Donald Trump’s social network debuts on iOS and explodes immediately

Truth Media, which is nothing more than the name it receives, the red social ridden by Donald Trump, inaugurated just a few hours ago its operations in the iOS App Store.

Precisely there is where millions of supporters of the Republican president quickly gathered. However, nothing has gone as planned. In fact, hours have passed since the official application was released until it collapsed and received the first accusations of code theft.

Trump’s return to social media

After the cancellation of his accounts on such relevant broadcast platforms as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and, coinciding with the commemoration of “Presidents’ Day in the United States of America”, Melania Trump’s still-husband has raised the curtain on his new show: Truth.

This offensive for returning to social networks through his own platform was taken after being expelled from Twitter as a result of the tweets published by the then president “due to the risk of inciting violence”, due to the historic incidents of January 6 of last year, when his supporters stormed the US Capitol.

The company responsible for the program aimed at bringing those disaffected Republican souls together is called Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and is part of a significant group of technology companies from the same group, which, according to its statutes, fight in “the defense of freedom of expression”.

Thus, the objective is to attract users who feel that their political leanings are discriminated against in the most popular social networks and for this purpose it proposes an application for mobile devices designed with the objective of “resist the tyranny of the tech giants”.

The hour of disaster

Crashed servers, non-validated accounts and, as some US media point out, users who download the application and receive error messages when they try to fill in the box for the date of birth, email or phone number.

The simple message reads: something went wrong, try again”. Although solving it may seem simple, it hides another more complicated reality, because many things have gone wrong.

For example, as suspected, its source code seems to be copied directly from another social platform, Mastodon, something that has all the ballots of leading to fierce legal battles.

Only a few hours have been enough to confirm the code similarities to Mastodon, another open source “alternative” social network very similar to Twitter that is oriented towards the privacy and autonomy of its users.

It is about another Parler-esque platform, Gettr and Rumble, flocked to by conservatives due to Facebook and Twitter’s censorship policies. The latter have long denied methods of intentional censorship of political content, but they also have very clear rules against hate speech or incitement to violence.

A newborn with no future

Now the legal question is added. The official publication of Truth has caused Eugen Rochko, founder of Mastodon willing to “seek advice from his legal team”.

Although it is true that the terms of use of the open source platform warn that its use is free, it is also notified that users are obliged to explicitly mention its origin and make the code of the derived platform available to the public.

Truth Media instead specifies in its Terms of Service that “the entire source code is owned by Trump Media.” For legal purposes, this is a violation of the AGPLv3 license that Mastodon is based on.

In any case, it seems that the new technological initiative of the American tycoon is not getting off to a good start. It is not clear if the problems have been fixed or not, if they are linked to the little control they would have over the “software”, and much less if these interruptions are linked to a peak in demand.

We will see what happens with Truth and what his fate will be, but it seems really uncertain.