Donald Trump’s social media platform might be gearing up to launch on Feb. 21, according to a listing on the Apple App Store.
A pre-order page for Truth Social on the iOS App Store has been quietly updated to mention an “expected Feb. 21, 2022” arrival date.
The developer behind the platform, Trump Media & Technology Group, didn’t respond to a request for comment. But according to Reuters, the Feb. 21 date is legit, citing an unnamed source familiar with the plans for Truth Social.
A launch on Feb. 21 would also be fitting, considering it’s the President Day’s holiday.
Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and suspended from Facebook and YouTube after his supporters stormed the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In response, Trump has been developing Truth Social, a pro-free speech social media platform that’s designed to counter the alleged censorship from “Big Tech.”
“Unlike with the Big Tech platforms, there will be no shadow-banning, throttling, demonetizing, or messing with algorithms for political manipulation,” Trump said back in October. “We will not silence our fellow citizens simply because they might be wrong—or worse, because we think that Americans ‘can’t handle the truth.’”
However, Truth Social has had a rocky start. The platform was supposed to launch as a beta in November, but it did not. The site also adopted the computer code from the social networking provider Mastodon, but without crediting the open-source project until a month later.
When Truth Social finally does launch, users can expect an experience similar to Twitter. But the big questions are how it’ll approach content moderation (if it all) and whether it can attract enough users to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. One person it did attract: Devin Nunes, who left Congress last month to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group
