B. Trump is very critical of the FBI (Steele dossier, Page & Strzok) and would be loathe to attach his name to something FBI-related;
C. The FBI already did a honeypot for terrorists with the "ANOM Phone" running "ArcaneOS," which had hilarious psuedosecurity methods that actually convinced them.
If the lack of outright a-priori cancellation of this app is surprising, that may be an opportunity for one to check one's premises underpinning assumptions.
Banning it straight away or not allowing them on at all gives them more power, you just have to wait for them to skirt a rule and you can blame them for their own banning.
I presume they've made the same mistake as that other one did, building on centralized infrastructure so they'll probably end up getting banned from AWS too.
Why would Apple do that? First, there's unlikely to be a big market for this (think Parler) so why would Apple involve itself on something that probably won't matter? Second, if there are any problems (eg security) or ToS/policy violations, Apple can't just assume those will happen. it has to be reactive.
There is literally zero upside in taking preemptive action here.
> Many users reported either having trouble registering for an account or were added to a waitlist with a message: "Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist."
Huh? Apple is not the one that's throttling and causing the error messages. Apple approved the app and provided app downloads to all the folks. Not sure what you're talking about.
Anything related to the trans row will get you banned from Twitter. Obviously it's quite hard to give examples, as you know there not in Twitter anymore.
This lady is quite famous in the UK and is banned from Twitter for her not so extreme views:
Oh, honestly, don't be silly, Twitter is _full_ of bloody transphobes.
That billboard wasn't taken down by twitter (it was probably taken down by the advertising agency, who generally prefer not to be involved in that sort of thing once it's pointed out to them). And the person in question _does_ appear to have an active twitter account?
So I only linked to that BBC article to give some context... As you say it has nothing to do with Twitter, because as I said it's hard to give examples of people being blocked on Twitter for having perfectly reasonable and mainstream views.
This example and the others just prove the point, really. The only people clamouring about "thought police" are cranks, extremists and other parasites; when they go somewhere else just for them en masse it will rapidly devolve.
Regardless of your political opinions it is undeniable that advertising could associate you with some unpleasantness and while there are brands willing to do so, they have already seen business reputational damage by doing so.
They could try charging users directly, but that has struggled historically (particularly for social networks wherein the network effect is a key success metric).
I don't think you need to have a business model if you can be sure of user growth and app downloads. In today's startup economy you can get almost unlimited funds as long as you can provide growth... the revenue can come later, it's not really a requirement for doing business.
The business goal is to get Trump re-elected. Candidates since multiple multiple millions of dollars to build a narrative and build their image as the candidate of choice. Making a social media app is just the next logical conclusion.
It could be a loss leader. I strongly believe that Reddit's biggest value proposition is that the site can be used to shape public opinion. This is hard to directly monetize, but I sense that the content that makes its way to the frontpage is rife with manipulation.
However, there is also a possibility that they are specifically looking for advertisers who are unabashedly conservative/on the right. I can easily see businesses branding themselves as the conservative alternative to [xyz]. A great example is MyPillow and Black Rifle Coffee. (Although B.R.C. has fallen out of favor lately).
If you look at the official names for countries you notice some trends. One of them is that use of the words "People's" and "Democratic" in the country name tend to indicate a brutal dictatorship. Examples:
- GDR: German Democratic Republic (ie East Germany). Totalitarian state.
- PRC: People's Republic of China. Also autocratic.
- DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (ie North Korea). This one is a two-fer and definitely a brutal dictatorship.
With all that being said, I present to you "Truth Social".
You can't just respond to something unrelated and say "trust in CNN is evaporating" or whatever the parent comment was going. What does that have to do with Trump's new social media thing using the more dictatorial names for countries?
It's something that should be called "The advertising law of opposites" or something. It extends to more than just countries to many slogans, such as Facebook's current 'Move fast """together""" '
Social Media has turned into one of humanities worst creations. I don't understand how any developer can work in that industry with a clear conscience. It is ethically and morally bankrupt.
IMO you would be doing less damage to society if you worked in the Military Industrial Complex, at least you were being honest about what you're working on.
Nah, are you forgetting about all the examples of user manipulation? Cambridge Analytics, the Rohingya Genocide, the impact on young people / peoples mental health, body dysmorphia. There is a very long list!
The worst thing about it is the people behind these platforms know exactly what their products are doing and they profit from it.
The problem is it allows people/organizations "to do what people do at scale" with light or no consequences. And they make it very easy for people to do it and to get hooked on it.
I'm not so sure that's 100% true in the absence of social media. If it were there would be millions/billions of actual physical confrontations per day.
Fortunately I think the age of social media might come to an end soon. When ai is strong enough to pass as a human (online) what's to stop the majority of accounts being ai-controlled by bad actors? We're already seeing the start of this and it's only going to get worse. This will force the social media companies to place very heavy restrictions on accounts. Twitter for example requires a user to have a valid phone number, but there are ways around this. More and more of their energy well be in combating these bad actors, placing a large financial burden on running the business.
I think you're right - and that in the future social networks will likely be relegated to kids just having fun again, they're just too easy to manipulate to be taken seriously with substantive social issues. I also wonder how much farther this will go... will YouTube suffer an authenticity crisis? Will people only trust things that they see with their own eyes? Or will a way be developed to assure folks that what they are seeing is authentic and not AI generated/manipulated?
Due to how polarizing the founding team is, it seems to me like this is a major attempt at a niche social network.
Previously, the social network playbook has been to try to capture as much of the population as possible, but I’m sure that Trump knows a large chunk of the population will never support or join the platform.
I think the polarization is also a feature, not a bug. Because once it is available, Trump likely believes a lot of these people will leave Twitter and Facebook. This will (in his view) result in a split market between Twitter (Left) and Truth Social (Right). No doubt both sides will view the other as deluded, but at least there (hopefully) won't be as many flame wars.
A flame war and an echo chamber are two sides of the same coin IMO.
Also, power seems to fracture almost indefinitely. Trump went after fellow Republicans. I’m sure there will be similar fights to become the voice du jour of Truth Social.
I'm pretty skeptical of their ability to build a functioning social network, purely from a technical perspective. It's a complicated problem to solve at any meaningful degree of scale.
With that said I think some people here might be too quick to dismiss the market opportunity a new social network could take advantage of.
You'll frequently see messages here about how terrible Reddit has gotten, in part because of heavy-handed moderation.
A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
Again, I doubt this particular app will succeed but I also wouldn't be surprised if the demand was real.
>A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
And then they will face the same market forces as Facebook and Reddit, and be forced to either capitulate or remain a tiny niche. Which may sound fine to a programmer, but anyone investing serious money into this will force their hand. And then the cycle repeats.
I don't understand why anyone investing money would be a serious issue. Trump has enough money to keep it going until he can get ad revenue or subscriptions, so I don't see why he would need to sell it or capitulate to market forces unless he wanted to. I would have a hard time believing that Trump is not approaching it as a business.
>I would have a hard time believing that Trump is not approaching it as a business.
I also have a hard time believing he would invest a single a penny of his own money into this. He's a repulsive human being, but he's not an idiot. And his investors will be calling the shots.
If it’s like every other Trump-branded venture, he’s happy to get paid to lend his name and equally happy to leave customers and business partners in the lurch as soon as he sees something more interesting.
As we saw with Tumblr, trying to sanitize a platform to make it corporate-friendly can also be a great way to shoot yourself in the foot. If the operators are smart, they will be happy with a target audience of "just" 75 million people in the US and right-leaning advertisers.
> A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
I agree there is demand for a non-moderated social network, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it. From their own term's of service:
> users may not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”
> A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
Doesn't this already exist in the form of Gab? I think they don't remove content except NSFW/pronography, doxing, and violations of US law.
> It's a complicated problem to solve at any meaningful degree of scale.
I doubt this is necessarily true. Modern social media is complex engineering specifically because of the demands of the Panopticon department for determining your users' underwear color for your advertisers.
If your software is for political community and/or propaganda purposes and not for the benefit of advertisers, I'd bet anything that your technical complexity drops by an absolutely enormous factor. You're CRUDing text, images, and social graph data, maybe you're storing videos in an s3 bucket. And you're probably doing some basic sharding and caching.
> we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
A reasonable pitch to users. But to advertisers and others? Not so much.
If you create a social platform that appeals very strongly to a small minority but where the content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there. And running a social media platform is expensive. User demand isn’t what I’d worry about, it’s sales (of ads and paid subscriptions). I don’t think there is a market for either of those if Parler/Gab were any indication.
>>[T]he content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there.
Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter? We have seen how social media companies have entered into overt political actions to control narratives. Trump is attempting to build his own version of this. And it's still early but he's not doing a bad job so far, he's raking in tons of money from investors. These "investors" aren't looking to make money, they are investing in political influence similar to those people who were pumping billions into the Clinton foundation to buy access/influence.
> Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter?
You don't. But running these operations at scale is extremely expensive, so you need a lot of income. It's possible to run it as a money sink provided you e.g. have investor money or, as in the case of previous right wing attempts, "donor money". But regardless of how the money is raised, it's rarely a charity that can go on forever. Everything we have seen so far indicates this isn't really a viable investment. Gab, Parler and similar have exactly this business model: operate at a loss through donor money. The audience isn't nearly big enough to motivate the spend, and the cost scales linearly with the audience unless there is a big ad income. The question shouldn't be why this should fail, but what sets it apart from Gab and Parler, other than "This time it's Trump".
I agree. I’m the admin for a couple moderately sized FB groups (roughly 250k users each).
The amount of content that is attempted to be posted by troll farms and bots is staggering. We originally had less moderation, and once the troll farms see they are being successful the amount of fake posts quickly outnumber the real posts.
And I’m not talking about just misinformation. One troll farm (I think it was one farm as all the profiles were from the same city in the Philippines) was just posting ASCII art pornography.
I give them 3 months of being open to the general public before being overrun with spam.
'free speech'... "PROHIBITED ACTIVITIES... disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site." - TRUTH Social TERMS OF SERVICE 7.12
It's just terrible, seeing how oppressed Trump and his cohort are... crushed into silence under the iron jackboot of cancel culture and the globalist deep state Marxist media conspiracy that controls thought and communication for most of humanity, made pariahs by the progressive hate-mobs, unable to participate in society because of their political views. Sad. Sad!
96 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadB. Trump is very critical of the FBI (Steele dossier, Page & Strzok) and would be loathe to attach his name to something FBI-related;
C. The FBI already did a honeypot for terrorists with the "ANOM Phone" running "ArcaneOS," which had hilarious psuedosecurity methods that actually convinced them.
B) Trump is critical of a lot of groups that believe him a useful idiot.
C) cool story.
Fortnite,
tons of things depicting Pepe the Frog,
I presume they've made the same mistake as that other one did, building on centralized infrastructure so they'll probably end up getting banned from AWS too.
There is literally zero upside in taking preemptive action here.
Seems like false scarcity. Or a beta test.
What incentives could Apple possibly have for helping this firm?
It sounded like the Apple App Store was wait-listing downloaders.
This lady is quite famous in the UK and is banned from Twitter for her not so extreme views:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45650462
That billboard wasn't taken down by twitter (it was probably taken down by the advertising agency, who generally prefer not to be involved in that sort of thing once it's pointed out to them). And the person in question _does_ appear to have an active twitter account?
Regardless of your political opinions it is undeniable that advertising could associate you with some unpleasantness and while there are brands willing to do so, they have already seen business reputational damage by doing so.
They could try charging users directly, but that has struggled historically (particularly for social networks wherein the network effect is a key success metric).
However, there is also a possibility that they are specifically looking for advertisers who are unabashedly conservative/on the right. I can easily see businesses branding themselves as the conservative alternative to [xyz]. A great example is MyPillow and Black Rifle Coffee. (Although B.R.C. has fallen out of favor lately).
- GDR: German Democratic Republic (ie East Germany). Totalitarian state.
- PRC: People's Republic of China. Also autocratic.
- DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (ie North Korea). This one is a two-fer and definitely a brutal dictatorship.
With all that being said, I present to you "Truth Social".
It's not this. It's that the names are ironic: - GDR: German Democratic Republic (ie East Germany). Totalitarian state.
- PRC: People's Republic of China. Also autocratic.
- DPRK: Democratic People's Republic of Korea (ie North Korea). This one is a two-fer and definitely a brutal dictatorship.
- Truth Social
And so the above poster's point was that this is also ironic:
- CNN, "The Most Trusted Name In News."
Or maybe that was the WWE, who can tell them apart.
IMO you would be doing less damage to society if you worked in the Military Industrial Complex, at least you were being honest about what you're working on.
The worst thing about it is the people behind these platforms know exactly what their products are doing and they profit from it.
The problem is it allows people/organizations "to do what people do at scale" with light or no consequences. And they make it very easy for people to do it and to get hooked on it.
That argument has the same flaw as the National Rifle Association's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people".
Guns don't kill people. I kill people. With guns.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC03hmS1Brk
Previously, the social network playbook has been to try to capture as much of the population as possible, but I’m sure that Trump knows a large chunk of the population will never support or join the platform.
Also, power seems to fracture almost indefinitely. Trump went after fellow Republicans. I’m sure there will be similar fights to become the voice du jour of Truth Social.
With that said I think some people here might be too quick to dismiss the market opportunity a new social network could take advantage of.
You'll frequently see messages here about how terrible Reddit has gotten, in part because of heavy-handed moderation.
A new social media that says, "we're not removing anything unless it's clearly illegal or we get a court order to do so" is a reasonable pitch in my mind.
Again, I doubt this particular app will succeed but I also wouldn't be surprised if the demand was real.
And then they will face the same market forces as Facebook and Reddit, and be forced to either capitulate or remain a tiny niche. Which may sound fine to a programmer, but anyone investing serious money into this will force their hand. And then the cycle repeats.
I also have a hard time believing he would invest a single a penny of his own money into this. He's a repulsive human being, but he's not an idiot. And his investors will be calling the shots.
I agree there is demand for a non-moderated social network, but I'm pretty sure this isn't it. From their own term's of service:
> users may not “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.”
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
Doesn't this already exist in the form of Gab? I think they don't remove content except NSFW/pronography, doxing, and violations of US law.
I doubt this is necessarily true. Modern social media is complex engineering specifically because of the demands of the Panopticon department for determining your users' underwear color for your advertisers.
If your software is for political community and/or propaganda purposes and not for the benefit of advertisers, I'd bet anything that your technical complexity drops by an absolutely enormous factor. You're CRUDing text, images, and social graph data, maybe you're storing videos in an s3 bucket. And you're probably doing some basic sharding and caching.
A reasonable pitch to users. But to advertisers and others? Not so much.
If you create a social platform that appeals very strongly to a small minority but where the content creates strong objection in a larger group, then companies don’t want to be seen there. And running a social media platform is expensive. User demand isn’t what I’d worry about, it’s sales (of ads and paid subscriptions). I don’t think there is a market for either of those if Parler/Gab were any indication.
Why would you need advertising or even make money in the traditional sense for that matter? We have seen how social media companies have entered into overt political actions to control narratives. Trump is attempting to build his own version of this. And it's still early but he's not doing a bad job so far, he's raking in tons of money from investors. These "investors" aren't looking to make money, they are investing in political influence similar to those people who were pumping billions into the Clinton foundation to buy access/influence.
You don't. But running these operations at scale is extremely expensive, so you need a lot of income. It's possible to run it as a money sink provided you e.g. have investor money or, as in the case of previous right wing attempts, "donor money". But regardless of how the money is raised, it's rarely a charity that can go on forever. Everything we have seen so far indicates this isn't really a viable investment. Gab, Parler and similar have exactly this business model: operate at a loss through donor money. The audience isn't nearly big enough to motivate the spend, and the cost scales linearly with the audience unless there is a big ad income. The question shouldn't be why this should fail, but what sets it apart from Gab and Parler, other than "This time it's Trump".