I tried to search for Trump's account. It's really difficult to find it with any search engine. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex and Baidu all failed to turn it up. I had to use "site:truthsocial.com Trump" on Google and even then it was nowhere near top result.
How hard can it be to get your most popular user into any search engine?
"How hard can it be to get your most popular user into any search engine?" Is it a telling find that something you'd expect to be easier to find, isn't? Who is really banning whom.
I think the problem is the media are not linking to it, not even conservative media. When no one cares about what you're saying enough to link to it, search engines don't assign importance to it.
Claims need evidence. After VPNing because apparently foreigners (or Americans living in foreign countries) can't handle the truth, I checked their robots.txt[1]:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
But "Oh no, the dirty woke leftie search engines are banning us!"...
Since we all know it's Trump little website/he'd be the most famous user (is he even still there?) I'd expect his profile is linked from the homepage, but that's not the case either...
Of course, you have no idea if that's true, but you say it because you want to believe it. This is textbook Frankfurtian bullshit.
What we do know:
1. Yandex and Baidu can't find it either. Russian and Chinese search engines have no incentive to derank Trump - if anything, the opposite (he's great for sowing division among Americans and it would boost the tech bias narrative).
2. As another commenter has noted, Truth Social bans all robots, including search engine web crawlers.
"We" are the people who don't exhibit cult-like reverence to leaders - irrespective of party affiliation. There is no better. There's only people with eyes wide-open or eyes wide-shut. I'm an independent and I have many liberal and conservative views/opinions. That means I get to choose between the lesser of two evils (in my opinion) without any allegiance to (or illusions about) the party the candidates are affiliated with. I know I'm getting a mixed bag no matter who I vote for. Clinging to a cult of personality or party makes us worse off.
We need to stop identifying as democrats or republicans and be Americans first. There's no compromise in Congress because it works out better for the parties, not better for Americans.
Wikipedia says "...initially did not make its source code available, violating Mastodon's AGPLv3 license. After Eugen Rochko sent a formal letter to Truth Social's chief legal officer on 26 October 2021,[57] Truth Social published its source code on 12 November 2021." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
There's something quite ironic about calling your social network Truth and not having any ability to hold yourself to standards of accountability to "truth" at all. It's a very hypocritical name, no matter whether it was a quality offering or not.
Fox too. I went to watch regular syndicated comedy programming on a local TV station that is also a secondary Fox news and sports station, and the regular programming was preempted to carry Fox coverage of the hearings.
There didnt seem to any commentary or analysis. Just videos of testimony and extensive clips of the events at the Capitol, most of which where pretty unflattering to those who swarmed the place.
It wasn’t the Bastille-storming moment that it’s talked up to be, but it was still a pretty heinous crime of the sort that high-functioning countries absolutely should be prosecuting.
Lincoln said in his first inaugural address that all constitutional controversies can be separated into majorities and minorities. And that either the majority or minority must acquiesce for the government to continue. He was talking about the minority who just lost the 1860 election, and were refusing to submit to that loss, by seceding.
But importantly, minorities sometimes win. There's the bill of rights. There's case law. There's popular vote in presidential elections, contrary to the Electoral College vote - as in Bush 2000 and Trump 2016, in which majorities submitted to the outcome, i.e. they did not revolt. Thus the government continued.
Also importantly, Lincoln is pointing out that even a significant minority can be extremely disruptive to civil order, that it is actually a fragile business. And Trump and his pro-autocrat supporters have laid the ground for a significant minority simply refusing to be governed in numbers exceeding law enforcement's ability to contain it. No one can predict whether that'll be attempted or actually succeed, but the Bastille-storming moment is the mere attempt at such a coup, despite being a failed coup, despite it surely failing even had the goals at the Capitol succeeded: assassination of any number of elected officials, stopping the Electoral Vote count or fabricating an alternative outcome... the people who were needed to make a coup succeed simply weren't present in positions of power to make it happen. But we can do counter factuals to analyze whether and how that could have been different, and end up with a different result.
Both of Trump's AG's in the last three months following the election told him he lost. Both told him there was no evidence of fraud in any amount that would alter the outcome of the election. Well, what if one of them said he won and that he absolutely had authority and a duty to order the military against the Congress? You'd need multiple members of the armed forces willing to go along with that. It wouldn't just be one. And it's essentially certain armed forces would split, because all of them are trained about military coups and interventions, and the deceptive trap of militaries getting involved in civilian decision making processes.
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012 (written in 1992, imagining a coup had taken place in the U.S. in 2012 - it's been required reading in the various military colleges for at least a couple of decades)
"Truth Social is America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology."
followed by:
"Access denied
You do not have access to truthsocial.com.
The site owner may have set restrictions that prevent you from accessing the site. Contact the site owner for access or try loading the page again."
Is anyone surprised? The Donald doesn't care for anything but himself and he was willing to ruin the whole nation and what's left of its democracy for his own ego. Hypocrisy comes for free in this package.
How dare they ban users, what about free speech, censorship has no place, think how awful authoritarian regimes treat their population. What about democracy! /s
I feel bad for him, as he's going to generate a lot of ill will towards himself in his twilight years. He seems to have bitten off more than he can chew and really exposed himself, to the point that his own daughter seems to be distancing herself from him.
He could have had a great life as the big shot face of The Apprentice, and be fondly remembered for his "YOU'RE FIRED" catch phrase. Instead, he seems to be turning into more of a joke with every passing day. It must trouble him a bit too. SAD.
Controversial posts tend to. Sometimes quite unjustifiably, imo. On the other hand, the Vanity piece was just reporting on what a few people said on Twitter. Not real journalism, really.
I was taught that the American way to counter "bad speech" was to do more good speech. That is, it's socialist, or worse, communist, to censor speech and ban people. What has gone wrong at Truth Social?!?
> This chapter applies only to a social media platform that functionally has more than 50 million active users in the United States in a calendar month.
The law is sculpted to not apply to things like Truth Social.
Temporarily. The district court stayed it, the Fifth Circuit (which has been on a nutty tear lately) reinstated it, and SCOTUS put the district court's stay back in place. It'll wind up at SCOTUS again at some point.
I don't think "noone" was the best way to describe it, but I do think GP was onto something. How about this instead? The people making the biggest deal about this are the same people who are always downplaying and justifying Twitter's rampant censorship.
Twitter doesn't claim to be "America's "Big Tent" social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology".
We watched politicians and celebrities bail out folks terrorizing our cities for months on end while calling for them to harass political opponents.
Those same politicians are calling this mostly peaceful protest illegitimate.
The dishonesty and double standard is on open display, and the refusal to have an honest discussion only fuels the fire. The same fire used to justify further fuel.
You’re getting downvoted a lot so I thought I’d provide an explanation: Yes, trumped-up charges do happen in other countries. The question is, how do you think such offences as are being described should be handled? What would your alternative strategy be?
Trying former heads of state for crimes committed in office is also a norm in countries with an established tradition of democratic governance: france, italy, south korea, germany for example.
Trump attempted a coup. Only US President to ever have resisted the peaceful transfer power. Ignoring it, both-sides-ing it, justifying it, or downplaying it is exactly what should not be done. He broke a sacred trust.
There were multiple groups of people there with different levels of involvement, different motivations, and different objectives. Proud Boys stashed weaponry at a hotel in case Trump invoked the Insurrection Act. They were, in their words, happy to have the "normies" beating up a few "pigs", while they executed their coordinated seditious conspiracy, a conspiracy that they believed, in their own words, that they were coordinating with Trump. Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. Come January 6th, its going to be wild. These same Proud Boys gave VIP security to Roger Stone. Michael Flynn calling for invoking the resurrection act and invoking emergency powers to "rerun" the election; Flynn meeting with Trump for hours without WH lawyers present days before Jan 6.
It is clear what Trump thinks: “January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
1: users post about the hearings and start a yarn about Trump not having lost for real, the election being stolen, etc.
2: the web and its brother get up in arms about the fake news being spread on TS
3: TS gets its domain revoked, its web hosting is dropped, backbone providers start dropping traffic to it, the electricity company filters electrons bound for TS servers, etc.
4: TS disappears down the same hole Parler fell in...
Note the SPAC that financed TMTG is under SEC investigation: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/spac-tied-tru...