Going by the name Truth Social, the new Trump platform is billed as a way for him (and all of us) to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” most especially Twitter and Facebook, which have banned him for repeatedly violating their terms of service. Speaking of terms of service,
Truth Social’s terms forbid users from saying anything to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”
At last, free speech has been restored to the Internet!
Even more amusingly, Truth Social users must agree to avoid “excessive use of capital letters,” something of which Trump himself is quite fond. And the terms themselves contain extended passages in, yes, all capital letters.
This is just the latest of many recent attempts to create a Trumpist Twitter, all supposedly devoted to free speech. There was Gab, then Parler, then Gettr — none of which exactly set the world on fire — and now Truth Social.
The problem the first two encountered, and this one will as well, is that a safe space where they can converse free of engagement with liberals isn’t just not what devoted Trumpists want. It’s the opposite of what they want.
As a political style, Trumpism isn’t about avoiding the libs, it’s about triggering the libs, owning the libs, enraging the libs. If you’re a liberal, have you ever found your blood boiling because of something someone said on Parler? Of course not, because you’ve never even
heard about anything anyone said on Parler. It might as well be a social media platform on Mars. . . .
So who are Trump’s potential customers? His most devoted political supporters, who can be lured in with the promise of participating in the project of Trumpism, then be targeted with ads for MyPillow, gold coins or whatever other bottom-feeding enterprises can be persuaded to advertise on Truth Social.
But there’s only so much revenue to be had from those sources. And after an initial wave of loyalists signing up for Truth Social, the number of subscribers will probably wither away. Sooner or later, they will probably realize that yelling
about liberals who have no idea you exist isn’t nearly as much fun as yelling
at liberals.