Former President Donald Trump was a regular on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram – until the social media platforms permanently suspended his accounts.
Cancel culture came swiftly for the outspoken and embattled president, but, in typical Trump fashion, he wasn’t going down without a fight.
Rumors flew several months ago that Trump would be releasing his own social media platform. Before the end of 2021, California representative Devin Nunes said he was resigning his position in the United States House of Representatives to become the CEO of Trump’s new endeavor, the TRUTH Social Media platform. Nunes was the first elected official to utilize Rumble back in 2020.
Now, sources say that beta testing has begun for the new platform, and an official launch is set for next month.
Sources have announced in a Fox Business exclusive that the servers for Trump’s social media platform, called TRUTH Media, are “up and running,” and the platform is expected to make a late March launch date.
TRUTH Social has not been made public yet, but, potential users can pre-order the app in the Apple App Store. The average user in the United States should be able to create accounts by the end of March.
These same sources tell Fox Business that the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) will not rely on a traditional big tech company for its infrastructure needs (this lesson was learned when Parler had its platform pulled from Amazon). Instead, TMTG has partnered with Rumble to utilize a cloud partnership service. Trump Media and Technology Group initially launched in October 2021; the partner for the group has agreements for $1 billion in capital “from institutional investors.”
Eventually, TMTG plans to become a publicly listed company; this will be accomplished by merging with publicly traded Digital World Acquisition Corp.
Rumble, which recently made news after offering Joe Rogan $100 million to join their platform, is an online video platform. Conservative heavyweights such as Dan Bongino have taken to Rumble, which is often advertised as an alternative to YouTube. Rumble’s viewership has grown from just over one million in mid-2020 to over 31 million by March 2021. Not only is Rumble marketing itself as a YouTube alternative, but also to Amazon Web Services (the same entity which removed Parler).
President Trump told Fox News in December that the upcoming social media platform “would be in great shape” by March 2022. His tease of the upcoming launch of TRUTH Social coincides with what sources are telling Fox Business. He released a statement in early February: “TruthSocial will fight back against Big Tech so we can protect our rights to free expression.”
In addition, sources who are involved in the final development of TRUTH Social told Fox Business that TMTG has a partnership with Hive, a Series D start up based in San Francisco. Hive provides could-based artificial intelligence for “understanding images, videos, and text content – all through the “cloud.”
Nunes said that this is to help ensure not only family-friendly content, but also no illegal content is uploaded to the platform. “We want to be very family-friendly, we want this to be a very safe place,” Nunes told Fox Business during an exclusive interview in January.
