Donald Trump’s Twitter-killer Truth Social has a big problem: “Nobody ever goes there anymore — it’s too crowded.”
I’m not here to slag on Trump or Truth Social. Well, maybe a little on Truth Social. I had wanted to it to succeed so much that I jumped on the waitlist immediately when it launched in February of 2022. But the platform was so riddled with bugs and missing features, the social media space was so barren, and its user security so non-existent, that after a while I deleted my account.
“There just isn’t a whole lot of there, there,” I wrote almost exactly one year ago today. “If you’re looking for links from big names like Dan Bongino, you’ll find them on Truth, same as you’ll find them on Gettr, Parler, and Gab. If you’re looking for some fun conversation, it looks like the user base just isn’t big enough at this point.”
A year later, the user base still isn’t big enough to compete. In fact, Truth’s most important metric — its active user base — is shrinking.
“Truth Social’s monthly web and desktop visits reached a high of 11.5 million visitors in August 2022 but have been on the decline since then, falling to just 5.7 million in February,” according to Similarweb stats quoted in a Bloomberg report on Wednesday.
Twitter, Truth Social’s inspiration and rival, had 6.1 billion visits in the same timeframe. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess how people like me, who for work must keep multiple Twitter tabs open in Tweetdeck virtually 24/7/365, add up in that figure. Journalists and opinion writers don’t visit Twitter so much as we’re always there.
I write for a certain blog that generates more traffic than Truth’s social media platform does and for another one that’s closing in on it. To put it bluntly, a social media platform can’t thrive with blogger numbers.
As a result, Truth Social’s parent company “has trimmed staff while awaiting regulatory approval for a merger,” according to “two people with knowledge of the matter,” in that same Bloomberg story. Trump Media & Technology Group has “laid off bout half a dozen people,” including senior members like Chief Technology Officer William “BJ” Lawson. He’s the third person to hold the position in the company’s brief history.
It’s fair to ask if the Biden Administration is delaying approval to screw Trump, but poor finances are merely a symptom of the platform’s troubles, not the cause.
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According to Bloomberg’s sources, the company has enough money to keep operations going at current spending levels only through September. It would be a shame if Truth Social were to fail, but hardly unexpected.
Launching a successful social media platform is not easy, particularly in a market already so crowded. Facebook does one thing, Instagram does another, and Twitter provides a third service. Each one is aimed at providing a different kind of service, connecting its users for different purposes. The network effects generated by each platform are nearly impossible to penetrate, and so out of necessity, each one is unique.
Maybe that’s what’s killing Truth Social: It’s a clone of Twitter, not something new and original.
PJ’s own Athena Thorne said to me today that Truth was “never going to do any better than Gab or any of the other alternatives.” The problem is that “Big Tech allows just enough viewpoint diversity on its platforms so everyone feels accommodated.”
With everyone feeling comfy-cozy on Twitter, that’s when “they sneaky censor and suppress the important things,” Athena told me. “Even with Elon Musk in charge,” I have to add. Censorship of dissenting opinion (and even of contrary facts) is so baked into Twitter’s source code that Musk admitted that the platform needs to be rewritten from scratch.
Even a billionaire like Trump can’t fund a money-losing venture forever, and it’s difficult to see Truth Social becoming a success — despite the noble goal of giving users an escape from censorship. That kind of outlet is why PJ Media launched our thriving VIP subscription service in 2019 and why we’re offering a 40% discount with the current SAVEAMERICA promo code. We don’t have a billionaire backing us, but we do enjoy support from happy readers just like you.
Trump was the man with enough imagination and vision to build a real estate empire, create and host the most popular reality show of all time, and — this is the big one — tweet his way into the Oval Office. But that yuge imagination and vision weren’t quite there when it came to taking on Twitter.
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