Just over a month after going live on the Apple App Store, two central tech figures working at Truth Social are saying “bye bye” to former president Donald Trump’s social media endeavor.
According to a new report by Reuters, Truth Social’s “chiefs of technology and product development” Josh Adams and Billy Boozer have resigned from the company.
Their resignations could have major implications for the conservative media project. Sources highlighted to Reuters just how integral the two were, with one calling Adams the “brains” behind Truth Social’s development. Boozer was described as having a “major leadership role” and acting as a manager across multiple teams working on Truth Social. As Reuters mentions in its report, the hiring pool was already fairly limited for Truth Social due to the nature of it being a politically conservative platform.
Adams and Boozer’s decisions to leave the company are yet another major blow to the alternative social network. When first announced last year, an alpha version of Truth Social’s unreleased website was quickly discovered by trolls who quickly defaced the platform with fake accounts and vulgar memes like pig poop balls.
Shortly after, Trump’s social media platform was forced to publicly credit Mastodon, the open-source software it was built on after it broke its licensing agreement by omitting those details.
When Truth Social finally launched on President’s Day this past February, most weren’t even able to use the platform. Instead, potential users were met with a waitlist. Many potential users have still not been granted access to the platform. Those who have been let into Truth Social have found that these various issues have resulted in a fairly inactive platform, unless you’re an established figure in the conservative movement.
Billed as a “free speech” platform, users on Truth Social discovered that the social media platform is anything but. Just like the Big Tech platforms, Truth Social has its own rules that have resulted in bans and content being removed. In fact, one user reported that the username they registered on Truth Social was banned from the platform simply because a user with a similar username that trolls Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes on Twitter. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) is the parent company of Truth Social.
Truth Social has seen its new iOS app installs plummet from hundreds of thousands of downloads to just 60,000 in recent weeks. The app is only available in Apple’s App Store, with no web or Android version yet. To make matters worse, the man who the entire company is based around, Donald Trump, has been MIA on his own social media platform. Trump made one post prior to the app’s launch and has not posted since.
It’s unclear exactly why Adams and Boozer have left the company. However, all these issues certainly could have played a part. Their departure is already having a negative impact on the company as shares in Digital World Acquisition Corp., the shell company TMTG merged with in order to trade on the stock market, have dropped by as much as 14 percent on the news.
