Two tech executives abruptly resigned this week from Truth Social, the social media company launched by former President Donald Trump as a right-wing alternative to mainstream platforms.
The resignations of the executives — Josh Adams and Billy Boozer, who were hired less than a year ago to serve as Truth Social’s chiefs of technology and product development — further highlight the continued struggles the social media site has faced since its public launch earlier this year.
The former executives were reportedly aligned with the main tenets of Truth Social’s mission: to provide a place for Trump loyalists to interact online without regulation, or to avoid “cancel culture,” as many have described the enforcement of rules on other sites. (Notably, Trump was banned from Twitter last year after spewing incendiary rhetoric regarding the 2020 election.)
According to Reuters, which first reported on the executives’ departures, Adams was considered the “brains” of the technology side of the company, while Boozer had a leadership role in the management and development of the app.
The circumstances behind their resignations are currently unknown.
After the executives resigned, the site’s parent company, Trump SPAC Digital World Acquisition, saw its stock drop by 14 percent, continuing a trend of losses in the company’s stock that began after the app went live.
Since its launch in mid-February, Truth Social has been riddled with problems and mishaps. Hundreds of thousands of users are still on a waitlist to access the site, which is currently only available on the Apple store; the platform is so far completely inaccessible to Android users and through web browsers.
These issues remain in spite of assurances from former Republican congressman Devin Nunes, who now manages Truth Social’s parent company, and who previously said that the app would be “fully operational” by the end of March. According to an analysis from market research firm SensorTower, Truth Social presently ranks 35th overall among social networking apps, despite Trump’s promise that the platform would be a direct competitor to both Facebook and Twitter.
Criticisms about the app abound, even among those who can access the site. Rosie Bradbury, European Tech Fellow at Business Insider, recently noted that the site lacks actual users, including prominent conservative voices who were supposedly planning to have a big presence on the app. The feed is also full of auto-generated messages.
“It was like a conservative ghost town that had been overrun by bots,” Bradbury said of her one-week experience using Truth Social.
The app’s layout appears to be a carbon copy of Twitter’s layout — but instead of tweets and retweets, Truth Social has “truths” and “retruths.”
Although Truth Social was advertised as a platform that would be free from censorship, users have already reported being booted from the site. Indeed, Truth Social’s terms of service actually allow the company to remove any user “for any reason or no reason.”
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