We’ve been hearing teasers about this for quite a while now, but yesterday’s announcement seems to make it official. Former President Donald Trump announced the upcoming launch of a new social media platform named TRUTH Social, being launched under the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). This will be his latest attempt to challenge Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the social media giants that have banned him from keeping accounts or posting content since early this year. The new platform will begin with a limited beta program in November with the full launch scheduled for some time early next year. There are already people speculating about what this might mean for the 45th President’s future, but as we’ve seen in the past, Donald Trump can be fairly inscrutable and full of surprises when the mood takes him. Assuming you can even find the websites for this venture, you’re probably going to run into a lot of traffic. (NY Post)

Former President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he is launching a new media company — complete with a social media platform that will begin rolling out in November.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) said in a statement that its mission was to “create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley, which have used their unilateral power to silence opposing voices in America.”

The new company’s first project is its social network, dubbed TRUTH Social, which is set to launch in beta for “invited guests” next month and come online nationwide in the first three months of 2022. A web page inviting people to sign up to be part of the beta launch describes TRUTH Social as “America’s ‘Big Tent’ social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.”

In addition to the social media platform, the company is also reportedly planning a video streaming service specializing in “non-woke” entertainment. They are also planning a cloud computing and storage service intended to challenge Google and Apple. It all sounds very ambitious, but that’s going to take some time to build, isn’t it?

This announcement already has some commentators pointing their fingers and declaring that this must mean that Trump has decided to make another White House run in 2024 without officially announcing it. I’m not ruling anything out, but color me unconvinced, at least for now. He still has plenty of options available to him. Sure, he could run for a second term, effectively freezing most of the field of potential GOP challengers. But at least thus far, he’s also seemed to be mostly content to play the role of kingmaker and endorse or decry various candidates in races around the country. It’s a vexing situation for the national GOP, but one that Trump seems to take a lot of pleasure in.

So will people sign up? You can bet that pretty much every journalist in the country will have an account as soon as they become generally available. And Trump’s loyal legions will be flooding in also. I’m pretty sure you’ll find me there as well because curiosity may have killed the cat, but it never managed to kill off a good story to blog about.

What I’m sure of is that the announcement of the arrival of TRUTH Social is probably going to drive the last nail in the coffins of Gab and Parler. Both of those were established largely as a replacement platform for Trump supporters after he was booted off of Twitter. I started an account on each just to keep tabs on what was going on in Trump World, but Parler seemed to be perpetually offline or sporadic and I haven’t really been active on it. I don’t even remember the last time I logged into Gab. But if Trump himself is active on the new platform, I’m guessing it will see a lot of traffic.

Just as a side note in closing, I did several Google searches for both “TRUTH Social” and “Trump Media & Technology Group” looking for their home pages and got zero results. Is somebody trying to block this? Sure, you can call that a conspiracy theory if you like, but given who controls most of the search results, is it really all that crazy?

Here’s a short bit of coverage from Reuters that includes some of Trump’s comments on the launch and more details of the new company.