Truth Social Is Just Trump’s Blog

Friday, 6 June 2025

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, “The Trump-Musk Feud Has Been Great for X, Which Jumped Up the App Store Charts”:

The feud between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump may be bad for the MAGA camp, but it’s proven to be beneficial for X, which has seen engagement soaring over the past 24 hours. According to new data from Sensor Tower, the app formerly known as Twitter skyrocketed up the U.S. App Store’s top charts, landing at the 23rd overall spot on June 5 — up from an average rank of No. 68 over the last 30 days.

X also saw an average rank of No. 58 over the past six months.

I wouldn’t call jumping from the 60s to the 20s “skyrocketing”, but, up is up.

Trump’s own social network, Truth Social, benefited from the feud as well, as the president shared his thoughts about Musk with his followers. Compared with the last seven days, U.S. mobile app active users on Truth Social increased by more than 400%, Sensor Tower’s proprietary panel indicates.

However, X is still much larger than Truth Social, Sensor Tower notes, as it has 100× more U.S. mobile app users than Trump’s social network.

In a couple of recent posts I’ve referred to Truth Social as Trump’s “blog”. (I expounded upon this in a recent episode of The Talk Show, with Stephen Hackett, starting after the 1h:20m mark, so if you listened to that, the following will sound familiar.) Long before this easily-predictable breakup of two unstable sociopathic egomaniacs (and who would be genuinely surprised if Musk is back in the Oval Office next week?), I’ve long wondered about one particular aspect of their alliance. To wit: that Musk famously spent $44 billion to buy Twitter/X, and envisions it as a world-conquering “everything app”. Trump was once the best known user on Twitter, but after being kicked off every legitimate social network after trying to overthrow the 2020 election, Trump started his own ostensible Twitter-like network, Truth Social. Ostensibly, they’re in direct competition with each other.

Did Musk ever pitch Trump on shutting Truth Social down and coming back to X full time? How about buying Truth Social for a bribery price of a cool $1 billion to sweeten the deal? Truth Social isn’t really a functional social network. Let’s stipulate that Truth Social has 1 percent the active US mobile users of X. Even that’s a sham. Nobody of note other than Trump himself uses Truth Social. For all the pathetic obsequiousness of every single lickspittle official serving in the Trump 2.0 administration, none of them are even vaguely active on Truth Social. They’re all still on X. The Justice Department posts to its official account on X multiple times per day, but the DOJ doesn’t even have an account on Truth Social. OK, JD Vance has posted to his Truth Social account about a dozen times in the last month. But he’s posted to X five times today.

What I’ve realized is that Truth Social is essentially just Trump’s blog. Truth Social is exceedingly unpopular when judged as a social network; but it’s exceedingly successful as a blog. All the other people using Truth Social are effectively reading his blog and shitposting comments and memes in response to his posts, trying to get his attention. I’ve been thinking about this for a few weeks, and in that time, Trump’s own posts on Truth Social have made the news on a near-daily basis. I’ve never once, ever, seen a post from anyone else on Truth Social make the news. Trump is not just the one and only person of consequence using it, his is the one and only account on Truth Social that you ever, ever hear about.

If Truth Social were actually meant to compete with X, Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon, this almost certainly would have been a source of conflict between Trump and Musk. Because, if it were meant to be an actual competitive social network, it would occur to Trump to require all his flunkeys and toadies not only to post to Truth Social, but to stop posting to X. But he hasn’t done that, because Truth Social is functioning as intended: it’s just an outlet for Trump to spew his demented mad-king musings (today he’s retweeting calls for him to be added to Mount Rushmore) and, most importantly, get some of his all-caps-laden bangers read aloud on the TV news.