Trump's Truth Social app launched Monday. It immediately crashed for 13 hours.
Announcements claiming that former President Donald Trump's new social media app, Truth Social, would be available for download on Monday proved to be technically true but did not facilitate much socializing, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
Per the Post, Truth Social "has been almost entirely inaccessible in the first days of its grand debut because of technical glitches, a 13-hour outage, and a 300,000-person waitlist."
Just after 5 p.m. ET on Tuesday, the waitlist appeared to be 476,784 names long.
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The app itself looks very similar to Twitter, except the verification checkmarks are red, tweets and retweets are called "truths" and "retruths," and Trump isn't banned.
Developers said they had "stabilized the account creation process," putting an end to the long outage but not to the waitlist, according to the Post.
Despite Trump's frequent condemnations of Big Tech social media censorship and Section 230, the law which enables platforms to choose the content they host, his new social network relies heavily on both content moderation and Section 230. Devin Nunes, a former Republican congressman who oversees Truth Social as CEO of the Trump Media and Technology Group, says the site will maintain a "family friendly" environment overseen by the same auto-moderation company used by Facebook and Twitter.
TMTG plans to go public following a merger with special purpose acquisition company Digital World Acquisition Corp. The merger is under SEC investigation.
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Grayson Quay was the weekend editor at TheWeek.com. His writing has also been published in National Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Modern Age, The American Conservative, The Spectator World, and other outlets. Grayson earned his M.A. from Georgetown University in 2019.
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