A new Pravda. There is a delicious, presumably inadvertent, irony in the name of Donald Trump’s new social media platform – “Truth”, or Pravda in Russian. It was the old Communist Party’s paper, the daily alternative to Izvestia (“News”), of which ordinary Russians used to joke: “There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia.” And little doubt that the oxymoronic Trump vehicle will carry on in the same vein of propaganda mixed with falsehood.
On Wednesday Trump, currently barred from Twitter for inflammatory and lying tweets, announced that he has found investors for his own outlet to rival Facebook and Twitter. The new company would be called Trump Media & Technology Group and would create over the next few months a new social network called Truth Social.
Prepurchase of its app is already possible. Its purpose, according to the Trump statement, is “to create a rival to the liberal media consortium and fight back against the ‘Big Tech’ companies of Silicon Valley”.
Since he left office in January, Trump’s voice has been substantially muted by his lack of access to his megaphone of choice, social media, although he continues to dominate Republican politics, not least the party’s choice of candidates. Many believe he is prepawring the ground to run again for the presidency. He filed a lawsuit this month asking Twitter to reinstate his account.
“We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favourite American president has been silenced,” Trump said in his statement.
Yet, in reality, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have begun, however inadequately and slowly, to control and banish forms of hate speech from their output. Smaller unregulated “free speech” platforms have sprung up but, so far, have had relatively little traction.
If Truth takes off, even though preaching largely to the converted, it will almost certainly serve to illustrate the case against reliance on self-regulation and for state policing of the wild west that is social media.