Trump Announces Launch of Own Social Media Site – WSVN 7News | Miami News, Weather, Sports
NEW YORK (AP) – Nine months after being kicked off social media for his role in inciting the Jan.6 insurgency, former President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he was launching a new media company with its own social media platform.
Trump says his goal in launching the Trump Media & Technology Group and its “Truth Social” app is to create a rival to the big tech companies that shut him out and denied him the megaphone that was paramount to his national rise.
“We live in a world where the Taliban are very present on Twitter, but your favorite US president has been silenced,” he said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
Conservative voices actually do well on traditional social media. Half of Facebook’s 10 top-performing link posts on Wednesday were from conservative media, commentators or politicians, according to a daily list compiled by a New York Times tech columnist and internet studies professor using Facebook’s own data.
Trump has been talking about launching his own social media site since he was kicked out of Twitter and Facebook. An earlier effort to start a blog on its existing website was scrapped after the page attracted dismal views.
TMTG didn’t look down. In addition to the Truth Social app, which is slated to launch smoothly next month with a nationwide rollout early next year, the company has announced that it is planning a video-on-demand service dubbed TMTG + which will offer entertainment programming, news and podcasts.
A slide in a Presentation of TMTG on its website includes a graph of TMTG’s potential competitors, which range from Facebook and Twitter to Netflix and Disney + to CNN. The same slide suggests that in the long run, TMTG will also become a powerhouse in cloud computing and payments, and suggests that it will take on Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Stripe.
TMTG is also taking a few hits on Trump’s previous favorite social network. The slides accompanying Truth Social’s pre-order list in the Apple App Store describe a social network that looks a lot like Twitter, right down to short messages and user IDs preceded by “@” signs.
The same graphics also show a user named Jack’s Beard, who in one image rants when an employee pushes back on the order to remove a user and their posts, calling it “a little over the top.” The Jack’s Beard account uses the username @jack, which is Dorsey’s username on real Twitter; Dorsey’s long, shaggy beard also attracted attention during his congressional appearances on Zoom.
Social truth Terms of use, meanwhile, prohibit users from annoying any of the site’s employees and statements that “disparage, tarnish or harm, in our opinion, us and / or the site”. It was not immediately clear who the “we” refers to in this statement.
In a statement, the new company said it was formed through a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., and said it was looking to become a publicly traded company.
Miami-based DWA is a Specialty Acquisition Company, or SPAC. These publicly traded companies are designed to list the shares of a private company faster than a traditional initial public offering. In practice, this means that PSPC acquires a private business, then changes its name and other details to those of the acquired business.
The SAVS pay for their acquisitions with cash provided by investors who subscribed to the initial public offering of the SAVS. DWA’s September 8 IPO raised $ 287.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
DWA said it has raised around $ 293 million in cash, which it will use to grow TMTG’s businesses. Among the company’s major shareholders are several institutional investors, including Lighthouse Investment Partners, DE Shaw & Co. and Radcliffe Capital Management, according to an SEC filing.
The deal has an initial enterprise value, a measure that takes into account a company’s total debt and assets, of $ 875 million, the statement said.
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