The long-rumored next venture of former President Donald Trump is finally revealed: His own social media platform.
It has been hacked by trolls. It hasn’t launched yet.
Trump released a press release on Wednesday night announcing his new media venture, the Trump Media & Technology Group. Ironically, it is a social networking site called "TRUTH" Social.
TRUTH won't launch until next year. However, the press release says that there will be a beta version in November.
You can sign up to join a waiting list by going to TruthSocial.com. You can also access Apple's App store to pre-order the mobile app when it launches next year.
However, a few internet-savvy sleuths decided to push that launch date back to the exact day of Trump's TRUTH declaration.
A sign-up link was found that took users to the domain "tmediatech.io" within hours of Trump's social media campaign being announced to the world. A number of people registered for the platform through this page, and soon discovered that almost every username was available. Since then, the domain has been removed.
Soon, usernames that would clearly be Trump's personal handle @DonaldJTrump, @DonaldTrump, and @realDonaldTrump were created. The new TRUTH Social username @DonaldJTrump was also proudly taken advantage of to bless his profile page by posting the meme "Pig Poop Balls".
Users such as @MikePence - Trump's former VP and @CodeMonkeyz - the online handle of Ron Watkins (QAnon figurehead) were quickly adopted.
Jack Dorsey, the founder and CEO of the company, noticed on Twitter that Trump's group used the TRUTH Social account @Jack for promotional photos for its upcoming TRUTH app on the App store. Trump was banned permanently from Twitter after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. This was "due to the possibility of further incitement to violence."
Despite the fact that the promo used @Jack's handle, the username wasn't yet registered on the platform. Once trolls saw this, they immediately took the @Jack handle and started bantering with one of TRUTH Social’s many Trump accounts regarding the ban.
After the fun ended, users who registered for the unknown platform were hit with an onscreen prompt stating "you cannot use your account anymore."
Trump Media & Technology Group saw the situation and decided to pull the plug. The domain "tmediatech.io", which is no longer accessible, has been taken down and all accounts seem to have been deleted.
This episode also revealed an interesting fact: Trump's eagerly awaited social media platform appears to be just a copy of Mastodon, the open-source social-media platform.
Although there is nothing wrong with open-source platforms, Trump's team could be violating Mastodon's licensing by removing credit and links from the source code. Mashable reached out to Mastadon, but they did not respond immediately.
Trump Media & Technology Group's pitch deck reveals that Trump also plans to launch a streaming video service in order to compete with Netflix and Disney.
Best of luck!
