The reason Donald Trump isn’t leaving the money pit that is Truth Social for the Elon Musk-owned Twitter? He can’t let something with his name attached to it fail, which has obviously never happened before. The Washington Post reports that the former president “has told his allies that he can’t leave Truth Social, because he’s propping it up, and he doesn’t want a site so closely associated with his brand to collapse.”
Trump has four million followers on Truth Social, compared to the 88 million that he had on Twitter (many of which were bots). He’s repeatedly claimed that the app is bigger than “TikTok, Twitter, Facebook and the rest,” but “in September, Truth Social had fewer than 1.7 million monthly unique visitors in the United States,” the Post reports. That’s lower than “the websites for the crypto news source CoinDesk, the drugstore chain CVS Health, and the internal job-listing page for Walmart.” And unlike Truth Social, CVS.com is useful (it can tell you the nearest location to buy half-priced candy after Halloween).
After a delayed start on his own platform, Trump has begun using it actively, posting memes and sharing messages from accounts promoting QAnon, the jumbled set of conspiracy theories that herald him as the ultimate warrior against a “deep state” cabal of satanic elite. Truth Social, however, has failed to gain the kind of mainstream base of users or advertisers on which most major social networks rely.
Maybe Trump is correct in avoiding Twitter. He doesn’t have to deal with this:
elon musk posted a photo of a nazi followed by a post telling ppl to vote republican. 30 minutes apart. pic.twitter.com/wWz9OwF02Z
— Marlow Stern (@MarlowNYC) November 7, 2022
Remember when Trump was tweeting about Diet Coke? Those were the days.
(Via the Washington Post)