Donald Trump’s social network app has been available in Apple’s App Store since February of this year. However, Google still refuses to allow the Android app. A company spokesman has now explained that it is due to a lack of moderation in the network.

In an Axios article, Google is quoted as saying: “On August 19, we notified Truth Social that their app submission violated several standard guidelines, and reiterated that effective systems for moderating posts is a condition of the Terms of Service for each app published on the Play Store.” In fact, the article also gives an example of which content isn’t even flagged as being questionable: it’s a call to kill.

Low interest in Truth Social

At the same time, financial difficulties of the group behind the Truth Social have become known. At least, employees of the Internet provider Rightforge claim that there are unpaid bills from the Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) in the amount of about 1.6 million US dollars. It is said to be the monthly accruing and contractually binding payments that have not been settled since March. Neither Rightforge nor TMTG have officially confirmed this. A full integration of TMTG into the parent company Digital World Acquisition has also been suspended so far. This had lost a value of 6.2 million US dollars on the stock exchange in the past six months.

Former US President Donald Trump founded his own social network after being banned from all common platforms as a result of the attack on the Capitol. However, he himself had hardly spoken in his Truth Social – unlike it used to be on Twitter, where he commented very regularly on a wide range of topics. Despite his increased need to communicate, Trump is only followed by around four million people on Truth Social, compared to a reach of around 200 million on Twitter, which is rather small.

Even before the platform was publicly launched, it was noticed that it had strong similarities to Mastodon – it was assumed that the developers used the code from the open network. Error pages even displayed the mastodon mascot. A breach of the open source license.

(emw)