Ever since he got booted from Twitter and pretty much every other social media site out there, Donald Trump has been promising/threatening to make his own platform.
That platform is “Truth Social”, which states in its terms of service that users are not allowed to criticize or make fun of Trump. Yup, that guy is 100% dedicated to free speech so long as that speech is not critical of him or complimentary to Democrats.
It’s also just a straight-up Twitter knockoff in terms of design:
The platform finally went live in Apple’s app store this weekend and pretty much immediately, there were issues—even beyond the expected ones like abundant racism and misinformation. Because despite being available for download, users were finding themselves unable to even create an account. (To be honest, that sounds like the best possible scenario for this app.)
According to The Daily Beast, the app tried to sell the crash as a result of simply being too popular, telling would-be users, “Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist.”
The outlet’s Zachary Petrizzo writes:
The waitlist numbers fluctuated throughout the night, with The Daily Beast’s reporter at one point sitting at 96,427th place in line on Monday morning. Other users reported queue positions as high as 160,000.
Additionally, on Monday, a web status notice posted to Truth Social’s website read: “Due to the overwhelming demand at launch, we are currently rate-limited on onboarding new users to the platform. We are working to increase signup capacity for onboarding and will continue to update this status as capacity increases.”
Devin Nunes resigned from Congress earlier this year in order to take a position heading up the Trump Media & Technology Group. Shockingly, the man whose biggest claim to fame is unsuccessfully trying to sue a fake cow’s Twitter account is not doing a spectacular job at managing a social media platform.
Nunes went on Fox News Sunday and told the network, “Our goal is, I think we’re going to hit it, I think by the end of March we’re going to be fully operational at least within the United States.”
So Trump wanted to make a MAGA safe space after every other platform kicked him off, hired Devin Nunes of all people to get it off the ground, the whole thing broke on its very launch, and they don’t have plans to get it up and running for at least a month.
I honestly don’t know what anyone could have expected to have gone differently.
(image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
