Donald Trump had designed his social network, Truth Social, with the objective of making it a forum for freedom of expression and sharing of ideas without filters. Six months later, a slew of conspiratorial messages relayed by the former tenant of the White House, confirm the proliferation of QAnon ideas on the online platform.
A flurry of messages published by the former American president on August 30 on his social network indeed seems to indicate new affinities of the Republican tenor for the conspiratorial fringes of American society. That day, Trump went so far as to reshare on his account the response to a “meme” relaying QAnon content, a nebula encouraging conspiracy theories linking, for example, personalities from the American Democratic Party like Hillary Clinton to a Satanist network and pedophile.
Haven of the far right
The promotion of QAnon ideas and the publication of false information has caused some platforms to take action. Google, for example, decided last week to ban the download of the application on Google Play, for lack of sufficient moderation. NewsGuard, which rates news sources based on their trustworthiness, found 88 accounts sharing QAnon content with more than 10,000 followers on Truth Social, more than half of whom were “verified” by Trump, and more than a third had been banned from Twitter.
Content posted on Truth Social is also regularly re-shared on other sites popular with its core constituency such as Telegram and far-right forums, as well as by members of the Republican Party.
“Truth Social weighs less in terms of political influence than Twitter and Facebook”
“Trump has echoed these theories in the past on Twitter,” notes Mike Rothschild, author of a book on QAnon conspiracy theories. With the approach of the American “midterms”, Truth Social nevertheless weighs less in terms of political influence than Twitter and Facebook at the time when the tribune had official accounts there, now closed.
First, Trump is struggling to gather crowds on his new platform, where he currently has just four million subscribers. He had 88.8 million on Twitter and 35.4 million on Facebook. Then, Truth Social never really took off and found itself in a precarious financial position. In July, it had 1.19 million active users on iPhone, according to data provided by the specialized firm ata.ai, in contrast to the 237.8 million daily users that Twitter presented in its last financial report.
The former president launched his platform in February as an alternative to traditional networks, after being banned from Twitter and having his Facebook accounts suspended for two years after supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. whom he is accused of having encouraged.