Donald Trumps’ Truth Social Media: For Freedom of Speech or Politics

[Zlantann]

As a President, Donald Trump was banned from virtually every major social media platform for violating their rules. At a point he was powerless because his links to his overwhelming supporters was disconnected. He claimed that he was silenced to give his opponents more advantage.

Therefore, Trump declared war on these Big- tech companies. He declared that he was launching his own social media platform to stand up to the “oppression of the tech giants” that has “used their unilateral power to silence dissenting voices in America”. Today, The Truth Social media has been launched and It is already available for downloading from Apple’s App Store

Do you really think the Truth Social Media is to promote freedom of speech or for Trump’s future political aspirations?

[Dunamisx]

Do you really think the Truth Social Media is to promote freedom of speech or for Trump’s future political aspirations?

To clear the air, individuals has the right to demonstrate a freedom of speech either by expressing displeasure or in support for, and as the matter of fact, Donald Trump's chances for future political career keeps getting weaker and flapping, the people cannot go for him for any tenure in office as he has already lost his interest in the people's mind right from when he lost the race to Joe Bidden. And any form of political propaganda can be aired irrespective of the opinion by the subject matter.

[BernyJB]

To be honest to use the word "truth" in the same sentence with Donald Turd's name is kinda funny. It gives sarcasm a new meaning...

[suchmoon]

Do you really think the Truth Social Media is to promote freedom of speech or for Trump’s future political aspirations?

Option C, it's a desperate attempt to make money via SPAC. Trump doesn't give two shits about freedom of speech and his political ambitions serve only to enrich himself. It's not a bad plan though, there are many deluded trumplings still thinking that he's being unfairly deprived of "platforms" and even presidency, and of course Wall Street bros will jump at the chance to pump this sucker:

[theymos]

I haven't looked into the platform much, but I heard that its rules are designed to create a "family-friendly" environment. Very weird for a "free speech" platform.

I agree with suchmoon that the whole point of this is a cash-grab, not political. Trump will constantly talk about how this app will destroy the media and the Dems and how you (yes you!) can help out by buying DWAC on the stock market. DWAC will largely just funnel money to Trump and his associates, and the app is just designed to be something to point to as a product, like the "diploma" you get from Trump University.

As Parler and others have found out, it's easy to say that you're going to create a free speech platform; it's much harder when you're forced to answer specific questions like:
 - Are you going to allow probable scams?
 - Are you going to allow doxxing and harassment?
 - Are you going to allow vague threats of violence like "Mr. X is bad, someone should really do something about him"?
 - Are you going to allow probable libel (which is no threat to the platform due to section 230)?
 - Are you going to allow advocating for violence as a policy matter (without inciting violence), such as arguing that all athiests should ideally be executed? This is definitely legal under US law, but it can be incredibly controversial.
 - Are you going to allow support for ideas far outside of the Overton window? For example, some extreme pro-choice people believe that it should be legal to kill babies a couple of months after birth, since there isn't much neurological difference between the brains of those humans and the brains of humans a month or two before birth.
 - Are you going to allow people to advocate for illegal things, such as recommending that people use illegal drugs? This might put the poster himself in legal peril in some cases, but is generally not a legal threat to the platform due to section 230.
 - Will you allow grey-area things such as magnet links to torrents for pirated content? How will you know that these things are actually pirated, and not something similar to Linux liveCDs? Some platforms have had the policy of only ever removing these sorts of things after receiving DMCAs, which should be a legally-justifiable position, but if the platform becomes a hotbed for pirated content, then they often still get in trouble (eg. Mega). So places like Youtube have had to create ad hoc and error-prone systems of copyright detection...
 - Many governments (including the US) engage in active propaganda campaigns. Will you allow people to parrot their propaganda misinformation, perhaps honestly, without knowing that it's misinformation or propaganda?
 - If China hires 1000 people to create 1000 accounts (one account per user, not alts) and has them spread misinformation all day, will you allow that?
 - Etc. Etc.

Bitcointalk.org tries to be pretty free-speech-maximalist, and there are forums which go even further, but the ultimate solution is to create a decentralized forum where nothing can be administratively deleted, and so nobody has to make these choices. Learn from Bitcoin and take the human out of it. But making a usable decentralized forum is also incredibly difficult: the first working decentralized forums were created over a decade ago, but even today hardly anyone uses them because none of them have achieved anywhere close to a sufficient level of usability.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

"Truth" Social Media? 
Trump wouldn't know Truth if it bit him in the ass.
Which it has -- multiple times -- and he still has not learned...

[Zlantann]

The digital world are troubled by a suspicion that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a calculated business plot to merge with Donald Trumps Truth Social. Before now Truth Social have been characterized with several challenges such as technical hitches, snags and delays. But recently in a perceived intentional attempt to promote Truth Social, Musk tweeted that Truth Social has passed twitter and TikTok on App Downloads. After that tweet, Truth Social downloads jerked from less than 6,000 the week before to 55,000 on Tuesday. The shares of Trump Media and Technology Group managers of Truth social that had slumped 60% leaped to 24%. Download, access and functionality of Truth Social have increased drastically. Digital experts are suspecting that the reason for the resignations of some key Truth Social’s executives  is to pave way for the merger between Truth Social and Twitter. Furthermore, this recent promotion of Truth Social might be because he would soon become a major shareholder.

Musk further tweeted that Truth Social existed because Twitter censored free speech. Key players in the industry are worried that these two important personalities might give users freedom which might promote hate speech and other comments that might promote violence.Trump and Musk wants to join forces together and fight back against the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley that have silenced them.



https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/27/minneapolis-police-engaged-in-racial-discrimination-probe-finds

[Gyfts]

When Trump appointed Devin Nunes to be the CEO it was clear that the entire platform would end in a dumpster fire. This was the issue with Trump's administration when he was in office; he would surround himself with incompetent people, fire them, then trash them on Twitter as if he did not make the mistake in selecting them. He only selects loyalists to be part of his business or political dealings. I didn't think Truth Social would ever come close to competing with Twitter because the only user base it would attract are the far right Trump supporting absolutists. It was inevitable that it'd turn into an even more toxic cesspool than Twitter ever was, but we never even saw it lift off the ground.

[Cnut237]

The digital world are troubled by a suspicion that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a calculated business plot to merge with Donald Trumps Truth Social.

He could simply rescind Trump's Twitter ban though, right? Seems a lot less effort than setting up a complex merger with "Donald Trump's version of the Truth trumps the actual true Truth because Donald Trump's Truth Social is controlled by Donald Trump" (or whatever it's called). Anyway, "Truth" is quite the Damascene conversion, isn't it? For a guy who told over 30,000 lies in his one 4-year term in office.

[OgNasty]

I was surprised to see Elon post that Truth Social was the most popular social media App on the App Store once news broke that he was buying Twitter.  I would think that the right leaning crowd would have been pleased with Elon being the new man behind Twitter, but it appears some of them were just as triggered as the opposition silencing liberals.  I guess that goes to show you that people will be mad no matter what happens.  I for one am glad that Twitter will finally be fairly moderated, which is something that is a difficult task on even the most free speech claiming platforms (including this one).

[DaveF]

As of this moment twitter stock is about 10% below ($48.90) what the buyout price is supposed to be ($54.20) so it looks like a lot of major market players don't think it's really going to happen.

Or they think they can do better then 10% in 90 to 180 days.

Don't know or care enough either way but I did find it interesting that this is one of the few times a buyout has been announced and agreed to in the last 20+ years that the stock did not spend the rest of the time hovering around the buyout price.

-Dave

[merchantofzeny]

Do you really think the Truth Social Media is to promote freedom of speech or for Trump’s future political aspirations?

Nope, I don't think any of these social media would ever be truly unbiased. It just happened that majority of tech companies are filled with left-leaning people (and they made sure to try to keep it that way). If it's all right-leaning there's also probably gonna be bias in the that social media.

I didn't think Truth Social would ever come close to competing with Twitter because the only user base it would attract are the far right Trump supporting absolutists. It was inevitable that it'd turn into an even more toxic cesspool than Twitter ever was, but we never even saw it lift off the ground.

Yes. Simply having Trump in it is going to attract those people that lean the same way as he do. I'd rather have some other private initiative that don't involve people in politics and hopefully those would grow more organically.

[Findingnemo]

I came to know about this truth social media recently after Elon shared a screenshot of trending apps in the Apple Store and also he claimed that this shit app claimed number 1 spot due to lack of freedom of speech on other platforms which literally means this app provides more freedom to the users but since Elon started his politics already he will reach the first place again with his influence.

[Cnut237]

Regardless of it being Donald Trump's baby, if anyone starts up any new venture, and feels the need to emphasise in the name itself that this thing is true, this should really be sufficient warning that it's not. To any sensible person, at least.

I mean, if you feel the need to explicitly claim that it's true, then the only reason you'd do this is that if you didn't, then people would assume the content is either false or misleading... which could only happen if either a) it is false or misleading, or b) your past behaviour has been dishonest, and leads people to that conclusion.

See also: Project Veritas, and numerous others.

[BADecker]

Regardless of it being Donald Trump's baby, if anyone starts up any new venture, and feels the need to emphasise in the name itself that this thing is true, this should really be sufficient warning that it's not. To any sensible person, at least.

I mean, if you feel the need to explicitly claim that it's true, then the only reason you'd do this is that if you didn't, then people would assume the content is either false or misleading... which could only happen if either a) it is false or misleading, or b) your past behaviour has been dishonest, and leads people to that conclusion.

See also: Project Veritas, and numerous others.

The problem with this^^ kind of thinking is that it is false. However, if the believer in this kind of thinking thinks it's true, he should "explicitly claim that it's true," which might make some people think that it is false.

Claims of explicit truth by the proponent, doesn't necessarily make what is being claimed false. Such claims might scare some people away, but it makes others who are interested examine the "white papers," or at least examine if there are any "white papers."