Devin Nunes: regretting what I said...

bi4smooth

You may remember this: Former Rep Devin Nunes (R-CA) resigned from Congress in January to take the helm of Donald Trump's Media & Technology Group - the Trump company that would oversee the "Truth Social" app - designed to give Trump a platform aside from Twitter and Facebook, which had taken to censoring his ... er... imaginative, fact deficient, borderline delusional posts.

Launched a little over a month ago (Feb 21, 2022), Nunes (who once sued the owner of a Twitter account named "@DevinCow" - an account largely used to lampoon the Congressman. Shocker: the suit was dismissed as frivolous) has quickly learned that all the marketing in the world can't fix a broken app! As someone who has worked in tech for my entire career, I have one piece of advise for him: if you're going to run a tech company, high some GOOD tech people! (The site has struggled to scale, even though the base code is from Mastadon - a free and open-source platform that has proven to be quite scalable in the "right hands").

But tech hasn't been the whole problem:

The "Truth Social" app was initially a hit! Signing up 872K users in the first week, but enthusiasm quickly waned - esp as many of the early users were using the platform to attack and make fun of the former President.
Current statistics show about 50K hits per week on Apple's App Store - a 90% drop from the first week!
The companion website initially had 6-million hits per week, but instead of growing, the visits to the site have fallen to under 1-million per week. (NOTE: The website cannot be used to post or read posts on the app, nor is the Android version of the app available yet)
Launched as an "alternative" to the "heavy-handed" Twitter and Facebook, users were quickly confronted with terms of service that forbade users to: "disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site".
Truth Social also declares that it has the right to "suspend or terminate your account" and also "take appropriate legal action".
Truth Social has blocked accounts for behavior it considers harmful or inappropriate, including creating accounts with parody names or complaining about the app.
Truth Social also disclaims any responsibility for any post made on the platform (Section 230 anyone?)
Needless to say, users' responses have been akin to: this is better than Twitter and Facebook.... how?

One more factoid: Axios reported that there were multiple official-looking accounts for entities, like: @NFL, @FoxSports, @ESPN and others. These "accounts" had legitimate-appearing links and logos, but were not created with the help - or even permission - of the named entities! Some were removed when the rightful owners of the service and trademarks complained.

Needless to say, The Donald is not pleased. Rumors around the TMTG water coolers is that Mr. Nunes is avoiding Mr. Trump, for fear of hearing those infamous words: YOU'RE FIRED!

Maybe he can run and get his old seat in Congress back?