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Hardened reporter spends a day on Truth Social

Over at the LA Times, Lorraine Ali selflessly spent a day on Truth Social and reports back:

Twenty-four hours of scrolling through posts from “Truthsayers” on the two-year-old platform explained why the site is tanking. In short, partisan echo chambers are stale, musty spaces that lack the sort of oppositional views needed to make social media tick. Truth Social feels like a MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room, where an endless line of folks step up to the mic to share how the world is out to get them.

The Truth Social feed I experienced was a mix of swaggering gun talk, typo-filled Bible scripture, violent Biden bashing, nonsensical conspiracy theories and more misguided memes about Jan. 6 “hostages,” trans satanists and murderous migrants than anyone should be subjected to in one day. Or ever.

This is supposedly worth $7 billion. Go figure.

33 thoughts on “Hardened reporter spends a day on Truth Social

  1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

    "Truth Social feels like a MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room".

    That's vivid. Ms. Ali can turn a phrase.

  2. marknc

    Can you imagine Disney, GM, Microsoft, Ford, IBM, Verizon, ..................lining up to pay for ads in that cesspool? Won't happen.

    1. tango

      Makes you kind of wonder what company would see profit in advertising to such a crowd. Epoch Times? Preppers? Pyramid scheme scammers? Organizations hoping to curry favor in a hypothetical Trump II Admiration like Wall Manufacturers or Russia?

      1. NotCynicalEnough

        Gun manufacturers, weapons adjacent products, purveyors of survivalist gear, etc. Aside from it being a very well targeted (especially in their imaginations) user base, they are the world's easiest marks.

      2. lawnorder

        That crowd is clearly not too bright, so there will be a high percentage of suckers among them. The problem for advertisers is that the total number of them is not large, and most of them probably don't have much money. I would expect that advertisers would be ruthless con-people who can make their money from a not-huge number of sales.

      3. J. Frank Parnell

        There’s always Trump shoes, Trump bibles, and Trump digital trading images. Can you think of a better match?

    2. KJK

      The Pillow Guy would be a candidate for placing ads on Truth if they had any money to pay for ads. I don't think Dominion Voting Systems would continue such ads after it receives the Pillow Guy company as partial compensation for its lawsuit against Lindell.

  3. Adam Strange

    Truth Social might be worth 7 billion dollars, just to get all these guys in one place and take down their names.

  4. ruralhobo

    Three lies in two words: no Truth, no Social, plus that truth is to social what cold rain is to a barbecue party. So now it appears people whose goal in life is to own the libs aren't much interested in a place where libs never go. Gee.

    But the value of the company, I think, consists of the fact that anyone who drives up share prices will enrich Donald Trump. So if you are a dictator somewhere, easy peasy to drive US policy if Trump wins the election. It wouldn't matter then how many users or how many advertisers. If Trump owned stock in a fig leaf, that fig leaf could be worth billions too. Or nothing. Depends on November.

    1. marknc

      My $50 says that there were some very rich early investors who ran up the price in the first few days and have been selling short.

  5. Salamander

    To a normal person, "TS" is a boring, stultifying, lie-fest. But it's not for "normal people"!! The reporter didn't seem able to figure that one out.

    Maybe her next "24 hour" ordeal should be spend on the cactus & succulent (sub?)reddit. My guess is, she'd come to the same conclusions. But the folks who hang out there find it useful and enjoyable.

    1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

      No. The cactus & succulent subreddit has people sharing accurate advice about how to cultivate cactuses and succulents. No such accurate information appear on TS.
      TS is more like a subreddit for furries or Star Trek fans: they just want to indulge their fandom. And being a fan of DJT absolutely includes hating on liberals, brown people, poor people, LGBTQ people, etc.

      1. Salamander

        But the TSers BELIEVE it's "accurate." And they're "indulging" in their fantasies, just as trekkies and theologians will do. You and I (and lots of so-called "normal" people) will call it hateful and delusional, but that's what they think of lefty discussions about how many different sexes there are and ways to have it, and all those reparations and permitting immigration.

        Different world views.

      2. kenalovell

        I have no experience of cactus and succulent groups, but I know of at least three other gardening groups on Facebook which are absolute hotbeds of misinformation. The authors of fairytales about the miraculous benefits of eggshells/banana skins/pasta water/electric fields etc on plants defend their nonsense with a passionate intensity equal to that of any global warming denier.

  6. mudwall jackson

    whatever you want to call it, djt media or truth social, it's nothing more than an overheated penny stock. it's got one thing, trump, and unless you're either dyed in the wool maga or a journalist paid to follow him, there's no reason to pay any attention to it. it's the antithesis of social media. and unless you're hocking gold coins, pillows or a scam of some sort, it's worthless to an advertiser.

  7. name99

    Everything you say is true. BUT
    It seems somewhat bizarre that you leave out the equivalent on the left side…

    The most recent version of this is Brianna Wu who, in just a few days, has basically been driven insane by the lunacy on the leftie side.
    Eg https://twitter.com/eyeslasho/status/1775277502891692396
    But you can read her whole feed right now to see many different versions of this.

    And if you think the name Brianna Wu sounds familiar, but you can’t quite place it, look it up. We are reaching the point where basically Stalin or Mao is saying “I cannot stand the stupidity, violence, and incoherence of this new generation of leftists”…

    1. Five Parrots in a Shoe

      If Ms. Wu really said the things attributed to her in that tweet then she has lost her mind. Like how RFK Jr. used to be sort of halfway reasonable but is now an absolute clown. It happens to people sometimes.

  8. kenalovell

    "A MAGA town hall in a ventless conference room" would be PARADISE to Trump cultists. Next best thing to an actual Trump rally.

  9. Laertes

    Eh. 7Bn is a lot, but as long as a second term for the creep remains a live option, his crummy little social network has enormous potential. If God forbid he does win, it won't be long before every single person in the federal government is using TS. The treasury will be his to plunder, and the other TS shareholders might reasonably expect to get a taste.

  10. QuakerInBasement

    "Organizations hoping to curry favor in a hypothetical Trump II Admiration"

    Who do you think bought the shares in the first place?

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