The “free speech” alternative social website is severely outmatched by its mainstream competitors
Truth Social, the social media platform founded by former president and 2024 GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, has earned just $1.2 million in advertising since its February 2022 launch, according to Trump’s July 6 financial disclosure.
Truth Social launched in February 2022, billing itself as a “free speech” alternative to such popular social media platforms as Twitter and Facebook, which had banned the former president after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. A study from Pew Research Center later that year found that just 27% of Americans had heard of Truth Social and only 2% used it for news.
By comparison, Twitter reported advertising revenue of $1 billion in the second quarter of 2022, according to the final quarterly filing it made before being acquired and taken private by Elon Musk last year. Social media giant Meta, whose family of apps includes Facebook and Instagram, recorded $28.1 billion in advertising revenue across its services for that same period, according to its quarterly report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
A planned merger between blank check company Digital World Acquisition and Truth Social’s parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, was announced in October 2021. At the time, the merger valued Trump Media & Technology Group at $1.7 billion.
In his April disclosure form to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, however, Trump said the company was worth no more than $25 million.
Shortly after the 2021 merger was announced, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority launched an investigation into the transaction, which put the plan on hold. Earlier this month, Digital World Acquisition announced it reached an agreement with the SEC’s Division of Enforcement to settle the agency’s investigation into the company, under the condition that the company pay a $18 million penalty after the merger closes, according to a filing.
And in June, three investors in the blank check company acquiring Trump Media & Technology Group were charged by prosecutors with insider trading, according to The Washington Post. About a month before the planned merger was made public, these investors allegedly used their advance knowledge of the proposed transaction in a scheme that netted them $22 million in profits. The SEC also filed a lawsuit, charging the three men with insider trading.
The men had been notified of the planned merger by Digital World Acquisition Chairman and CEO Patrick Orlando in June 2021, according to the SEC’s lawsuit. Orlando was not accused of any wrongdoing; neither Trump the former president nor his company were not named in the indictment.
Orlando was fired by Digital World in March, although he remains a director at the company, according to Axios.
“Due to the unprecedented headwinds faced by the company, the board agreed it was in the best interest of its shareholders to select a new management team to execute an orderly succession plan and set strategic operating procedures for the Company in this new phase,” Digital World Acquisition said in a March press release.
Regardless of the politics surrounding the man, Donald Trump built a real estate empire and then, against almost all the odds, catapulted to the most powerful job in the world, thanks in large part to his exceptional ability to market his brand and himself.
1. There’s no such thing as bad publicity
While it’s certainly a cliché and definitely not true in all cases, Trump showed that in some instances bad publicity and bad PR can be a boom to one’s notoriety, specifically brand awareness, without crashing their reputation.
During his presidential run, Trump continuously made the news for all the wrong reasons, at least according to conventional campaign wisdom, by repeatedly saying things that were shocking or potentially insensitive and by constantly breaking with presidential decorum.
Yes, Trump received lots of scorn for these things, but more importantly, he gobbled up $5 billion worth of free media while spending only one-third on advertising as his main competitor, Hillary Clinton. Trump’s face and voice being seen and heard on TVs across America at all times must have certainly helped his successful presidential campaign.
So while brands surely don’t want to make a splash in the media or on social media often for the wrong reasons, as long as the content doesn’t alienate and turn off the targeted audience, then the consequences might be negligible.
2. Know the image you want and push it confidently
Perhaps the biggest reason for Trump’s success as a candidate was his embrace of being an outsider. Trump knew he had an advantage over other vanilla politicians with his perceived status as a “businessman,” a “non-politician,” and “politically incorrect.”
And Trump saw this edge written in the tea leaves or by just simply looking at about any poll on Americans’ distrust of their elected politicians.
Brands who know their desired image down to a T, and more specifically, knowing why their brand is unique, makes marketing in an authentic way miles simpler.
And, as it turns out, consumers rank authenticity and honesty above both unique product offerings and great customer service.
3. Break the rules
Echoing the above points, Donald Trump’s habit of spitting in the face of conventional campaign wisdom is something that every marketer could learn from.
His willingness to break the standard rules of politicking was refreshing to many people. And many times, even if people didn’t technically agree with what Trump was saying, they found it a breath of fresh air that he would speak his mind and be outside the box — at least in terms of the political sphere.
And sure, there are a lot of traditional marketing strategies and techniques that are tried and true and will inevitably pay dividends in the long run, but ditching the marketing manual every now and then can make your brand stand out from the pack in a world where many younger consumers are very skeptical about advertisers.
Rather than throwing out the same old marketing content as other brands have done for years, pushing bold and innovative advertising that speaks to customers in new, relatable ways is exactly what Trump did for his voters.
4. Have an enemy
One wildly successful aspect of Donald Trump’s election run was his ability to find and exploit a huge number of enemies — enemies of both himself and his would-be voters.
Whether it be the media and their “fake news,” the Washington elites, the big-money interests, Crooked Hillary, Rosie O’Donnell, illegal immigrants, or Islamic terrorists, Trump knew that having enemies creates a conflict and storyline that will rally people. Trump supporters stood with him based on his beliefs and attitudes, but probably more so, because of what he stood against: business as usual in Washington.
Having or creating an enemy is also a priceless marketing technique, just ask T-Mobile, who was struggling to keep up with other mobile carriers until the company launched its “Un-carrier” campaign, which essentially painted AT&T and Verizon Wireless as the enemies of carrier freedom.
The campaign was a huge success and rallied many young, dissatisfied mobile phone users to make the switch to T-Mobile. Now T-Mobile is the fastest growing mobile phone carrier in the US.
5. Speak Like Us
Trump’s social media presence, especially on Twitter, is a great example of how he knows what will resonate with his audience.
Rather than coming off as fake and superficial like most politicians who opt to have social media managers do their posting, Trump offers wholly unfiltered hot takes on his Twitter timeline on a regular basis, which not only amplifies his brand but makes him seem more like an authentic person.
On top of this, you might have heard that Trump speaks at a 4th-grade level, tending to repeat things over and over again, use primarily one-syllable words, and simple sentences in his speech.
You could draw many conclusions from this, but the most important is that his speech is easy to understand, more memorable, and is much closer to how the average person talks than an in-the-weeds politician.
For marketers, speaking like an average person and coming across as authentic can be a huge challenge. It often times feels fake and forced.
A great and increasingly popular way to remedy this is by building a network of trusted social media influencers to market your message. Influencers, unlike brands, are much more trusted by consumers because they are like us in our eyes and we relate to them in ways we could never relate to an impersonal brand.
6. Simple messaging
If you asked people what Trump’s campaign, or Bernie Sanders’ for that matter, stood for in just one or two sentences you would get a tight and quick answer. If you asked that same question of Hillary Clinton’s campaign or any of Trump’s main Republican primary challengers, you would probably get a lot of “uh’s” and “um’s.”
The reason for this is simple messaging. In Trump’s case, he stuck to simple, easy to remember phrases like “Make America Great Again” and “build the wall.” Sanders, likewise, often repeated “Medicare for All” and “free college.”
In marketing, this is invaluable. Consumers should know a brand’s message and identity and be able to say it in a one or two sentences or a few short phrases.
This can be achieved by utilizing highly-focused ads and audience targeting. Spreading content too thin can often times lead to vague and forgettable messaging.
Rather than buying loads of TV ads and hoping to attract a energized base, Trump built a relevant, consistent, concise, and simple message that easily resonated.
7. Know your audience
Trump’s clear understanding of his audience was a key reason he succeeded in getting to the White House.
He knew that many Americans had been forgotten by their politicians and left to fend for themselves and used this to market his campaign with laser-focus targeting. Even more, his underlying populist messaging was simple and ultimately what they wanted to hear, that the system isn’t looking out for them and that he was going to shake things up.
Furthermore, he was acutely aware of the beliefs and demographics of his audience and, for that reason, didn’t care to burn bridges with say, Hispanic-Americans or Muslim-Americans to build support and to rally his targeted audience.
Marketers too must sharply know their audience in order to mobilize them to purchase their goods or services, especially in the digital age when consumers expect heavily personalized advertising that speaks directly to them.
At least four million election-related tweets were sent during the campaign, posted by more than 400,000 social bots.
Key to democracy is public engagement – when people discuss the issues of the day with each other openly, honestly and without outside influence. But what happens when large numbers of participants in that conversation are biased robots created by unseen groups with unknown agendas? As my research has found, that’s what has happened this election season.
Since 2012, I have been studying how people discuss social, political, ideological and policy issues online. In particular, I have looked at how social media is abused for manipulative purposes.
It turns out that much of the political content Americans see on social media every day is not produced by human users. Rather, about one in every five election-related tweets from September 16 to October 21 was generated by computer software programs called “social bots.”
These artificial intelligence systems can be rather simple or very sophisticated, but they share a common trait: they are set to automatically produce content following a specific political agenda determined by their controllers, who are nearly impossible to identify. These bots have affected the online discussion around the presidential election, including leading topics and how online activity was perceived by the media and the public.
How active are they?
The operators of these systems could be political parties, foreign governments, third-party organisations, or even individuals with vested interests in a particular election outcome. Their work amounts to at least four million election-related tweets during the period we studied, posted by more than 400,000 social bots.
That’s at least 15 per cent of all the users discussing election-related issues. It’s more than twice the overall concentration of bots on Twitter – which the company estimates at five to 8.5 per cent of all accounts.
To determine which accounts are bots and which are humans, we use Bot Or Not, a publicly available bot-detection service developed in collaboration with colleagues at Indiana University. Bot Or Not uses advanced machine learning algorithms to analyse multiple cues, including Twitter profile metadata, the content and topics posted by the account under inspection, the structure of its social network, the timeline of activity and much more. After considering more than 1,000 factors, Bot Or Not generates a likelihood score that the account under scrutiny is a bot. Our tool is 95 percent accurate at this determination.
There are many examples of bot-generated tweets, supporting their candidates, or attacking the opponents. The effectiveness of social bots depends on the reactions of actual people. We learned that people were not able to ignore, or develop a sort of immunity toward, the bots’ presence and activity. Instead, we found that most human users can’t tell whether a tweet is posted by another real user or by a bot. We know this because bots are being retweeted at the same rate as humans. Retweeting bots’ content without first verifying its accuracy can have real consequences, including spreading rumors, conspiracy theories or misinformation.
Some of these bots are very simple, and just retweet content produced by human supporters. Other bots, however, produce new tweets, jumping in the conversation by using existing popular hashtags (for instance, #NeverHillary or #NeverTrump). Real users who follow these Twitter hashtags will be exposed to bot-generated content seamlessly blended with the tweets produced by other actual people.
Bots produce content automatically, and therefore at a very fast and continuous rate. That means they form consistent and pervasive parts of the online discussion throughout the campaign. As a result, they were able to build significant influence, collecting large numbers of followers and having their tweets retweeted by thousands of humans.
Our investigation into these politically active social bots also uncovered information that can lead us to more nuanced understanding of them. One such lesson was that bots are biased, by design. For example, Trump-supporting bots systematically produced overwhelmingly positive tweets in support of their candidate. Previous studies showed that this systematic bias alters public perception. Specifically, it creates the false impression that there is grassroots, positive, sustained support for a certain candidate.
Location provided another lesson. Twitter provides metadata about the physical location of the device used to post a certain tweet.
By aggregating and analysing their digital footprints, we discovered that bots are not uniformly distributed across the United States; they are significantly overrepresented in some states, in particular southern states like Georgia and Mississippi. This suggests some bot operations may be based in those states.
Also, we discovered bots can operate in multiple ways. For example, when they are not engaged in producing content supporting their respective candidates, bots can target their opponents. We discovered that bots pollute certain hashtags, like #NeverHillary or #NeverTrump, where they smear the opposing candidate.
These strategies leverage known human biases, in particular the fact that negative content travels faster on social media, as one of our recent studies demonstrated. We found that, in general, negative tweets are retweeted at a pace 2.5 times higher than positive ones. This, in conjunction with the fact that people are naturally more inclined to retweet content that aligns with their preexisting political views, results in the spreading of content that is often defamatory or based on unsupported, or even false, claims.
It is hard to quantify the effects of bots on the actual election outcome, but it’s plausible to think they could affect voter turnout in some places. For example, some people may think there is so much local support for their candidate (or the opponent) that they don’t need to vote – even if what they’re seeing is actually artificial support provided by bots.
Our study hit the limits of what can be done today by using computational methods to fight the issue of bots. Our ability to identify the bot masters is bound by technical constraints on recognizing patterns in their behavior.
Social media is acquiring increasing importance in shaping political beliefs and influencing people’s online and offline behavior. The research community will need to continue to explore, to make these platforms as safe from abuse as possible.
Emilio Ferrara is research assistant professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and this article originally appeared on The Conversation.
