Former President Donald Trump’s Truth Social wants to make itself cancel-proof against leftist demands that Big Tech preemptively deplatform it.
So far, the increasingly popular free speech platform has already survived attacks from the corporate media hellbent on smearing anything associated with Trump. Now, leftists are wielding Jan. 6 as an excuse to demand Big Tech companies such as Apple thwart Truth Social before it even becomes fully operational at the end of the month.
In “Big Tech Could Save Us From ‘Truth Social,'” author Samuel O’Brient, who has a history of demanding censorship because he believes “Limiting Free Speech is Essential to Democracy,” argues that Big Tech companies should preemptively nuke the anti-political censorship platform simply because it is associated with the former president.
“Trump clearly wants to use Truth Social to rally his troops again and fire them up for another run at the White House. There’s almost no way that such a mission won’t include inciting violence in some form,” O’Brient wrote this week. “If Truth Social becomes a venue for hate-spewing and further insurrection-plotting, these big tech giants can buy themselves a lot of goodwill by honoring their credos and standing up to protect American democracy.”
While corporate media are still largely focused on downplaying the number of people abandoning propaganda sites run by the political actors in Big Tech, leaders at Truth Social know that a war on their attempt to offer a “family-friendly” social media site is coming and they are prepared to stop it in its tracks.
“The campaign by the left and the mainstream media to censor and suppress other viewpoints is a shocking threat to democracy,” Devin Nunes, CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) in charge of launching Truth Social, told The Federalist. “The fact that there’s even a need and a demand for Truth Social – a social media platform that won’t censor content based on viewpoints – is unsettling in itself. Once you begin censoring, the suppressions develop a momentum of their own. This naturally leads to demands for preemptive censorship, which until recently was a concept you only found in dystopian science fiction novels.”
Despite the difficulties presented by a market largely controlled by Big Tech monopolies, Truth Social built most of its platform from the ground up. Parler previously tried a similar strategy but was eventually nuked by dozens of companies who wanted the platform gone for political reasons. Unlike in Parler’s case, Apple is really the only Big Tech company that has the power to remove Truth Social from its app store and the new social media platform is already working to keep the illegal activity that censors use to justify suppression off of the platform.
While some are calling for Truth Social to be wiped off of the web, the leaders of the social media company are confident that their lack of reliance on corrupt, political actors for web services will guard them against sudden deplatforming.
“We’re building as much of our own infrastructure as possible from scratch. We won’t be relying on Big Tech firms to keep our website on the internet, and we’re partnering with companies that are fundamentally committed to free speech, such as Rumble,” Nunes said.
Big Tech is filled with political entities that have used their influence and authority to suppress narratives about Covid-19, biological sex, and political stances they dislike. During the 2020 election alone, social media oligarchs did their best to alter the election outcome in favor of now-President Joe Biden. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was caught red-handed funneling money into poor election practices that benefit Democrats and Twitter, aided by the corrupt corporate media, deliberately blacked out any coverage of the Hunter Biden laptop story. After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Facebook, Twitter, and others justified wiping Trump off of their platforms for “inciting violence” but have let actual warmongers like Russia’s Vladimir Putin stay on.
Users are hungry for a social media platform that doesn’t threaten them when they think or speak differently than the regime desires and Nunes said they will find it with Truth Social.
“The Big Tech companies generally did not begin as leftwing propaganda projects. In fact, the founders of a lot of these companies were idealistic proponents of free speech. But over time, they got corrupted and transformed their platforms into appendages of the Democratic Party and the left,” Nunes said. “Truth Social won’t do that, no matter the pressure from the media, the government, the left, or anywhere else. President Trump, myself, and others here have spent years fighting back against the left’s ridiculous attempts to silence us.”
Nunes is all too familiar with political censorship that is strategically used to justify false narratives circulated by the corrupt corporate media. When he served as the Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes was quick to call out the fraudulent stories about Trump colluding with Russia which were repeatedly promoted by the dishonest press. Nunes also helped expose Twitter for shadowbanning conservatives like him.
“You can’t eliminate one side from the public debate and expect to keep a healthy democracy. Everyone is entitled to have their say, and we’re not going to hire a bunch of Big Tech-style political enforcers and ideological goons to force-feed you the viewpoints we decide you should be reading. That’s condescending and unfair, and we won’t do it,” Nunes said.
