Truth Social is Donald Trump’s social media app that he started developing as a reaction to being banned on Twitter. Well, technically it’s his second social media platform post-ban. His first, launched in May of 2021, was “From the Desk of Donald Trump,” where he would make short text posts that could then be liked and shared on other platforms by his followers. It was billed as a place for his supporters to speak freely without fear of censorship, but Trump was the only person that could actually post anything. There weren’t even comments. Because it had very few viewers, Trump shut it down in less than a month and scrubbed any mention of it from his website.

So onto Truth. The platform was announced in October 2021, just months after “From the Desk…” shut down. It had the same promises of free speech as its predecessor, the difference being that other people would actually be allowed to speak. The app has had a rough go of it, which shouldn’t be a surprise based on the troubles of other “free speech” platforms like Parler and Gab. Almost immediately after the announcement, Anonymous leaked the URL for an internal beta version of the app. Later that month, it was revealed that Truth violated an open-source licensing agreement for not making its source code publicly available, as it is a derivative of the free and open-source social media platform Mastodon. When the app finally launched on the Apple App Store (it’s an iPhone exclusive), it topped the charts for downloads, but only a small fraction of people were actually able to actually get in. I made an account a few days after it launched and ended up 755,671st in line. About a week later, I logged in to check if the number had changed, and my account didn’t seem to exist. So I made another account and was 1,101,591st in line, which is interesting because based on estimates, the app didn’t have that many total downloads at the time. Now I’m not saying they inflated their numbers, but I’m also not not saying it…

So anyway, I got the email this morning that I could finally hop on and start truthing. When I signed in, the app prompted me to finish setting up my profile, which included making a display name separate from my @ username, choosing a profile pic, banner, bio, and location. Every part of this process was almost identical to a certain bird-themed app. The default profile picture is even an eagle. I was then prompted to choose at least two accounts to follow from a curated list. Trump Jr. was the first option, followed by The Donald himself, so I picked them. I also chose accounts like Fox News, Kyle Rittenhouse, Sean Hannity, and the Epoch Times, all verified.

Using the app itself feels very familiar if you have a Twitter account because it’s the same. Sure, Tweets are called Truths, Retweets are Retruths, and the color scheme is purple instead of blue (which I actually kinda like), but it all works the same. Conservatives aren’t known for being innovative, so this isn’t all that surprising. With all the login issues, it’s also not surprising that the app is very slow. On the iPhone 8 that I’m using, profiles can take up to a second to load. Post replies take even longer. A truth with 5 replies took about two seconds to load. Donald Trump’s first truth with 23.1k replies still hasn’t loaded after 10 minutes. Comparatively, a tweet from @POTUS with 21k replies loaded in less than a second.

Let’s talk a bit about Trump’s first truth. Posted two months ago, it reads “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” and has 133k likes. Trump’s most recent truth says “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” It has 132k likes and was posted two months ago. Yep, that’s the only post he’s ever made on his own social network. Activity across the app is pretty low in general based on the posts I’ve seen and the number of total users. The potential growth isn’t looking that great, either. Downloads of the app have dropped rapidly; It’s not even in the top 100 on the App Store anymore. The app hasn’t really been adopted by the GOP either. Trump Jr. only joined the app two weeks ago, over a month after its launch. The only elected officials I’ve found so far are Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Ted Nugent. Maybe the rest are all stuck on the waiting list.

The accounts I’ve been talking about are all verified. They have that little check mark (red, not blue!) we’ve become familiar with that tells us the account we’re looking at is actually who they say they are. But, there’s a bit of a problem with unofficial accounts on Truth. For example, @NASA was recommended to me in Truth’s Discover section. They have 143k followers, they tweet, er… they *truth* news about space, they look pretty dang official. Except they’re not. They don’t have anything to do with NASA. They’re an account that posts links to articles from space.com, which isn’t even affiliated with NASA. The only indication that they’re not an official page is a button that says BOT on their profile, which pops up the message, “This account is an RSS feed aggregating bot, and is not managed by or affiliated with the referenced news outlet.” I, like most people, assumed that the account was official because the app suggested it to me. This is, of course, a problem because the account is still run by a random user. At any point, they could decide to stop posting actual articles about space and start pushing misinformation. And, given that conservatives (the majority of Truth users) are more likely to believe fake news, accounts like @NASA have the potential to do real damage.

“But were they verified?” you might be asking. No, they weren’t. On a competently run platform, that would be another indication that the account is unofficial. But we’re not talking about a competently run platform, we’re talking about Truth Social. Remember how I said I got a list of verified accounts to follow when I signed up? A list that I was required to choose from? Well that list included @FoxNews. The account has 61.2k followers, does not have a BOT indicator, and most importantly, is verified. Devin Nunes (CEO of Truth) even posted a welcome truth to Fox for joining OAN and Newsmax on the platform. Yeah… @FoxNews isn’t run by Fox. It’s an RSS feed. Even after Fox officially stated they aren’t on Truth, the account is still verified with no disclaimers. Nunes and Truth haven’t posted a correction, either. The closest thing they did was delete the previous post and post a new one where they changed the wording to call it an RSS feed. I take back what I said before, turns out Truth is able to innovate on something. They changed the check mark to mean absolutely nothing.

That’s all the Truth I have for you now. I’ll probably be writing a follow-up after I’ve had time to really dig into the bowels of this app. At this point, you might be wondering why any of this matters. When compared to the all of the awful stuff going on in the world right now, it seems like a really small thing. So let’s think about it this way: Social media is the breeding ground for alt-right ideas. Look at your local Facebook groups if you need proof of that. Donald Trump is the person that normalized putting these ideas into the real world. If we can learn about these ideas and people on his own platform and others like it, we might learn how to convince some of them to reconsider those ideas. I can’t stop Russia from bombing Ukraine. I can’t fix climate change. But I think I can do this.

Oh and by the way, I never did get those comments to load.