Donald Trump has once again proven the critics wrong as his Truth Social app launched big with its migration to a new server that could handle millions of users without the worry that some Big Tech tyrant would shut it down on a whim.
Truth Social was given a soft launch on February 21 to shake out the inevitable problems one finds when first hitting the on switch of a website or app. And the road was certainly rocky in its first month and a half, with two execs quitting, connectivity problems and the 1.5 million users it did not have the capacity to approve and allow to start using the app.
But with this week’s switch over to the Rumble Cloud, Truth Social, where you can now see us @western_journal, is ready for the wide launch it has been looking for since its inception.
The new partnership between two of the nation’s top free speech platforms means that Big Tech cannot shut them down over so-called “violations” of terms, conditions and conduct policies that lefty gate keepers have been using to end the free speech of conservatives and Republicans online.
Devin Nunes, a former congressman and the CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group, which owns the social media site, celebrated the move to the Rumble Cloud.
“Yesterday, Truth Social and Rumble took a major stride toward rescuing the internet from the grip of the Big Tech tyrants,” Nunes said, according to Just the News.
“Our teams have worked tirelessly to realize this great endeavor,” Nunes continued. “Rumble’s cloud infrastructure is second to none and will be the backbone for the restoration of free speech online for ages to come.”
Rumble, an alternative to Google-owned video hosting site Youtube, launched late in 2013, but in 2020 it began rebranding itself as a free speech alternative to Big Tech. For instance, Rumble got a big boost when nationally syndicated conservative radio host Dan Bongino invested in the company and began offering his videos exclusively on the platform, Buzzfeed reported. Other notables on the right were also migrating their content to Rumble, including Dinesh D’Souza, Jim Jordan and Sean Hannity.
One important feature of Rumble is that it serves as its own host, and therefore, outsiders have no role in approving or disapproving of what they do. And that is why it was such a perfect fit for Truth Social.
Truth Social has been working on the plan for weeks, but only made the official announcement as it was preparing to make the final moves to the Rumble cloud.
But even before that, some conservative users noted that, despite its restrictions in size and its temporary limit to growth, Truth Social was still affording more actual interactions with interested users.
Dan Bongino’s experience is typical. Early this month he noted that even with more than a million fewer followers on Truth Social compared to his Twitter account, he was actually seeing more people pass his work on to others by “re-truthing” them — more likes and more pass throughs to the actual website and radio program sites than he ever saw from Twitter.
Bongino gave an example. On March 7, he wrote a post entitled, “Panic Breaks Out Over The Ukraine Bio-Labs Story,” and posted it on both Twitter and Truth Social.
Here were the engagement results according to Just the News: “His giant Twitter audience created 554 likes and 185 retweets as of 7 p.m. EDT on Thursday. In contrast, his smaller sized audience on Truth Social tripled the engagement with 1,550 likes and 488 ‘re-truths.’”
“The traffic to the site and to the show is off the chart. The engagement is extraordinary right now,” Bongino told the outlet.
This reporter also joined Truth and is listed on the app under @WarnerToddHuston. And I, too, have seen more people following, re-truthing, commenting and liking the posts I make there than on either Facebook or Twitter.
Nunes celebrated the move to Rumble. In an interview with Fox News, he said that Truth Social is now “uncancellable” by Big Tech.
“People just didn’t expect us to be able to, in just a few short months, to get out of beta testing and fully launch on the Apple App Store … We are uncancellable by Big Tech. We are not relying on any tech tyrants and really running on the Rumble Cloud like we are. This is the future of taking on woke companies,” Nunes said.
“And remember, why are we here? We’re here because all of these tech tyrants either censored us, banned us,” he added. “Millions of Americans got banned, got kicked off of these platforms. And Donald Trump as President of the United States, had no choice but to start this company to give the American people their voice back. And that’s what we’re doing at Truth Social.”
This is all flying in the face of story after story that pronounced Truth Social a dead issue only a month after its soft launch in February. By March, the left-media establishment was declaring Truth Social to be a “failed” attempt.
The attacks on the platform’s soft launch were brutal. Many of these attacks appeared in the first week of April. As if the memo went out from the left, one news outlet after another went on the attack.
To name just a few: The BBC insisted that “Trump’s Truth Social app branded a disaster”; Vanity Fair followed the playbook, calling Trump’s social media app an “even bigger humiliation than his other business failures”; the Washington Post attempted to claim that Truth Social was in “trouble”; The Guardian insisted that Trump Social was a “failed venture”; and CNN — yes, the network whose $300 million streaming service, CNN+, failed after three weeks — exclaimed that Truth Social was a “slow-motion train wreck.”
In any case, it seems that Trump and his team are committed to see this thing through. In fact, Trump said that even if Elon Musk does buy Twitter, he probably won’t go back there. Truth Social is his home now.