launch until later, internet users discovered a link from which accounts could be created, although that link eventually disappeared. Drew Harwell, a technology reporter with The Washington Post, shared on Wednesday that “the “donaldjtrump” account of Trump’s TRUTH Social has already been hacked,” as he put it. (The name of the site has been stylized with “truth” in all-caps — which doesn’t make its moniker any less cumbersome, mind you.) Harwell included a screenshot showing the account with a pinned post depicting a defecating animal. Notably, Harwell was also able to make an account with the username “mikepence,” and although it was eventually suspended, he noted how the ability to initially make it at all revealed security vulnerabilities for the site.
Trump was kicked off major social media sites earlier this year in the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol, which he helped incite with his lies that last year’s presidential election was somehow rigged for Biden. There’s been talk of Trump launching his own social media site for awhile, but the form it would take had not materialized until now. Referring to the Trump Media & Technology Group, Trump said this week that he “created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech” — although there has never been particularly compelling evidence for the right-wing notion that social media companies single out conservatives for “silencing” on the basis of conservative political beliefs alone. Pretending as though Trump was removed from Twitter for being a Republican or whatever is ridiculous. He was removed because he incited his followers to storm the Capitol and attempt to kill members of Congress and the vice president of the United States.
