Donald Trump has published his very first post on his new social media platform. How do we know this? Because his son shared a screenshot of it on Twitter.
On Tuesday night, the former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., share a screenshot of his father’s very first post on Truth Social on his Twitter. The platform has not launched publicly.
“Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” read the post on Truth Social.
“Time for some Truth!!!” tweeted Trump Jr., sharing the screenshot on the website that banned his dad after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021 in an attempt to overturn the official election results.
A few others in the Trump orbit have also shared screenshots of their own debut Truth Social posts. The video service Rumble, which has pivoted into a “free speech” conservative media platform following those events at the Capitol, tweeted out a screenshot promoting how its company will power video on Truth Social.
The screenshot-sharing campaign was clearly an endeavor to promote the upcoming launch of Truth Social. However, from a marketing perspective, it seems like a missed opportunity, primarily because there was nothing to promote.
Truth Social has still not launched. There is no officially launch date for when the social network will go live. A pre-order page on Apple’s App Store for the Truth Social iOS app lists a Feb. 21 release date. However, according to a recent report from TIME, that date has since been pushed back to “late March.”
One thing that is clear, though, is that Truth Social looks like an exact replica of Twitter. The posts all look like tweets, complete with similar looking reply, retweet, share, and like buttons. The profile page looks like you’re viewing a user’s account on Twitter. Perhaps the biggest difference is the dystopian renaming of “tweets” as “truths.”
For a platform that’s not even publicly available yet, Truth Social has already experienced its fair share of issues. A horde of trolls descended on an unreleased test version of the website on the day it was announced last October. These trolls registered fake Donald Trump accounts and filled the website with memes, such as “Pig Poop Balls.”
Then Truth Social had to deal with licensing issues. The conservative social network is powered by open-source software, Mastodon. However, Trump’s platform broke the software’s policy by removing any credits pointing back to Mastodon. Truth Social quietly fixed those issues late last year.
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the conservative online media landscape changes when Truth Social finally launches. The social network Parler became a right-wing darling shortly after the 2020 presidential election, even peaking on the App Store’s top charts. Not long after, Gettr was launched by former Trump advisor Jason Miller. That platform seems to have replaced Parler in popularity amongst Trump supporters.
It seems likely that a pro-Trump platform that actually features Trump himself as a user will become the defacto right-wing social network. We’ll find out on Feb. 21, or late March, or whenever Truth Social ends up actually launching.
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