Trump Isn’t Concerned About Free Speech, Just A Free Audience
I have to admit that it's been somewhat amusing watching Truth Social flop. After months of rumors (and a variety of competitors targeting the Trumpworld), Trump announced plans for his own Twitter clone, Truth Social, in October of last year, using a sketchy financial instrument to fund it. He found a perfect dupe in Congressman Devin Nunes to run the operation, whose only relevant experience seems to be suing Twitter accounts that mocked him. The promise of a free speech" supporting, Trumpist world, social media dissolved into obvious parody as Nunes promised the site would be heavily moderated with a ridiculous set of rules. There were already reports that the site was having difficulty attracting users, perhaps because Trumpist influencers" were whining that it's no fun if they're not upsetting the right people.
And now, more reports are coming out about just how much of a flop Truth Social is so far. An analysis of traffic to the site shows that it's in free fall.
The former president's social media network for MAGA disciples has sunk to about 60,000 new users a week.
This is down 93% from its launch week, when it saw 872,000 installs during the week of Feb. 21," Stephanie Chan of the analytics site Sensor Tower told The Wrap. We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch."
Truthsocial.com reportedly has fallen to 1.9 million weekly visits from a high of 6 million in the debut week for the Twitter-like platform, according to Similarweb stats cited by the news website.
As we've noted before, the problem for the people who complain about being moderated off of Twitter is not actually about free speech at all. Indeed, Twitter's policies actually do plenty to enable strong free speech principles. The real issue is that Trump and his friends didn't want a platform for free speech," they wanted a free audience" to rile up.
And no matter what you think of the 1st Amendment or free speech principles," they don't automatically grant you the power to force people to listen.