Monday is Presidents Day, so apparently failed, one-term, twice-impeached former President Donald Trump thought it would be the ideal day to launch his social media site, Truth Social.
The Hill reports the site isn’t quite at full functionality, but that isn’t stopping Trump and his investors from going full speed ahead.
According to a beta tester given early access, the platform isn’t quite ready for primetime just yet.
“The app still has a lot of issues,” Ben Rabizadeh, founder and CEO of the social investing platform Story Trading, told The Hill Friday. “The major issue with the app is it’s slow, it’s laggy.”
Also, Truth Social is basically just a copy of Twitter, minus the hundreds of millions of users that make Twitter (along with Facebook) the top social media sites on the planet:
Rabizadeh described the layout of the platform as visually similar to Twitter, Trump’s preferred platform while he was in office.
“The design is clean,” he added. “When you look at a screenshot it looks like Twitter but when you use it the flow is a lot different.”
Users have been able to sign up for access to Truth Social for months now, and yet as of Friday the site still has less than 2,000 users who want to be part of the ex-president’s foray into social media.
The greatest challenge facing Truth Social may wind up being its ability (or inability) to keep it from becoming a outlet for right-wing nutjobs and tinfoil hat wearers:
Truth Social will likely be confronted with the reality sooner or later that it will have to moderate some content if it wants to be hosted on major app stores and retain advertisers.
“The main thing I’m curious about is whether whoever is running this platform is going to allow it to devolve into a site for conspiracy theorists and white supremacists,” Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, told The Hill.
With Donald Trump’s named attached to it, you can bet there will be plenty of crazies.
But when you consider that Trump has been a failure at every venture he’s ever tried, it’s not exaggeration to predict that Truth Social will be defunct by this time next year.
