The social network of former US President Donald Trump will be launched in the coming weeks to the general public, after an abortive opening in beta version last November. It’s up to him not to alienate the giants Google and Apple and their app stores.
Donald Trump is preparing to launch his own social platform, called TRUTH Social, in the coming weeks, perhaps even before the end of March, the date of February 21 announced for a time having been postponed. And tension is mounting on the side of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which touts the social network as an ode to freedom of expression, when others fear that it is a tool that will further fuel misinformation and hatred.
The App Store and the Play Store, like a sword of Damocles
More than a year after disappearing from the radar screens of Twitter – which permanently suspended its account after incitement to violence as part of the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 – Donald Trump will make his big comeback in the world from microblogging. The former president, who is already seeking a second term in the White House, is working with his teams to launch his TRUTH Social application to the general public.
If the new social network wants to start its life peacefully (this one evoking the bar of 75 million users when it was launched, i.e. 74 million more than at the end of Year I of Facebook), it will have to convince Google and Apple. The two companies, along with the Play Store and the App Store, have a kind of life or death right over an application that does not really respect their policies, given their market share in downloading applications.
And while TRUTH Social promises a “ engaging and uncensored experience ” which will let its users talk about vaccines against Covid-19 and the results of the last American presidential election, it will however have to operate a certain moderation, to make sure not to be expelled from the stores of Google and Apple.
TRUTH Social will really have to make moderation efforts
There is real case law on the subject. In January 2021, the Parler social network was unpublished from the Play Store, App Store and Amazon platforms. The same fate was reserved for Gab, the two platforms having seen users of traditional networks switch to them. Google and Apple being totally sovereign platforms, nothing prevents them from doing the same with the new TMTG application.
The director of TMTG, Devin Nunes, incidentally a former Republican member of the American Congress (from 2003 to this year), first confirmed with our colleagues from Reuters that the launch of the application should be done by the end of March. The former elected official also indicated that he feared that TRUTH Social would be the subject of cyberattacks as soon as it was officially launched. He hopes, by then, to enlist cyber forces to deal with any unfortunate eventuality.
TMTG has tapped content moderation company Hive, which will use AI to flag sexual, bullying, violent and hateful content. The platform has no choice, since the App Store requires all developers to provide their applications with a content reporting system and to remove contentious content as quickly as possible.
Source: Reuters
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