A ‘non-cancellable’ community: the ‘truth’ about Trump’s social media platform

The TRUTH is out there, according to known factualness provider Donald Trump. On Wednesday the former president, who has been banned from the major social media platforms since January, announced that he will be launching his own social media company called Truth Social. Although, in typical Trump style, it’s styled TRUTH Social.

The network, which from the Apple App Store screengrabs looks suspiciously like a clone of Twitter, will open to “invited users” next month and be rolled out to the public early next year. The app is apparently part of a wider media network called Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) that aims to take on the “liberal media consortium”.

“I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in a statement. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable.”

Trump’s plans for TMTG are extremely ambitious. Not only does he want to take on Facebook and Twitter, he wants to disrupt Disney, Apple, Netflix, Google and Amazon. How exactly is he going to do that? Good question. The 22-page company presentation outlining TMTG’s vision is rich with hyperbole, but low on detail. Here’s the gist:

TMTG will be too big to cancel

While Trump has been announced as the chairman of TMTG, they might still need to hire someone that is good at numbers (maybe Ivanka Trump is available?) as their current approach to quantifying the media company’s potential audience seems to be more art than science. In one slide they look at how many people listen to podcasts and watch Netflix; from there they extrapolate that TMTG can get “potentially hundreds of millions of users”. Then they give up on maths altogether and put a pretty picture of something that looks a bit like the Earth, but certainly isn’t the Earth as we know it, on a slide with the word “massive” over it. TMTG’s aim, this slide proclaims, is to build a “non-cancellable” global community.

TMTG will absorb the life forces of every other conservative media outlet

Apparently the Technicolor spermatozoa in another image are on their way to fertilize Trump’s new media egg. The arresting visual is supposed to represent the way that TMTG will unify the “fragmented ‘non-Big Tech’ universe”. Not sure how that works as the likes of Fox News and News Max will technically be its competition, but I’m sure someone somewhere has a very cunning plan.

Truth Social is going to encourage ‘open, free and honest’ conversation … sort of

TMTG’s investor presentation pitches Truth Social as a “big tent” social media platform that will unite people of every political ideology. When you dig into the platform’s terms of service, however, things get a little more complicated. Users must agree not to “annoy” any of the employees and not to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the site”. So don’t be rude about Trump, basically. Users must also agree to refrain from “excessive use of capital letters”. OK TRUTHERS!

America’s thirst for ‘non-woke’ entertainment will finally be satisfied

Move over Netflix, TMTG+ is going to be an on-demand streaming service that promises to serve up all the “non-woke” entertainment censored everywhere else. Like what exactly? Well, from the visuals this content seems to consist of boxing and sumo wrestling. Does that mean we’ve all been red-pilled by the Olympics?

Yes, TMTG’s plans sound ambitious, but Trump has the bona fides to make a yuuuuge success of it

To reassure investors that TMTG’s plans to build the biggest media empire in the history of the universe are completely achievable, the presentation concludes with some helpful visuals of old newspapers. One even has a coffee-cup stain on it for authenticity. Trump’s entertainment success is summed up with two key achievements: The Apprentice and the Miss Universe pageant. Weirdly there’s no mention of all the casinos that Trump bankrupted. It also omits mention of his widely panned board game and the small matter of his presidency of the United States.

TMTG’s corporate presentation doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. But that doesn’t seem to have put would-be investors off. The company plans to go public by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPac) called Digital World Acquisition Company (DWAC). Once this news broke, DWAC’s stock surged 400% and it looks likely to be the next meme stock.