Former President Donald Trump has officially revealed that he's launching his own social media in 2022, a few months after his aide told Fox News about his plans. He's calling it TRUTH Social, and the platform is apparently part of his camp's efforts to fight back against "the Big Tech companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America."
Some of Trump's supporters believe that social networks are biased against conservative voices — in 2018, a group even sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, accusing them of breaking antitrust laws and violating their First Amendment rights by conspiring to suppress conservative viewpoints. The case was tossed out of court a few times. According to a New York University research published earlier this year, there's no evidence of conservative bias on the world's most popular social networks. There was even an Instagram bug in the months leading to the US Presidential Elections that favored Trump content over Biden's.
It is true, however, that Facebook and Twitter banned Trump from their platforms following the January 6th US Capitol riots. Twitter determined that his tweets at that time violated its policies. According to the website, his tweets (which you can view in an archive) "must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence..."
Earlier this month, Trump sued to get his Twitter account back, arguing that the ban violates his First Amendment rights. Indeed, his ban on the website gets a special mention in TRUTH Social's announcement. He said in a statement: "We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced."
TRUTH Social will have a beta launch in November for invited guests. Trump and his team are expecting to roll it out nationwide in the first quarter of 2022.
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