The social media platform backed by former President Donald Trump, following his permanent suspension from Twitter in January 2021, has billed itself as “America’s premier free speech social platform,” “The Tent of Social Media Platform” Great” of America” and “Social media without discrimination”. .”
Many found Trump’s statement to revolutionize social media. After all, he was The green golf jacket of the Twitterverse—riding on the platform’s algorithmic ability to increase disruption and spread misinformation all the way to the White House.
Alongside a new report that investigates whether everyone’s “truths” make it to Trump’s platform, experts weigh in on whether Truth Social is as dubious as other platforms when it comes to censorship.
Have those free speech promises been kept?
When Truth Social debuted this past Presidents’ Day weekend, the app was revealed to be what most pundits saw as a slick and shiny hit on Twitter.
The platform’s interface, “in terms of functionality, literally copied Twitter,” said Jesse Lehrich, Accountable Tech’s co-founder and senior advisor.
By design, it was a cheap rip-off of the platform from which Trump was suspended. “Tweet” and “retweet” were replaced with “Truth” and “reTruth”. User feeds, profile pages, button shapes, and menu items all resembled Twitter and the usual social media infrastructure. The classic light blue color palette was slightly darker: eggplant purple.
But there was still the promise of riding the amber waves of free speech that Trump hoped would attract patriotic minds. In the news release announcing Truth Social last October, he promised to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against Silicon Valley’s ‘Big Tech’ companies.”
Trump was unhappy when Twitter reported misinformation about Covid-19 and false claims about the election, and deleted hate speech — perhaps some positive, visible steps platforms have taken to moderate the way users behave and engage with information.
But Truth Social has done a similar thing, says a new report released by Cheyenne Hunt-Mayer, a Big Tech accountability fellow at Public Citizen. Hunt-Mayer found that Truth Social restricted posts and images that discussed reproductive rights, gun control and the Jan. 6 hearings. But as for Trump, he’s not even censoring that well.
In a now-viral TikTok, Hunt-Mayer explained that any post that included the phrase “abortion is health care” could not be posted, regardless of context. And she noted that while left-leaning posts were restricted, images with pro-gun quotes and anti-Ukraine phrases were also being banned.
Not just censorship, but sneaky censorship by “shadow ban”
But if there’s one thing Truth Social authentically replicates from Twitter, it’s fickle, leveraged traction by algorithmically deciding what appears in people’s feeds, Hunt-Mayer’s report says. It’s called shadow banning — which, as defined by Truth Social, is “a deceptive and manipulative practice where a social media platform artificially limits the visibility of a user’s posts without the user’s knowledge. Shadow banning is a practice often used by Big Tech social media platforms to effectively censor users who question dominant narratives or hold unfavorable political views.
But no social media platform is ready for the shadow ban.
“When it comes to the architecture of what these platforms are actually doing, it’s just a black box,” Lehrich said. “In theory, reducing violent, borderline content is good practice, but there’s no way of knowing what they’re actually doing. It’s all self-reported.”
“The term ‘shadow ban’ is one of those interesting, nebulous tech phrases that means different things to different people,” Lehrich said.
When the term was first introduced, it was taken to mean that a user could continue to post, but not know that the platform is partially or completely restricting others from seeing that post. In other words, the user can see that they posted, but no one else can.
“But it’s been chosen to mean any time someone’s distribution is limited or not retweeted as much as they normally would,” Lehrich said.
Twitter’s algorithm is not without purpose. In 2018, in response to right-wing outrage over Twitter’s alleged shadow banning of Republican politicians, Twitter issue a statement asserting that he was not directly involved in the practice. Instead, it used its algorithm to bury the posts of “malicious actors” deep in people’s feeds.
“The algorithm is designed to maximize engagement,” Lehrich said. “One might think they’re being shadow-banned on Twitter, Facebook or YouTube, but they’re really just not posting often enough or following the right people.”
Shadow bans are different from outright censorship — seen in countries like China — where posts critical of the government will be removed and one’s account is likely to be disabled. It’s also different from the warning tags added to misinformation posts, many of which are allowed to stay with those flags.
Will Social be real in another six months?
The road ahead for Trump’s social media baby looks pretty bleak. Since debuting at No. 1 in the Apple Store’s social networking category, progress has been a slow, bumpy ride. The app has fallen to 68th place since Friday and has not yet been adapted for Android phones (although a pre-order option is available).
As reported by Reuters, the app’s 2.8 million downloads since July 1 are considered laughable by some, given its high-profile endorsement. The most prominent users — of whom there are very few verified accounts — include (surprisingly) the Democratic governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and (surprisingly) Trump himself.
And major questions about Truth Social’s funding remain. The planned merger of the parent company of Truth Social and Digital World Acquisition Corp. — a so-called SPAC designed for investors to merge with another company and go public without the need for an initial public offering — is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. In June, Digital World said executives from both companies had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury in New York.
If the truth is told, what happens next is that social truth is anyone’s guess.
Thanks to Lillian Barkley for copy editing this article.
