The outcome is eminently unsurprising: any social network set up by a figure as polarizing as Trump is practically guaranteed to fail.
Truth Social
has now fallen to a dismal 35th place among social networks on the app store, according to market research firm SensorTower. Some members of the company's own leadership seem to be realizing the effort is a bust.
According to Reuters, the senior executives in charge of Truth Social's technology and product development, Josh Adams and Billy Boozer,
have left the company. (Adams did not respond to a request for comment and Boozer declined to comment to Reuters on his departure.)
Some users who have tried to sign up say they haven't been approved. And some content about major brands on the app doesn't seem to be coming from the brands themselves, according to CNN.
When CNN
asked a spokesperson for the wallstreetbets community on Reddit whether they were controlling the content about their community on Truth Social, the response was telling.
The spokesperson said that Truth Social was "running the account as an RSS feed under our subreddit name" and while Truth Social had offered to allow the community to run its account itself, the offer was "declined" because "a core tenet of our community is remaining apolitical."
The response reveals that people and organizations recognize that participating in this social network is a political act -- one that directly aligns themselves with the former President and all he has come to represent. Sixty-one percent
of American adults, who according to a March 2022 Marquette Law School poll, hold an unfavorable view of the former President, likely would not find that an attractive premise.
Truth Social and Trump Media and Technology Group, the app's parent company, didn't immediately respond to a request from CNN for comment.
Trump, let's recall, is famous for using social media to tweet what
congressional investigators believe was essentially an invitation to extremists to storm the Capitol last year. The former President has denied any responsibility for the January 6 insurrection. As a result of the attack, he's been
permanently barred on Twitter and
suspended for at least two years by Facebook.
Trump also refused to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election -- and
even tried to overturn the results, through failed litigation, pressure on election officials and pressure on his vice president.
And he's been widely recognized as a man who makes
misogynist remarks, calling everyone from Vice President Kamala Harris to Denmark's Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen "nasty." He also has a history of attacking minority groups -- from
Latino immigrants to
Muslims. In his book, "Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It," Helio Fred Garcia
found that after Trump verbally attacked groups, including Hispanics and Muslims, hate crimes against them increased.
In short, to sign up for Truth Social is to lend legitimacy to the former President and his behavior. It's no wonder that a lot of companies and people aren't clamoring to do so: they recognize that joining would cause self-inflicted reputational damage to themselves by mere association.
As a result, it simply isn't possible for this social network to take off on a significant scale. After all, the value of a social network to a user depends in large part on how many other people are using it. If users can't communicate with a lot of other people and groups because they aren't on the platform, joining becomes a less attractive proposition.
The idea that the value of something like a social network increases as its number of users increases is known as
Metcalfe's Law. Even if you don't discuss politics on a social network with a relative or friend with whom you disagree, you still might like seeing pictures of their kids growing up, or benefit from being able to contact them to arrange a carpool to soccer practice or plan Thanksgiving dinner.
While it's remarkable that a social network started by a person who bills himself as a successful businessman and who previously served as leader of the free world appears to be plagued by so much mismanagement, that's not the ultimate root of the problem here.
The insurmountable obstacle Truth Social faces is that Trump's reputation has undermined its chances of long-term success.
Most Americans do not want to associate with anything he creates. And a social network on which you can't actually be social or network with many people is destined for failure.