By now you've almost certainly heard about
#NeverWasMyPresident Donald Trump's grand plan to
launch yet another alternative to major social media platforms
such as Twitter and Facebook -- his way of sticking it to Big
Tech for banning him.
I'm referring, of course, to the absurdly ill-named TRUTH Social,
which will be developed by a new enterprise called Trump Media
and Technology Group (TMTG). Announced by Trump surrogate Liz Harrington on Twitter on October 20,
2021, TRUTH Social is being launched to
"stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech."
Trump had famously already failed at least once in the social
media arena, promising months ago to
immediately launch a platform of his own after he was booted off
of Twitter and Facebook due to his incitement of the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6,
2021. Or maybe his big plans just got
delayed. In any case, instead of the promised social media
platform, a laughable blog appeared briefly... and was gone
within a month. There was buzz for a while that Gettr was the new home for Team Trump and his allies... but that buzz faded too.
The idea of alternative Twitters and Facebooks and so forth is
not new, of course. Right-wingers have been snowflaking for the past few
years about being "censored"
online, and many have taken their toxic whines not only to the
courts but also to numerous alternate social media apps that have sprung up
in recent times. But a Trump-branded
social media alternative is truly newsworthy, because Trump
unfortunately remains so high-profile, not to mention that he's
the biggest and loudest whiner of all when it comes to griping
about censorship.
If you think that TRUTH Social is going to be a safe haven for
"free speech," however, think again. First off, the
site will censor its own users. Saying bad stuff about Dear Leader or his platform or
its parent company is verboten.
And if you think that this platform is destined for long-term
success, you need to reconsider that too. From The Daily Kos, October 21:
...Most of the attention focused on [the announcement about TMTG] has been centered around the announcement of something called “TRUTH Social”—also known as yet-another-Trump-focused-Twitter-clone. But that’s not the real point of TMTG. The real point is that this is a scheme through which Trump can collect several hundred million dollars, even if his new social platform never posts a tweet, or a toot, or a fart, or whatever they end up being called.
The truth behind TRUTH Social is right there in the first paragraph of the announcement, which is not focused on the technology behind the platform, or anything that Trump is bringing to the table. Instead, that paragraph is dedicated to explaining how the project has been given "an initial enterprise value of $875 million" and "a cumulative valuation up to $1.7 billion." Which is amazing, because what it seems to have is nothing more than a credit line and some highly generic code that was hacked within minutes of the beta address becoming known.
No sooner had the first test invites been handed out than someone spoofed Trump's account and posted, well, as Daily Beast contributor Steven Monacelli accurately puts it, "a photo of a pig defecating on its own scrotum." Two hours after it first went up, the whole site came down.
However, it doesn't matter if the site ever sticks its head above the waste pool again. Because that's not the point. Donald Trump is potentially walking about with $340 million, even if it fails completely. That's the point.
The site seems to be up again now, but right
now it's
just a page that invites you to
"Join the Waiting List!" or to pre-order the app in the
Apple Store. The launch is supposed to happen in November of
2021.
But there seem to be a few other bumps in the road, not the least
of which are credible accusations that the Trump app's developers
appear to have purloined code without giving due credit
to the code's creators. Oops.
Coding issues aside, it goes without saying that this whole thing
was designed as yet another money op for the former
Grifter-in-Chief, who was a grifter long before he infested the White
House, and has continued his grifting
nonstop since being legitimately voted out. (If you sincerely believe he wasn't legitimately voted
out, you're in a cult. Please seek help.) Like countless other
media outlets that have reported this news, the Daily Kos article
cited above goes on to explain the scheme.
What Trump is attempting here is something called a SPAC, or Special Purpose Acquisition [Company]. It's also known as a "reverse merger" or a "blank check company." It's a scheme in which some low-value shell company that's already listed on a stock market "buys" a private company, then relists itself under the name of that new company. In almost all cases, what's really going on is that the private company is just taking over the empty husk of that shell company—a company that may have existed for no other purpose than to serve as a placeholder for some future SPAC.
Why go through these steps? Because getting listed on a stock exchange generally requires clearing a number of hurdles, including meeting requirements from the Securities and Exchange Commission. SPACS can just pop into existence, taking a fast track to a stock listing while dodging almost every qualifying step.
The Trump SPAC falls under a specific category known as a "celebrity SPAC," in which a high-profile person, known as "the Sponsor," raises capital by taking the SPAC public in an IPO. The SPAC uses the cash proceeds from the IPO and a large stock issuance to acquire a private company and make it public. But unlike traditional IPOs, the Sponsor gets a 20 percent stake without having to invest much of anything -- and there's much less regulatory scrutiny. While not all SPACs are scams, this one almost certainly is. The Kos article describes it as "nothing more than an exchange-based Ponzi scheme in which the original Ponzi is guaranteed to walk away with a mountain of cash." In short...
TMTG isn't a social media platform. It's a scam. Trump doesn't need another social media platform. He needs suckers willing to buy stock. And Trump has always been very, very good at locating suckers.
So while it's fun to point out that TRUTH Social has some of the most restrictive rules of any platform, including rules that prohibit criticizing TRUTH Social, it doesn't really matter. The whole platform can be sh#t pigs all the way down. It can collapse under its own incompetence. None of that means a thing. What matters to Trump is that he gets to walk away with a bundle.
That's pretty much all that has ever mattered
to Trump.
The SPAC stock linked to Trump's platform is Digital World
Acquisition Corporation (DWAC), and granted, it was quite the
talk of the market last week, when DWAC shares shot from $9.96
per share at closing on Wednesday, October 20, to $94.20 per
share on Friday, October 22. That's an astounding 845% rally in a
mere two days. But as CNBC reported today
(October 25), DWAC was down 10 percent after 2:00 PM ET, so there
appear to be signs that "the Trump-fueled craze has died
down," according to the CNBC piece.
Short-seller Iceberg Research unveiled a bearish position on the DWAC on Monday, saying that investors face uncertainties in this blank-check deal as Trump could become a dominant shareholder after the merger.
“Now that initial excitement has passed, we see only risks for investors in near future. Based on Trump’s track record, at current price, renegotiation is likely to keep more of the merged company for him,” Iceberg Research said in a tweet.
“SPAC holders don’t own a piece of this project yet. Trump has leverage, not them.”
But I'm not shedding any tears for these investors. At this point, anyone who invests in anything related to Trump deserves to lose money. And as far as I'm concerned, that also goes for the countless small donors who have fallen for his myriad fundraising scams --- such as phony "membership cards" and other "exclusive" benefits (or promises thereof) designed to keep the rubes feeling like they're Someone Special. He'll almost certainly continue to run these scams long after the current SPAC cash cow has been milked dry. The cult members will just keep on forking over, feeding his coffers and his ego while he smirks and talks bad about them behind their backs.
* * * * *
Trump may be the most high-profile right-wing
grifter to whine about Big Tech and try to compete directly with
the major platforms, but he's far from the only one. Take Mike "The Health Ranger" Adams (please). Besides being a particularly vociferous Trump
fanboy and advocate of martial law as long as a right-wing president is imposing it, Adams is a longtime peddler of
alt-health frauducts and "advice" as well as a promoter
of conspiracy theories and far-right-wing talking points. (He was
also one of the featured speakers, along with Eric Trump and
Roger Stone, at a three-day fascism/alt-health rally in Nashville
this past weekend, The Truth [sic] About Cancer Live.)
Years ago Adams, apparently unhappy with the standards imposed by
Wikipedia, created his own Wiki platform, "TruthWiki,"
which is every bit as hilariously misnamed as Trump's TRUTH
Social. In an April 2016 Whirled post
(under the sub-head, "Trying to conquer the Internet, one
comical alt-site at a time"), I described Adams as...
...the guy who is so afraid of people finding out the truth about him and his colleagues that he started his own lame version of Wikipedia: the very ill-named TruthWiki. (Here's the TruthWiki entry about David Gorski. And while we're at it, here's Gorski, as Orac, writing about TruthWiki in 2014.)
Dr. Gorski is an oncologist who's one of the
people on Mike Adams' enemies list; Adams has seriously defamed
him numerous times in his Natural News blog posts.
Then there's Adams' answer to Google, GoodGopher. From the 2016
Whirled post I quoted above:
GoodGopher very carefully filters out what they consider "disinformation" and government/Big Pharma propaganda, instead stacking their search results with alt-nutty and rightwing sites (which are euphemistically called "independent news media") such as NaturalNews (of course!) as well as Breitbart, The Blaze, Washington Times (owned and run by Moonies), Drudge Report, Western Journalism and more.
It's a pretty lousy search engine, but it's tailor-made for the no-evil monkeys who want to avoid any fact or opinion that might shake their carefully constructed world of alt-health advocacy, Scamworld delusions, conspiracy theories and right-wing spin.
I went to the GoodGopher site a little while
ago, for the first time in years, and typed a name in the search
engine. It was a name for which I knew there were numerous
results on GoodGopher; at least there had been when I checked it
last. But all I got for search results was a message:
"Server is busying [sic] right now, please try again
later." All righty, then!
Mike Adams may not be giving Wikipedia or Google a
run for their money, but what his sites lack in quality they
collectively make up for in quantity. His disinfo empire includes
scads of alt-health and alt-"news" web sites, some of which are no doubt generating income from suckers, and with
some of these sites he also seems to be succeeding in one
important task: spreading the type of political disinformation
that is eroding American democracy and further nudging us down
the road to authoritarianism and fascism.
On October 18, ArsTechnica published the revelation that Robert Willis, aka "Hacker X" -- the
hacker who helped build an enormous US-based disinfo network that
helped Trump get elected -- had confirmed that he was actually
working for Mike Adams at Adams' NaturalNews.com site.
Willis had joined NaturalNews.com in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election and helped the site build out a network of anonymized websites that looked independent but secretly promoted the "health" information and pro-Trump political writings of Mike Adams and NaturalNews.com.
NaturalNews has long been linked to disinformation. In 2019, The Atlantic named it one of the top producers of anti-vax content on the Internet. The site has touted homeopathy, urged "natural" remedies for things like cancer, and warned about "chemtrails." NaturalNews content has been banned from Facebook, and the site has been called a "powerful conspiracy empire."
Willis claims to have made little money from his work for Adams, and says that he has remorse "for a few reasons." He claims that he didn't really know what Adams was all about when he first joined his site, which is kind of hard to believe.
As for all the pro-Trump, anti-Clinton "fake news" that Willis eventually helped to propagate, he claimed that the reason he "didn’t know it was fake news at the beginning is because the machine needed to be built before it could be used, so I didn’t spend time inside stories outside of overseeing social media and numbers, at which point I did not factor in the aspect of whether the articles were true or not. I was strictly breaking down stories by headlines and breaking it down into numbers. With an occasional crazy headline that seemed harmless."
Okay, sure. Willis says the whole experience has made him apolitical and that he didn't vote in the 2020 election. Here's his statement about about his actions. And here's a post about "Hacker X" and Mike Adams by the aforementioned David Gorski, the target of some of Mike Adams' most vicious defamation.
* * * * *
If you feel like climbing even further down into the pit of alt-site failures, you might stumble across a silly Facebook alternative created last year by phony doctor/cancer quack/neo-Nazi/Trump fan/alleged predator and all-around evil dimwit Leonard Coldwell, who has been in a perpetual huff for the past decade or so about repeatedly being thrown into Facebook jail. Back in October of 2020 Lenny's favorite handmaid griped about Facebook for about the ten-dozenth time on his main English-language web site:.
Make no mistake accounts are being targeted. Those who have spoken out for truth on matters such as politics, COVID-Hoax, Masks, for natural health and not big pharma, called out Monsanto and Bill Gates, or even Georgy Sorros [sic] who wants to destroy the world as we know it are being scrutinized for every word they type.
Why?
Because Facebook is a communist/socialist website who [sic] is pushing the agenda of the New Normal hard. They want you all to be obedient. They want (end game) for you to be vaccinated mindless drone of a slave to the system.
But never fear; there was a solution from the great "Dr." C:
Dr. Coldwell has created his own version [of Facebook]. Champ book. You are invited! https://champbook.tribe.so/ while much of it is currently in German we also are gaining many English speaking members and would love to have you. There will never be censorship like there is on Facebook.
Which isn't to say that there won't be
censorship, I suppose. But it all seems moot because Lenny and
most of the rest of the world appear to have all but forgotten
ChampBook, as you'll see if you take a look at the endless stream
of spam that meets the eye when you land on
the site. But I have to admit that
there is quite an impressive list of "Most reputable losers
users," with a very reputable spammer called Мария
Иванцова being number one, and Lenny himself appearing at
the bottom of the list of most reputable users when I checked the
other day, and not appearing on that list at all when I went back
to check today. (Мария was still number one, though.) Poor
little Lenny: he can't even compete with spammers and bots on his
own site. Sad.
* * * * *
None of what I've written above means that I am
opposed to competition, including and perhaps especially in the
area of social media and other online forums. Monopolies aren't
good for business or, ultimately, for democracy. Nor does it mean
that I am blind to the misdeeds -- some of them quite egregious
-- of the Big Tech platforms. As more info continues to spill out about Facebook, for example, it becomes ever more painfully obvious
that Big Tech companies value profit over any of the other fine
values, such as truth or the well-being of their users, to which
they pay lip service. But the problems created by Big Tech won't
be solved by right-wing scammers, whose ludicrous forums are
little more than echo chambers at best, and all too often are
vehicles to pick the pockets of vulnerable people.
Grifting is not just a right-wing thing, of
course. But these daze, the right-wing grift machine, fueled by
an unending stream of fascist bat-crap both online and off, seems
to be posing the greatest dangers, not only to public health but
also to the health of American (and world) democracy. The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated this problem, but it has been brewing for years now. Whether the
grift comes in the form of a Trumpian "investment
opportunity" and "TRUTH" platform, a slime trail
of fake-news sites from "The Health Ranger," or a
flaccid Facebook alternative from an angry and deranged little
German scammer, it's all part of the same problem.
It has never been more important to stay informed, rather than
misinformed or willfully uninformed. And it's never been more
important for eligible voters who want to stop the madness to
make sure they're registered, and then to get out there and vote.
