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Cockburn isn’t a great fan of social media. He prefers it to social distancing and social-justice warriors, but would much rather while away the hours at social gatherings.
He was therefore not much moved by this week’s beta launch of TRUTH Social, the new social media app from former president Donald Trump, which is chaired by his acolyte former congressman Devin Nunes.
As with many of its forebears, the TRUTH Social launch was far from seamless. As the New York Times had it, “The official debut of TRUTH Social on Monday was marred by error messages and a long waiting list for people who had already signed up to download the app.” Then again, Facebook launched as a Harvard “hot-or-not” site and can now spark civil wars: momentous things can spring from humble beginnings.
TRUTH Social follows in the footsteps of other conservative alternatives to Twitter and Facebook, such as Parler and Gettr, the latter of which is helmed by ex-Trump campaign official Jason Miller. Like Parler and Gettr, TRUTH Social styles itself as a more “pro-free speech” site when contrasted with the Big Tech giants — and Cockburn is very vocally in favor of free speech.
But critics have been quick to point out passages in Trump’s app’s terms of service that aren’t all that First Amendment-friendly. They see irony, for instance, in how the app won’t permit parody accounts — given how TRUTH Social chairman Devin Nunes attempted to sue the individual behind a Twitter account pretending to be one of his cows. And unlike Twitter, TRUTH Social won’t allow users to post sexually explicit images or videos. Given Cockburn’s track record in either satire or porn (you guess which), he wonders how much of an alternative TRUTH Social will offer.
Cockburn wonders whether there’s a graver problem ahead for the likes of TRUTH Social, Gettr and Parler: the philosophical reality that at base, all three apps are pale imitations of Twitter.
The tech reporter Casey Newton highlighted this in a recent Substack: “their products are for people who want a Twitter-like thing, populated primarily by conservative political commentators talking about politics, and moderated a little less aggressively than Twitter itself… I do not think this will turn out to be a particularly large market.”
A side-by-side comparison makes for grim reading: track a given user across Twitter, Parler and Gettr, and you’ll find that most of their posts are the same. Got a blue tick on Twitter? You’ll have a red tick on Parler or a red “V” on Gettr. You can draft up a pretty broad definition of “social media” these days that includes photo- and video-sharing sites like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, fitness apps like Strava and Peloton, and language-learning tools like Duolingo. Are we to believe that the best the finest tech minds on the right can come up with is: “Twitter but with the people who got kicked off?”
Cockburn’s sinister venture-capitalist buddies used to spout off about how “apps” had to have “unique selling points” to be worth putting money into. Yet right-wing social media doesn’t even seem to be that unique from each other. Surely the conservative alternative to social media should be going outside with family?
