
Two executives from Truth Social, a social-media company founded by former President Donald Trump as an alternative to mainstream platforms, have abruptly resigned.
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 last year from Twitter after spewing incendiary language 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.
Their resignations are currently not known.
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 February, Truth Social has been riddled with problems and mishaps. There are hundreds of thousands of users still waiting on the site to be accessible. It is only currently available through the Apple store. Android users and web browsers cannot access the platform.
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.
Even among those who can use the app, there are many criticisms. Access the site. Rosie Bradbury, European Tech Fellow at Business Insider, recently noted that the site lacks actual usersMany prominent conservative voices were reportedly planning to be present on the app. You will also find auto-generated messages in the feed.
“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 It appears to be a carbon-copy of Twitter’s layout — but instead of tweets and retweets, Truth Social has “truths” and “retruths.”
Truth Social was advertised as a platform free from censorship. However, users have reported being removed from the site. Indeed, Truth Social’s terms of service Allow the company actually to remove any user “for any reason or no reason.”