Endless Thread - The Truth Social, the whole Truth Social, and nothing but the Truth Social

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

Truth Social is not just a Twitter knock-off. While the social media platform that Donald Trump launched after he was banned from Twitter in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol only has about 600,000 monthly active users (of what appears to be five million total accounts), it might play an important role in the presidential election. Truth Social is where journalists go to get Trump's unfiltered takes. Even Vice President Kamala Harris is on it. Perhaps more importantly, Truth Social represents a significant proportion of Trump's personal net worth, making it potentially a critical tool for wealth and power. Endless Thread decodes why Truth Social matters to all Americans, whether they're posting on X, or truthing on Truth Social, with help from misinformation and disinformation-focused Professor Jo Lukito, and Pro Publica's Robert Faturechi. Show notes: Trump Media Whistleblower Blasts Company for Outsourcing Jobs Abroad as Betrayal of “America First” (ProPublica) Trump Media Quietly Enters Deal With a Republican Donor Who Could Benefit From a Second Trump Administration (ProPublica) Trump loses $1.3 billion in net worth after the worst-ever day for his social media stock (CNN) What to know about Truth Social, Trump’s social media platform (PBS News) This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski. The hosts are Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson.

Support for endless thread comes from Mathworks, creator of MATLAB and Simuling Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey folks, before we get started with this week's episode, just a reminder that we are looking for stories about political battles within your family ahead of the holidays on the internet's and in real life. We are working on an episode about this. We want to hear your story. Where can they get at us, Amory? Where can they get? How can they get in touch? Please send us an email to Endless Thread at WBUR.org.

We would love a voice memo. A written message is also fine, but really we want to know how the lines get blurry between these online debates, discussions that you have around politics with your family, and then how that translates to your offline relationship and maybe changes that relationship and maybe terminates that relationship. So, endless thread. At WBUR.org. Please put family politics in the subject line.

Okay, here's the show. WBURP Podcasts, Boston. Ben. Yeah? At your peak Twitter usage, how often would you say you were tweeting? Like every day. What was your daily tweet count? Are we counting bathtub tweets?

Like if I'm in the bath and tweeting? Absolutely. I'd say counting bathtub tweets, I'd say maybe five tops. Like a big day is five tweets. That is a big day. That's like me. I got to take a nap after. What about you?

I'm like two tops. A couple two tweet tweets? Couple two tweet tweets. Well, we are both solidly put to shame or maybe put to glory by the fact that Former President Trump, he was regularly flying tweet laps around both of us. Between getting a Twitter account in 2009 and the end of his presidency, Donald Trump tweeted 57,000 times. That's a lot. And during the final six months of his presidency, he was tweeting on average 35 times a day. Holy cafe, fe! That's a lot of tweets, mama me.

Trump's Twitter habit came to a screey. reaching halt just after January 6th, 2021. Donald Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter a few days after the attack on the Capitol. Twitter said his tweets played a role in inciting violence. He was also banned for a period of time from Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, full-on deplatformed for a couple of years there. But this is a man who has a lot to express. He'd have to put all those thoughts somewhere.

Even if he'd have to build that somewhere himself. He does love building things, or talking about building things, at least. It's going to be huge. Huge. Well, this month, we've been talking about online communities that are playing a role in the eminent election and the platform that Donald Trump created in his image. Well, that's one of them. His digital Mar-a-Lago, if you will. Oh, I will. A platform known as Truth Social.

I'm Ben Reed Truth in Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Severson. And from WVR and Boston, this is Endless Threat. We're looking at the blueprints of Truth Social. How Donald Trump has used the platform to increase his wealth and power. And whether Truth Social is built to last. And what that means for all of us. Today's episode, The Truth Social,

the Whole Truth Social. And nothing but the Truth Social. So, Amory, I hadn't spent too much time on truth social. You don't say. Yeah. Well, yeah, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit. It's too much. It's too much.

So rather than spend time there myself, I talk to somebody who has spent a lot of time there. I've been following Donald Trump's activity on social media for the better part of a few years. And so when he was removed from Twitter, which was his primary platform, I had been very interested and curious about where he might go to next. Josephine Lekito is a professor at the School of Media and Journalism at UT Austin. A lot of her research focuses on how political misinformation and disinformation are spread on social media. Basically, Joe is hanging out wherever political misinformation and disinformation might hang out.

Which you may be shocked to learn includes Truth Social. Truth Social has an outsized effect on misinformation and disinformation, and that's driven largely by Donald Trump. We'll get more into that misinformation. It's like a whole bathtub of misinformation that we'll get into and start tweeting from. But first, back to the beginning of Truth Social. Donald Trump made the first post on the site in February of 20th. The Post, quote, get ready. Your favorite president will see you soon. Language on the site boasted that it was a, quote, big tent social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest, global conversation without discriminating against political ideology, unquote.

It was supposed to be different from Twitter. But when Joe logged on to check it out, this is what she saw. The structure of truth social is almost a perfect parallel to one of Twitter, down to the ability to have verified accounts, down to the use of hashtags, down to the size of the messages. The equivalent of sharing a post like retweeting on Twitter is called a re-truth on truth social. The platform itself looks almost verbatim like what you would expect a small scale of Twitter to look like. And that is very intentionally designed, right? The people who built Truth Social didn't build the interface from scratch. They used the same backend as Mastodon, the open source Twitter replacement.

The team that put together Truth Social realized that Macedon would make for a really easy way to basically make a Donald Trump equivalent for Twitter. Donald Trump wasn't so much trying to build a social media site in his image, but in Twitter's image. But even if it looks the same, the users of Trump, Truth Social are quite different from Twitters. It perhaps surprises nobody that most of the folks who are on truth social are people who are in strong support of Donald Trump. Many of them are self-identified Trumpers or people who are part of the MAGA movement. We do see some Democrats and liberals on truth social.

The term among right-wing or conservative influencers is trolling the libs, right? Trying to get an emotional reaction out of liberal users. And we see the reverse of that on truth social where folks like Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or other Democrats actually intentionally be on truth social as a way of trolling the conservatives. The Harris campaign has been trolling hard on truth social this month. For example, they posted a split image of the presidential candidates, a faded picture of Trump looking faded and a picture of Kamala Harris beaming. Above their heads, they have the number of viewers each candidate got for interview. reviews that they did on Fox News on the same day. Harris, 7.1 million. Trump, three million. The caption is, have you seen this? And then they tagged Trump's truth social account.

Classic. So that's how the Harris campaign is using truth social. How does Donald Trump use it? He very much uses truth social as his megaphone. This is his place for him to say what he wants, when he wants. as often as he wants. And so even if he isn't directly involved with the actual coding or the mechanisms of truth social, he plays such a large role in truth social because, of course, truth social would never ban censor or remove any of Donald Trump's comments, right? He is not moderated on that platform in particular. And he uses truth social to try to get attention from news media and from other organizations,

whether that attention is good or bad. When Donald Trump has strong feelings about a certain Time magazine person of the year, for example, he's going to let his truth socialites know. Republican presidential candidate and the former U.S. President Donald Trump has shared his feelings on the singer Taylor Swift. He posted this, quote, I hate Taylor Swift, end quote. So for a little while at least, Trump's pop star hot takes only out of home on truth social. But these days, if he wanted to take them to Twitter, or X, he could.

Because when Elon Musk bought Twitter turned X in October of 2022, he adopted the same, Anything Goes attitude truth social said made it different from other platforms. Porn, Holocaust denialism, conspiracy theories, Elon Musk demanding that Americans copulate to populate. It's all on X. And Elon invited a lot of people who had previously been banned from the platform back, including former prolific tweeter-in-chief Donald Trump.

Even if Twitter is so much more massive than truth social, I imagine that in some ways there's some level of competition there, right? So like, how did that affect truth social? Yeah, that's such a great question because I think when Donald Trump created or advanced truth social, it was with the possibility that he might never end up back on Twitter. And now Elon Musk has reinstated former president Donald Trump on Twitter, but you see that he's still primarily and almost exclusively posts on Truth Social. And I think it's because of this competition you're discussing. If Trump moves to Twitter because, or I guess now X, given that Elon Musk purchased it, that would essentially mean that he would be killing Truth Social. That would no longer be a very popular platform. Yeah, I guess like he loses a bunch of money if he leaves Truth Social and it fails, right?

Totally. He loses a bunch of money. Reputationalally, right, he's someone who likes to show that he is good at business. And it would be essentially an admission of failure if he were to transition away from Truth Social into a platform like Twitter, that he had no control over. That isn't like he'd be essentially giving up on a business. But other conservative or right-wing voices who had been banned. And from Twitter pre-Musk don't have Trump's financial stake in truth social. When Musk reinstated their accounts, they rushed back.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Green, the satirical right-wing website Babylon D. Canadian men's rights advocate Jordan Peterson. For folks like Marjorie Taylor Green or Jordan Peterson, that calculus is not going to be as complicated. It might make more sense to just be on Twitter, especially if they can regain their audience or reach a larger audience because Twitter is so much of a larger platform. And non-celebrities started migrating back to Twitter, too, if they had ever left in the first place. Not because these figures from the right were there, but because they missed engagement from the left, Joe says. One thing that we see a lot among conservatives is their desire to be on platforms where liberals are present.

Because you cannot quote unquote own the libs if you are not on a platform that has. as liberal users. And so when we talk to, for example, pro-QAnon or pro-Maga individuals about why they stay on a platform like Facebook or why do they keep recreating Twitter accounts even after they've been banned, and for many of them, their motivation is to be on a platform where they can own the lips, where they can make fun of liberal candidates. You can't troll people who aren't there. I mean, you can, but it's less lively. There are about 600,000 monthly users of Truth Social, compared to more than 335 million users on X. This niche appeal is not necessarily a

sustainable business model, which isn't to say that Truth Social hasn't been lucrative in the short term. The company behind former President Donald Trump's social media app, Truth Social, has gone public, and it is off to a strong start. Shares of Trump Media and Technology Group climbed in early trading on the NASDAQ exchange. More about how truth social is paying off for Trump after the break. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics.

Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the Edge of what we think we know.

Wherever you get your podcasts. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences.

Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org.org slash creative studio. Okay, little recap for our tale as young as time. Former President Donald Trump gets banned from Twitter. He creates true social. Elon Musk buys Twitter, changes its name to X for reasons I barely understand, invites Donald Trump back. Lots of other people flood back, except the scientists in academics who have mostly left for Oh, yeah. And also not Trump so much, who still has big dreams for truth social. Or at least he's seeing big dollar signs, says Joe Lukito, our professor of journalism and media and truth social lurker.

Trump in particular was really motivated to have truth social go public because you can make a lot more money with an IPO compared to a private company. An IPO or initial public offering. And in March of this year, he did just that. Trump Media, the company that owns Truth Social, made its stocks available to the general public. You can buy a share. I can buy a share. On its opening day, the closing price per share was $58, which a lot of experts thought was overvalued. There are a lot of comparisons to GameStop. You remember that? Diamond Hands?

Chicken Tendies? The value of the stock seemed totally divorced. from the company's actual financial situation. One of the things that you'll notice in news coverage about truth social's finances is that they continue to lose money each quarter and they hold less money each quarter, especially if they're struggling to get advertisers, finding revenue streams through truth social can be quite tricky. Now, that doesn't sound so good for truth social, right? But its value is in the billions of dollars. it sometimes makes up a majority of Donald Trump's net worth. If Joe got on Truth Social because she follows misinformation,

pro-publica reporter Robert Fatteretchi got on because he's always following the money. It's incredibly important as he runs for president, and if he becomes president, because of the massive conflicts it potentially presents. As of September, Trump is allowed to sell his personal shares in Trump media, the parent company of True Social, Trump owns more than half the company. The expectation is that once he starts selling, you know, the share price would probably fall considerably. So the value on paper is not exactly the value he would extract if he started selling, but it could still be, you know, easily in the hundreds of millions of dollars, more than a billion, potentially more than a couple billion, depending on how, high the share price goes. A lot of people expect that if he were to win the election, the share

price would rise even further and, you know, it would make up an even higher percentage of his overall net worth. Robert says that there are other ways Truth Social might be useful to Trump. You've got vendors, you've got outside contractors, you've got advertisers. It has become this massive vector for influencing the potential future president. Roberts already seeing evidence of this. When Trump media recently announced a streaming deal, he noticed it was with a tiny entity owned by a Louisiana energy magnate named James Davison.

Davison is a very large GOP donor and a Trump donor. And he is someone whose businesses have an expansive lobbying agenda. He has personally, in the past, lobbied the Trump White House to get things that he wanted. And so to us, what that presented was a crystal clear example of the kind of conflict of interest that Trump's holdings in Trump media present. He is now in business with a major GOP donor who conceivably would want things from a second Trump White House. So Truth Social could potentially help Trump in a lot of ways, A way to make more money, a tool to leverage political favors.

And as we said earlier, as a personal megaphone, often Joe says for things that are not true. If it were not for Donald Trump, truth social would not be such a linchpin of mis and disinformation dissemination. Recent falsehoods Trump has posted or retruthed on truth social include a claim that Vice President Kamala Harris staged a coup to secure the Democratic nomination. That George Floyd's murder was a Democratic conspiracy to steal the 2020 election. In August, he promoted QAnon 15 times on Truth Social in a single day. Turns out just because you call something a re-truth, don't make it true. But because journalists are still quoting Donald Trump as a political candidate, and because Donald Trump continues to spread misinformation and disinformation about the election,

about his candidacy, about his competitor, we see the amplification of that intentionally or otherwise through news media. And yes, we do realize the irony in us detailing the lies that Trump has truthed on truth social. So we've learned a little bit about what's happening on truth social. But how are things behind the platform's curtain? Chaotic. Robert Federici and his ProPublica colleagues recently got their hands on an internal complaint made by truth social employees. It detailed accusations that their bosses are not putting America first,

but in fact, putting their words, America last by hiring people outside of the country who will work for cheap. Several high-level employees have since left the company. That main allegation here is hypocrisy, right? They're presenting themselves as being in line with Trump's stated political ideology, but what they're allegedly doing behind doors is, you know, closing off job opportunities for American workers and instead outsourcing that abroad.

So is Truth Social ever going to enter the pantheon of great American social networks? Joe Lekito thinks not. I do think that Truth Social has a ticking clock. There's a point in which Truth Social will end, specifically because there is only, so much of an audience base that Truth Social can get. And so the question becomes for Donald Trump or for Truth Social, are their business goals long term in the sense that they want to make a

sustainable 20-year-old platform? Or is their goal to make it go public and cash out? And I suspect that the goal is probably the latter. Right now, Truth Social is experiencing a sort of plateau. And I think in the next couple of years, what I'll be watching out for is this slow trickle and decline of truth social. Does that mean that you're expecting Trump to lose? I think it's really hard to know whether, you know, having been someone who was alive in 2016, I feel like I'm always going to be skeptical of any, like, any guesses as to how the election is going to turn out. I think if Donald Trump hypothetically, if Donald Trump loses the election, certainly truth social will probably go away. faster. But even if Donald Trump wins the election, I don't think, you know, truth social can

outlast his political career. And so even if we had four more years of Donald Trump as president, after that period, truth social is not going to be nearly as sustainable as it is now. I guess I would have thought about it a different way. I would have expected that like if Donald Trump wins, truth social might be the only social media left if he wins. I think just from the sense that, like, he might be banning or willing to ban all these other platforms. Yeah. I do think there's going to be some attempted pressure at this. However, even with platforms like TikTok and certainly with U.S.-based platforms, it's going to be very, very hard for any governing body, particularly the federal government, to, like, remove social media platforms, right?

I think that's true both because of the First Amendment and limitations placed on Congress. I think that's also true because American citizens like being on social media platforms. And so it wouldn't work to Donald Trump's benefit. Like it's not a politically advantageous goal of his, I think, to remove all these other platforms, just even if he wanted to amp up truth social status. American citizens do love being on social media platforms. I'll re-truth that. All right, Amory, it's the end of the episode.

We got to truth our truths. And I'll re-truth your truth if you read-truth, my truth. Okay, deal. Okay, perfect. All right, here's my truth. I mean, I think a thing that I think about when it comes to X and truth social. And, you know, frankly, like Reddit, which is, as I understand it and experience it, actually a very widely liberal form of, you know, social.

community media. I think, you know, none of us have left the filter bubble. The filter bubbles are just getting more and more intense. And I think that that sort of fundamentally breaks one of the promises of the early web and the early internet, which is that you can have meaningful conversations with people from all walks of life, from all over the place. And those conversations can, like, inform you and help you form opinions that are new and different and more informed by nature of the fact that you are able to talk to all different kinds of people all over the place. So I feel like truth social and the way that a lot of us interact with our social media is now, it's just getting more and more intense and more bifurcated. And we're seeing that play out in real life in the election. and I think that that is, I think it's a little problem for us, just a little problem.

I will re-truth that. And I guess my truth would be that it doesn't matter if you're tweeting or you're truthin or you're exing or you're posting. None of that is as important as you exercising your right to vote. So please get out there and get it done. Endless Threat is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Graeme. Tatter and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and me, Amory Sievertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Sumitajoshi is our managing producer. The rest of our team is Dean Russell and Paul Vycus. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between the internet and the presidential election happening right now. If you have an unsolved mystery and untold history, or another just great story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email Endless Thread at WBUR.

and don't forget. We want to know about the social media fights you're getting into with your family about politics. Email us a voice memo or a written message with family politics in the subject line. Endless thread at wbUR.org. Thank you. Yeah, that's what you said. He said tooth social. That's a different one. That's the dentist platform, tooth social.

Where the dentists go. talk. Or just tooth enthusiasts. What? Or just tooth enthusiasts. Tooth enthusiasts. Oh, no.