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Truth Social Users Are Begging Trump To Please Stop Running Shady Ads: ‘I’ve Been Scammed More Than Once’

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In a situation that should surprise absolutely no one, Truth Social users are proving to be easy marks for shady online ads, and they’re reportedly pleading with Donald Trump to do something about it. Thanks in no small parts to those users, who are extremely right-wing and dwindling by the day, Truth Social isn’t exactly a desirable target for major brands.

The predicament has forced the platform to be overrun with questionable ads for “alternative medicine, diet pills, gun accessories and Trump-themed trinkets.” Case in point: One ad boasted a gold $1,000 bill that Trump was supposedly giving to his supporters free. It was not free or made of gold.

Via The New York Times:

Devin Nunes, the chief executive of Trump Media, said in an announcement last year that the company’s ad strategy would help it “displace the Big Tech platforms” as a major way to reach Americans. But ad experts say the wariness from prominent brands on far-right social networks, which have positioned themselves as free-speech alternatives to Silicon Valley giants like Meta and Google, is driven by the kinds of conspiracy theories and hyperpartisan politics often found on the sites. In addition, they say, Truth Social has a relatively small user base and many older users, who are less desirable for the brands.

The situation has reached a boiling point as the few remaining users on Truth Social have reportedly turned on Trump. One user even hopped into the former president’s replies to plead for his help.

“Can you not vet the ads on Truth?” the frustrated user wrote. “I’ve been scammed more than once.”

However, thanks to the demographics of Truth Social and it’s less than helpful tracking system, the ad problem is probably not improving anytime soon or at all. There are also reports that Trump could leave the platform once his contract is up, but Devin Nunes has denied that’s the case. For whatever that’s worth.

(Via The New York Times)

Feature Image Credit: Getty Image

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Sourced from UPROXX

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Trump joins video platform Rumble that competes with Google’s YouTube

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By Ryan Lovelace,

President Trump joining the video platform Rumble marked the beginning of his digital return after bans against his accounts have restricted his access on Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube.

In joining Rumble, a YouTube rival, Mr. Trump is attempting to redefine his social media persona, from that of an outcast muzzled into silence by the tech giants to that of a defiant outsider challenging the status quo.

Followers should not expect to see pithy blog posts on Rumble like they would on Twitter. Instead, the user experience is more akin to YouTube, with short video clips and broadcasts. The first video from Mr. Trump‘s account featured a live broadcast of his Saturday rally in Ohio.

Rumble, buoyed by an influx of users and cash, particularly from conservatives, has mounted its own insurgent campaign against its much larger rival, Google.

Rumble has roughly 30 million monthly users and has grown its user base by 10% month over month, said Rumble founder Chris Pavlovski last month. That’s up from 800,000 monthly visits in August, per the Wall Street Journal.

Rumble has sued Google for antitrust violations in federal court and recently scored a large undisclosed investment from a group including billionaire Peter Thiel and conservative author J.D. Vance. Mr. Thiel, founder of PayPal and Facebook’s first outside investor, supported Mr. Trump‘s first presidential bid and Mr. Vance is considering running for the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Ohio.

Rumble’s detractors say it does not share the ideological commitment to free speech that was the hallmark of social networks Parler and Gab that similarly sought to compete with established tech companies. Parler and Gab featured microblogging posts similar to Twitter that have attracted right-leaning audiences as fears grow of censorship by more prominent platforms.

Gab founder Andrew Torba criticized Rumble for allegedly changing its terms of service on the day Mr. Trump joined to include new policies about hate speech. John Matze, Parler’s fired former co-founder, piled on and questioned Rumble’s motivation for securing Mr. Trump‘s digital presence.

“I wonder how much equity or money Rumble had to give … The same Rumble that runs entirely on Google ads, Google analytics, etc … [that is] big tech,” said Mr. Matze in a post on Gab. “Not that I think Trump‘s brand is worth anything anymore.”

Before his exit at Parler, Mr. Matze spoke favorably about what Mr. Trump‘s joining Parler would mean for the upstart platform. Last June, he told The Washington Times his platform would likely have trouble scaling if Mr. Trump suddenly joined Parler.

Mr. Pavlovski did not respond to questions about Mr. Trump‘s addition and the criticism from Gab and Parler’s founders. Last month, Mr. Pavlovski said he was more interested in competing with large incumbent platforms than mixing things up in American politics.

Rumble‘s competitor YouTube also has not written off restoring Mr. Trump‘s access. Twitter has permanently banned Mr. Trump and Facebook has extended its ban until at least 2023, but YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said in March her platform would end the former president’s suspension after determining the risk of violence had ceased.

YouTube and Google did not answer requests for comment

Feature Image Credit: AP Photo/Tony Dejak

By Ryan Lovelace

Sourced from The Washington Times

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What Will the Lincoln Project Do After Trump?

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By Alex Shephard

The group is thinking about becoming a media company. But can it succeed without its muse?

The Lincoln Project is betting that anti-Trumpism can outlast Donald Trump’s presidency. Axios reported that the group of ad-making former Republicans “is weighing offers from different television studios, podcast networks, and book publishers.” Everything, it seems, is on the table: The group is currently producing a documentary about the election while studios want the Lincoln Project’s help in developing “a House of Cards–like fiction series,” definitive proof that the Golden Age of Television is behind us.

Given its status as a viral ad hitmaker, it’s not surprising that eyeball-obsessed media executives are eyeing the Lincoln Project as a partner. “As a media business, we’re putting a pretty big bet on the idea that they know how to get audiences,” United Talent Agency’s Ra Kumar told Axios. Studios, networks, and publishers need big audiences like never before, and since it was founded last December, the Lincoln Project has shown it can deliver them in the millions.

In less than a week, however, it may lose its muse. Some of the groups that have sprung up in the last four years—Run for Something, Indivisible, the Sunrise Movement, Swing Left—should have little trouble adjusting to a post-Trump future: Left-leaning politicians will still be running for office, swing districts will need targeting, climate change will remain an existential threat. But the same may not be true of the Lincoln Project. There are still giant questions about what, exactly, this group of former Republican operatives believes. What’s the point of an anti-Trump group when Donald Trump is gone?

Earlier this month, 60 Minutes’ Lesley Stahl asked the founders of the Lincoln Project to respond to criticisms that, for all the online attention their attack ads had received, they weren’t accomplishing much of anything. “I think we have hurt him, we have cut him, we have defined him, we have provoked him,” Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s unsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, responded. “There was not a glove proverbially laid on him for a really long time. I think we’re amongst the first groups to effectively do that.”

The one thing you can say for certain is that the Lincoln Project is good at provoking Donald Trump and many of those close to him. He has tweeted about the group several times and ranted about it at rallies, calling its founders “real garbage” and “not smart people.” His daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner have threatened to sue them over a Times Square billboard blaming them for the Trump administration’s disastrous Covid-19 response.

As for hurting, cutting, defining—that is much less clear. “Every time Donald Trump loses his mind and throws things at the wall because a Lincoln Project ad is up, that takes the whole campaign off track,” said Rick Wilson, who once made an ad tying disabled veteran (and Democrat) Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “There’s one thing you never get back in a campaign. That’s a lost day.” But the idea that the Lincoln Project is throwing sand in the gears of a well-oiled machine simply doesn’t track. The Lincoln Project clearly makes Trump very mad, but so does everything else. It’s not evident that the group is moving voters, and particularly Republican voters—“independent-leaning men, those college-educated Republicans, the suburban Republican women,” as Wilson put it on 60 Minutes—into the anti-Trump camp, which has been the group’s stated purpose.

Making Trump mad has become a financial juggernaut. The Lincoln Project makes a simple promise to donors: Give us your money, and we will use it to make the president angry. Much of its spending—advertising on Fox News in Washington, D.C., (so the president can see it while he binge-watches), buying Times Square billboards in the famous battleground state of New York—is advertising for itself. These displays only bring in more money. (Representatives from the Lincoln Project did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Lincoln Project fills a void for liberals who are concerned that the Biden campaign too often goes high when Trump goes low and believe that it should more closely mimic Trump’s own tactics. The Lincoln Project’s founders argue that they get in the mud so Biden doesn’t have to, allowing him to run a positive campaign. It now sells merch and builds its audience by stealing memes from Twitter and Instagram users—an unethical practice made famous by the Instagram account FuckJerry of Fyre Festival fame.

There are few clues about what a post-Trump Lincoln Project would look like. The group excels at depicting the president as a deranged loser, but anti-Trumpism is not an ideology. The policies that the founders of the Lincoln Project have spent decades fighting for—traditional Republican stuff about small government and low taxes—are not particularly popular anywhere, but that’s especially the case among the group’s new base in the hashtag-resistance.

The comparison to Crooked Media is being made a lot, but it doesn’t make sense. That organization was also formed by former political flaks in opposition to Trump, sure. But Crooked Media positioned itself as a voice for those pining for the Obama years, and its founders were aligned with a large faction of Democrats. Crooked’s podcasts and articles and books and television show could tackle a wide range of topics: the president’s awfulness, yes, but also issues that liberal voters care about. The Lincoln Project has none of that built-in advantage. Its founders not only lack connections with the Democratic base, they have a wildly different set of beliefs from the vast majority of Democratic voters. If they did follow Crooked Media down the path of nostalgia, it would be for the presidency of George W. Bush.

The best-case scenario is that the Lincoln Project doesn’t try to square the circle. It has targeted a number of Republicans for their fealty to the president. It has decried the racist and authoritarian bent of the current GOP, while downplaying the role its founders played in the party’s transformation. It’s possible to imagine a Lincoln Project that keeps its place in liberals’ hearts by focusing on the rot at the core of the Republican Party.

It’s more likely, however, that the Lincoln Project will stake out a position as a fighting institution for the status quo, beating back the liberal left with one fist and right-wingers with the other. If the Biden administration drifts too far left—with a Green New Deal, say, or just loads of spending—we might see the Lincoln Project fighting it the way it fought Trump.

All of this is predicated on Trump losing, of course. The actual best-case scenario for the Lincoln Project, despite its own mission of defeating Trump, is for him to win.

Feature Image Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

By Alex Shephard

Alex Shephard

Sourced from TNR

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Why Trump’s Tweets Indicate he Could be the Best Thing That Happened to Both Business and Politics

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Love him or hate him, he seems to have a personality perfectly suited to the White House.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Researchers have analysed the tweets of Donald J. Trump. They compared his personality traits with other influential business leaders.

The Twitter messages of Donald J. Trump, the entrepreneurial businessman turned US president, show that he is creative, competitive and a rule-breaker. But no one is perfect (especially not Trump!). He also has neurotic tendencies. (But who doesn’t?)

Since joining the social media platform Twitter in 2009 to May 2017, Trump has issued more than 35,000 messages. This amounts to about twelve tweets a day. With 30 million followers, he is the second-most followed politician on Twitter after his predecessor, Barack Obama, who on average tweeted about four times a day.

The researchers, Martin Obschonka from QUT in Australia, and Christian Fisch from Trier University in Germany analysed how aspects of Trump’s personality are revealed in the language he used in 3200 tweets issued by October 2016 (before he became president). They used established software for assessment of language and text for psychological purposes.

Trump’s language use and online personality were also compared with that of 105 other influential and famous business managers (including Google’s Eric Schmidt, HP’s Meg Whitman, and Apple’s Tim Cook) and entrepreneurs (including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Dell’s Michael Dell, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos) who are not on the political stage.

Their results indicate that Trump is indeed a distinct type of person who shows strong features of a so-called Schumpeterian personality that is said to be typical of successful entrepreneurs. This personality was described by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s as being very creative, change-orientated, competitive and rule-breaking. The analysis further indicates that Trump has neurotic tendencies, and experiences underlying low well-being.

“These traits are rather untypical for entrepreneurs,” explains Obschonka. But he adds that neuroticism isn’t necessarily all bad, for it can also stimulate competitiveness.

“Maybe this high neuroticism is a major motivator to succeed in Trump’s entrepreneurial projects in his business life, but also in his role as political leader,” speculates Fisch.

“If social distinction is a core principle of the entrepreneurial personality, then we clearly see this principle reflected in his unusual personality profile,” says Fisch. “Many experts agree that really successful entrepreneurs not only dare to be different – they are different.”

The researchers speculate that having entrepreneurial personality traits could be advantageous in leading and governing an entrepreneurial society as a top-down process. But they stress that leading a company is very different from leading a country and it is unclear whether political leaders with an extremely entrepreneurial personality can indeed act strictly entrepreneurially in their highly responsible role.

Time will tell if an entrepreneurial person can indeed make a country’s overall success more likely. And if so, everyone, everywhere in the world, needs to think about who we will vote for in the future.

 

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Facebook And Google Shareholders Make Noise About Fake News

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Fake news was “both widely shared and heavily tilted in favour of Donald Trump” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to a March 2017 NYU/Stanford study. Their database detected 115 pro-Trump fake stories shared on Facebook 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared 7.6 million times. Nearly a quarter of web content shared on Twitter by users in the battleground state of Michigan during the final days of last year’s U.S. election campaign was fake news, according to a University of Oxford study.

These are mind-boggling statistics.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google) are now currently under pressure. The perception is that they have not done enough to curb the online epidemic of “fake news.” And shareholders are starting to worry. They are pressing for Facebook and Alphabet Inc. to issue detailed reports.

Investment advisor Arjuna Capital engaged both companies to evaluate the impact that fabricated content is having on their platforms and business. Arjuna Capital is an investment firm focused on sustainable and impact investing.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, said: “Fake news is not about spin or confirmation bias – It’s about fabrication.  And when fabrication is disseminated so easily at scale, the way we have seen through social media, it represents a threat to our democracy. If Facebook maintains a platform of confusion and distortion it will lose the trust of its users, in which case they will simply move on to the next thing. And that’s what concerns long-term investors. We need to know this is being handled responsibly over time. It will not be solved through a simple algorithm tweak or better user education—those are merely pieces of a larger puzzle.  Right now, we think the issue is being fumbled.”

Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a non-profit organisation that works with investors on media and technology issues said: “Issues like fake news and hate speech aren’t going to go away any time soon – and Facebook’s responses to them thus far are perfect examples of too little, too late. The company needs to start reporting regularly – and in a consistent fashion – about the impact its policies and practices have on billions of Facebook users all around the globe.”

According to Pew, 64 percent of U.S. adults say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. The confusion cuts across political lines: 57 percent of Republicans say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion compared to 64 percent of Democrats.

Fake news is a problem. But since the beginning of news media, there has always been a problem with subjective bias. Are we ever going to be able to argue that some news, any news, is more genuine than other news? Probably not.

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Twitter is the Prime Social Media Network for World Leaders

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So who is the most followed icon?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers.

Burson-Marsteller’s Twiplomacy study is an annual global survey of how world leaders, governments and international organisations use social media.

So what has the latest study unearthed? Well, religion is still relevant even in these modern times. Pope Francis is the most followed icon on Twitter. The Pontiff is ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Pope Francis has a combined total of 33,716,301 followers on his nine language accounts, ahead of U.S. President Donald Trump with 30,133,036 followers and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi with 30,058,659 followers,

Twitter is the prime social network used by 276 heads of state and government, and foreign ministers, in 178 countries, representing 92 percent of all United Nations (UN) member states. Facebook is the second-most used social platform by world leaders, with 169 governments having established official pages. However, world leaders have, on average, twice as many followers on their Facebook pages as followers on Twitter. Data for Twiplomacy, which updated the studies about Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope, was captured in May 2017 using Burson-Marsteller’s proprietary Burson tools, CrowdTangle.com and Twitonomy.com.

President Trump is among a very small group of leaders who manage their own Twitter accounts, and his tweets have generated 166 million interactions (likes and retweets) over the past 12 months – including the nearly four months since he was sworn in as U.S. President – almost five times as many as Modi with 35 million interactions.

Saudi Arabia’s @KingSalman is the most effective world leader on Twitter based on the average number of retweets per original tweet. Of his ten tweets over the past year, King Salman has received an average of 147,456 retweets. President Trump’s personal Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, is the second-most effective Twitter account of any world leader, with an average of 13,094 retweets per tweet. Pope Francis is in third place, with 10,337 average retweets per tweet.

President Trump’s unorthodox use of Twitter during the U.S. presidential election campaign, and especially since taking office, has left many governments around the world wondering if – and how – they should engage with @realDonaldTrump on Twitter. Some leaders, such as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and Pope Francis, have sub-tweeted President Trump without directly mentioning him by name. Only three world leaders have addressed @realDonaldTrump directly on Twitter to rebuke his policies, including Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto; Hilda Heine, the President of the Marshall Islands; and Ricardo Rosselló, the Governor of Puerto Rico.

The 2017 edition of Twiplomacy also examines the use of other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope, and the Twiplomacy.com website includes rankings as well as a social media atlas for each country studied. The study found, for example, the number of governments using Periscope has doubled over the past year, offering a cost-effective way to broadcast press conferences live.

“Politics and diplomacy are playing out on social media in a way we have never seen before,” said Don Baer, Worldwide Chair and CEO, Burson-Marsteller. “With the U.S. president bypassing traditional government channels to communicate directly to his supporters and detractors alike, we can expect more people in positions of power to adopt this practice. Our Twiplomacy study shows how fast-paced and dynamic our communications landscape truly is.”

“The study demonstrates the intense evolution in how world leaders and governments are using social media to reach policy or political objectives,” added Ramiro Prudencio, CEO of Burson-Marsteller Europe, Middle East and Africa. “This cross-platform analysis provides key insights on social media use in a global, fast-paced, connected, 24/7 information environment.”

The 2017 Twiplomacy study analysed 856 Twitter accounts of heads of state and government, and foreign ministers, in 178 countries with a combined total audience of 356 million followers. Foreign ministries tend to use Twitter to establish mutual relations. The European Union (EU) External Action Service is the best-connected foreign office, mutually connected to 128 peers. Russia’s Foreign Ministry is in second position, maintaining mutual Twitter relations with 127 other world leaders. The German Foreign Ministry has 116 mutual connections with peers, followed by the UK Foreign Office and the Foreign Ministry of Norway with 115 and 109 mutual connections, respectively.

The Donald Trump @WhiteHouse account does not follow any other foreign leader. The archived @ObamaWhiteHouse account, conversely, follows the UK government account, @Number10gov, and the Russian Prime Minister’s account, @MedvedevRussiaE.

The most followed non-government account is the United Nations Twitter account, @UN, which is followed by 338 of the 856 world leaders’ Twitter accounts; @BarackObama and the @ObamaWhiteHouse are followed by 312 and 254 world leaders, respectively. @UNICEF is the second-most followed international organisation and The New York Times (@NYTimes) is the most followed news organisation. The @Twiplomacy Twitter account is the eighth-most followed non-governmental account by world leaders, with a following of 184 heads of state and government, ahead of @Reuters and @TheEconomist.

“Twitter facilitates relations between world leaders in today’s online world,” said Matthias Lüfkens, Managing Director, Digital, at Burson-Marsteller EMEA. “I am especially honoured to see our @Twiplomacy Twitter account among the most followed accounts by heads of state and government.”

Other key findings include:

  • Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto is Latin America’s most followed leader. @EPN has 6.3 million followers, far ahead of Colombia’s President @JuanManSantos, Argentina’s @MauricioMacri, and Venezuela’s @NicolasMaduro, each of whom have more than 3 million followers.
  • Kenya’s Uhuru Kenyatta, @UKenyatta, is Sub-Saharan Africa’s most followed leader with 2 million followers, ahead of Rwanda’s @PaulKagame and Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari (@MBuhari), both of whom have more than 1 million followers.
  • The UK Prime Minister, @Number10gov, is the most followed EU leader, with more than 5.1 million followers, ahead of the British @RoyalFamily and France’s @Elysee Palace, with 2.9 and 1.5 million followers, respectively. Newly elected French President @EmmanuelMacron has shot into fifth place behind Spanish Prime Minister @MarianoRajoy, both with more than 1 million followers.
  • Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, @HHShkMohd, is the most followed Arab leader with 7.9 million, followed by Jordan’s @QueenRania and Saudi Arabia’s @KingSalman with 6.5 million followers each.
  • India’s Foreign Minister, @SushmaSwaraj, is the most followed female world leader with 8 million followers, ahead of Jordan’s @QueenRania.
  • Abdullah Bin Zayed, @ABZayed, the Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates, is the second-most followed foreign minister with 3.9 million followers, with Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Minister, @AdelAljubeir, in third place with 1.3 million followers.
  • Among the foreign ministries, the U.S. State Department (@StateDept) is the most followed, with 4.3 million, ahead of the Turkish Foreign Ministry (@TC_Disisleri) and India’s @IndianDiplomacy, with more than 1.2 million followers each.
  • More than 4,100 embassies and 1,100 ambassadors are currently active on Twitter.

The complete collection of social media studies can be found on bm.com and twiplomacy.com.

 

 

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How Trump Used Twitter to Solidify his Political Brand

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

“Fake news” and “Failing NYTimes” are the two phrases Donald Trump tweeted most in his first 100 days in office, showing just how much the president used Twitter to target the media at the start of his administration, according to Temple University researchers.

Temple faculty members Bruce Hardy and Heather LaMarre and doctoral student Connor Phillips studied every new tweet from the @realDonaldTrump account between Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20 and his 100th day in office on April 29. Excluding retweets, Trump tweeted 491 times during this period.

While several stories quantifying the president’s Twitter use have already appeared, the Temple researchers went further by using word association techniques, density charts and other tools.

According to their findings, Trump’s tweeting in his first 100 days “translates into a deliberate and targeted war on news.”

  • Trump tweeted “fake news” 32 times in his first 100 days, topping his list of favourite phrases. “Failing NYTimes” was second at 16 times. By comparison, Trump tweeted his campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” only 11 times.
  • Attacks on the media dominated Trump’s Twitter account. While Trump tweeted regularly about job creation and border security, and increased his tweets on healthcare during a push to pass new legislation in March, criticism of the media was consistently the topic he tweeted about most.
  • The correlation of words Trump used also shows how much he focused on the media. On a scale of 0 to 1, the words “failing” and “NYTimes” were highly correlated at 0.87, while the words “fake” and “news” were correlated at 0.82 and “fake” and “CNN” were correlated at 0.47.
  • Trump tweeted more positive words than negative ones, and the overall sentiment on his Twitter account was positive. The Temple researchers say this is largely because Trump tweeted the word “great” 86 times in his first 100 days. His next most frequently used positive word was “honour,” at 15 times.

So what’s the take-home for this? Be sure to be enthusiastically positive more than you complain, and you might find the same success as brand #TrumpforPresident.

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