Former California Rep. Devin Nunes — who left Congress to serve as CEO of the company behind Truth Social — has stated that the new app is intended to be the anti-Twitter in that users will not be suspended or banned over the content of their posts as frequently as they have been on Twitter. Musk has said he is seeking to acquire Twitter in part to champion less content moderation.
Nunes appeared on Fox Business Monday morning to promote Truth Social and was asked by host Maria Bartiromo about Musk. One question on many minds is whether Musk might allow Trump back on Twitter after the former president was banned following the Jan. 6 Capitol riots.
In the event Musk does allow Trump back on Twitter, Bartiromo asked Nunes whether the former president would return to the app where he was, for a time, a god-tier poster.
“Well, I can only report what he said,” Nunes said of Trump. “He said he really doesn’t have an interest in going on Twitter, and my guess is that would continue to be the same.”
That “guess” seems … suspect. Trump himself hardly uses Truth Social and reportedly went “ballistic” when he was first suspended from Twitter. The Daily Beast reported that Trump is “furious” about Truth Social’s troubled launch and “appears disengaged from trying to turn the platform around, much less post on it.”
But according to Nunes, Truth Social is not struggling, actually. He went on to claim, offering no evidence, that Truth Social has more engagement than Twitter.
“Twitter right now is nothing but a PR wire,” he said. “It’s got a global footprint, but there’s just nobody there, and I mean.”
Truth Social’s download numbers are very bad, and the high number of user complaints also don’t exactly lend themselves to the idea that Truth Social has more engagement than Twitter. Nunes is always welcome to open Truth Social’s books, and we at SFGATE would be eager to see the metrics he is looking at that would lead him to make such a strong claim.