Ex-President Donald Trump apparently isn’t all-that-enthused about the fact that the roll-out of his new social media platform, Truth Social, has been kind of an embarrassment. Many of those who’ve tried to download the app were lumped onto a wait-list before they could actually use the platform, with that list reaching huge levels — in the range of hundreds of thousands. Now, The Daily Beast reports that “after a botched rollout where most prospective users were simply added to a wait list, Trump has been grumbling about the app behind the scenes, according to two sources familiar with the matter, even as he’s tried to put on a brave face publicly.” Despite what is basically his addiction to attention, Trump himself has hardly posted on the site, which doesn’t exactly add to the appeal or make the whole thing seem any less like a startling dud.
Guardian US: Trump’s private schedule for Jan. 6 — timestamped 11:22a — shows he knew before he started speaking at the Ellipse at 11:50a that he was to travel directly back to the White House after his speech.
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) March 5, 2022
According to The Daily Beast, ‘sources have heard the former president on the phone swearing gratuitously and asking things like, “What the fuck is going on” with Truth Social.’ According to preliminary estimates of website traffic reported on by The Daily Beast, Truth Social has failed to surpass other fringe, right-wing social media alternatives like Gab and Gettr in the time since its presentation to the public in terms of the amount of hits it’s getting from visitors. Notably, Truth Social is also less popular than Twitter and Facebook in the Apple app store, which was the only place that the platform was even available for access as of this weekend. (Sorry to Android and web browser users, apparently… the lack of options for those trying to get to the site through such means doesn’t exactly bolster its business credibility.)
Guardian US: Trump appears to have encouraged the crowd to march on the Capitol, on a false premise, in the hope the volatile security situation would lead to some event to stop Biden’s certification. https://t.co/NDoHQegUWI
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) March 5, 2022
Trump defended Truth Social during a chat at the latest installment of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), telling a right-wing reporter regarding the app: “It’s slowly been opened, people are getting on and they’re loving the product and we’re getting a voice… It’s been an incredible success… We have hundreds of thousands of people trying to get on and we’re doing it very slowly.” But according to The Daily Beast, behind the scenes Trump “repeatedly groused about the negative press and the less-than-stellar optics of the rollout, these sources said. And he’s demanded to know why more people aren’t using it—why the app isn’t swiftly dominating the competition.”
Guardian US: Trump made the false promises that led the crowd to go to the Capitol in spite of being told by Secret Service the situation was too volatile for them to guarantee his security if he went, per source
— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) March 5, 2022
All of these fundamental struggles for the platform have been unfolding in addition to apparent investigations into the business endeavor behind it all by federal financial authorities including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which went after “documents relating to meetings of DWAC’s Board of Directors, policies and procedures relating to trading, the identification of banking, telephone, and email addresses, the identities of certain investors, and certain documents and communications between DWAC and TMTG,” according to DWAC’s own telling. DWAC refers to Digital World Acquisition Corp., which announced plans to merge with Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group in connection to the app. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren explained the underlying issues, Truth Social’s backers “may have committed securities violations by holding private and undisclosed discussions about the merger as early as May 2021, while omitting this information” from filings with federal authorities.
Trump’s much-hyped Truth Social social media platform is a huge failure on every level other than grifting https://t.co/K9jtUAXQGH
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2022
