We have been availed of Donald Trump’s imbroglio with popular social media giants, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with the world most powerful apps blacklisting the former United States Chief Executive as a result of his ‘at times’ caustic vituperations.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and major social media sites gave him a red card for his alleged role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection and after months after, the former President of the United States has announced he would launching a new media company with its own social media platform.
According to Trump, his intention to launching the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) and the corresponding ‘Truth Social’ app is to rival the Big Tech companies that have shut him out and denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his national rise.
“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favourite American President has been silenced,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
Ever since he was banned from Twitter and Facebook, Donald Trump has continuously voiced out his frustrations and the Big tech guys monopoly of free speech and has intimated the public about his plans to launch his own social media site, with an earlier effort made to launch a blog on his existing website getting abandoned after the page drew dismal views.
Apart from the Truth Social app which being expected to get launched in November, with a nationwide rollout scheduled for early 2021, the TMTG is also having in the works a video-on-demand service coined TMTG+ that will have in its feature, entertainment programming, news and podcasts.
The TMTG presentation on Trump’s website has in one slide that included a graphic of TMTG’s potential competitors, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to Netflix and Disney+ to CNN, with the same slide suggesting that the TMTG in the long term will also transform to becoming a power in cloud computing and payments, a suggestion that it will go head-to-head with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Stripe.
The presentation did not fail to take some jabs at Trump’s previous favorite social network, with the slide accompanying the Truth Social preorders listing in Apple’s app store depicting a social network that has a striking resemblance to Twitter, right down to short messages and user handles preceded by “@” signs.
The graphics also featured a user with the name ‘Jack’s Beard’, where the mimicked Jack had to fume and show his anger when an employer stalled with his order to delete a user and its posts, describing it ‘kinda an overreach’. The ‘Jack’s Beard account is also laced with the @ handle @jack, akin to Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey’s handle on the microblogging site. It should be noted that the Twitter henchman has a long scraggly beard that has drawn the attention of global users and the beard after Jack in the TMTG’s presentation appears like a direct jab at him.
Of note is Truth Social’s term of service, which forbids users from annoying any of the site’s employees and from statements that “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site”, though it was not immediately clear who the “us” in that statement refers to.
TMTG announced that the new app and social site was done through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., while noting that it seeks to become a publicly listed company.
Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWA), a Miami based special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) belonged to the category of companies designed to list the shares of a private company more quickly than a traditional initial public offering. This entails that in actual terms the SPAC acquires a private firm, while changing its name and other details to those of the acquired firm. It is a common practice for Special-Purpose Acquisition Companies to pay for their acquisitions with cash provided by investors who bought into the SPAC’s initial public offering.
According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), $287.5 million was raised from DWA’s Sept. 8 with the company announcing that it has raised roughly $293 million in cash, to be used to grow TMTG’s ventures.
