If you ask donald trump, Social truth is fine. If you ask Truth Social, well…it seems like they’d rather you didn’t ask at all.
Trump’s fledgling social media platform recently made a change that makes it harder to track an important metric of the site’s growth. Like Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, Truth Social allowed users to endlessly scroll through an account’s followers and accounts that amplified or interacted with its posts. This data is helpful in assessing the overall health of the site and its legit growth rate.
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But now, Truth Social is monitoring access to this information more closely. Rather than allowing users to see all followers of an account, users are limited to 40 of them. On web browsers, Truth Social is even more stingy with “reTruths” – its equivalent of retweets – allowing a user to see only 15 of the accounts that boosted a post. On Truth Social’s iPhone app, follower lists remain capped at 40, while a full list of reTruthers is available on select posts.
Without being able to see full subscriber lists, it’s hard to separate real user growth from artificially accelerated growth. For example, Trump’s recent post accusing the FBI of “offering evidence” during his search for Mar-a-Lago has more than 16,000 “reTruths” on his list of more than 4 million followers. But researchers looking to gauge the authenticity of Trump’s followers are limited to viewing 40 followers at a time.
The change was subtle, but that didn’t stop eagle-eyed industry pundits from spotting it. “Truth [Social] recently started restricting site functionality,” said David Thiel, CTO of the Stanford University Internet Observatory. rolling stone. “For example, if a post is supposed to have thousands of likes or ‘reTruths’, or if a user has thousands of followers, it will actually only let you see a few dozen of them, making it impossible to tell if any of their engagement numbers are real.This may be an attempt to obscure slow growth.
Truth Social did not respond during the 7-day notice they were given to comment on this story. After the publication, a post on the company’s account indicated that full listings of reTruths were available through the platform’s iPhone app.
The anti-transparency effort is just the latest sign of trouble for Trump’s response to Twitter. The social media platform has already warned investors that it may not be profitable, stiffened one of his major suppliers and pleaded with Google to endorse a long-awaited Android app.
The question of the potential obfuscation of real growth data, however, has plagued other social media giants far more successful than Trump’s vanity project – notably in the ongoing saga of terminal online billionaire Elon Musk and its legal dispute with Twitter. This year, Musk tried to get out of his $44 billion buyout of the social media company by claiming Twitter lied about the percentage of fake users on the platform. In its SEC filings, Twitter said it believes no more than five percent of its daily active users are made up of “fake or spam accounts.” TMTG, the parent company of Truth Social, offered no such estimate of the percentage of fake accounts in its filings with the SEC.
Trump was banned from Twitter early last year for his role in instigating the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot, and has publicly insisted he now prefers to use his own MAGA emulation of the platform. The twice-impeached former president also boasts that Truth Social is a runaway success and in great shape – even though he is complained several times in stripped of its glaring shortcomings. In fact, Trump became so frustrated with the spring of that year that he summoned his eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., to lead a “rescue missionin an attempt to rescue Truth Social.
In the present day, as Trump continues to project his supposed confidence in his app, the ex-president and budding social media mogul has been quick to remind some of those close to him that any current or future fumble is not surely not his default. According to a person familiar with the matter, Trump insisted to his allies this summer that by (finally) posting prolifically on the website, he was doing his part in bringing this “incredible value” to the company.
“His attitude is that if other people don’t do the job, then those dollars stop with them,” the sources say, and “definitely not him.”
Update: On September 18, this story was updated to reflect that on the iPhone app, full lists of reTruthing accounts are available on some posts.
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