Trump’s Truth Social and Musk’s Twitter: Is Freedom of Speech Too Dangerous?

While news media and social media alike buzzed frenetically with the seemingly earth-shattering news that Tesla titan Elon Musk had agreed to purchase Twitter — the wildly popular social media platform boasting over 200 million daily users — for a whopping $44 billion, another social media app has quietly slipped into the #1 spot downloads from the App Store.

In a shocking twist that has left establishment media and its reverent followers stupefied, former President Donald J. Trump’s Twitter-copycat app Truth Social is now standing strong at the number one spot in the Apple Store, with millions of former Twitter users switching allegiances in order to escape Twitter’s daunting algorithm rife with shadow-bans and suppression of alternative political voices.

Truth Social Defies Media Expectations

As far as the app itself, it does appear strikingly similar to Twitter, with tweets rebranded as “truths” and retweets as “retruths.” Upon his return to social media, the former President triumphantly posted “I’M BACK! #COVFEFE, prompting users across the world to wonder: What the hell is Covfefe?

The phrase, first used to ridicule a supposed Twitter typo in one of Trump’s characteristic tweets, has been denied as such by Trump’s camp. Cryptically, former White House Secretary Spicer had told the press at the time:

“The President and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.”

As of most recently, the former President has been “retruthing” videos of his appearance at his most recent Save America rally in Greenwood, Nebraska, an event that drew thousands upon thousands of American citizens seemingly deeply disgruntled with the current administration’s astronomical gasoline prices, skyrocketing inflation, creeping food shortages and daunting unemployment numbers.

With numbers on Truth Social shooting up daily, mainstream media’s premature declarations that the app is a “disaster” are yet again leaving them feeling displaced and out of touch. One popular business columnist on Medium had even branded the app, back in March, as a “failure” and a “huge flop.”

Elon’s Twitter is Deemed “Dangerous for Democracy”

At the same time that Truth Social is dominating the social media charts in spite of misleading mainstream predictions of utter failure, new Twitter owner Elon Musk is likewise hitting back at mainstream narratives, utilizing his Twitter account to viciously dissect NBC’s treatment of dissenting political opinions. In a backlash against one NBC reporter’s inflammatory assertion that Republicans are “Neo-Nazis” he subtweeted NBC to blast them for a precise litany of corruptions, writing:

“Same org that covered up Hunter Biden laptop story, had Weinstein story early & killed it, &. built Matt Lauer his rape office. Lovely people.”

Other public figures, meanwhile, are terrified by the idea that Elon will change the current climate of ‘decency’ at Twitter. According to Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio, U.S. Representative and avid tweeter renowned for her occasionally bombastic rhetoric, there will be an “explosion of hate crimes,” Other similarly-inclined politicians have followed suit, with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren even calling the new Twitter “dangerous for democracy.”

Is freedom of expression actually a grave danger to freedom itself? Perhaps Twitter vs. Truth Social will show us the answer.

If you loved (or hated) this content, please consider giving a follow and/or leaving a sassy comment or two!