Trump’s social network has 30 days to stop breaking the rules of its software license
Truth Social ripped off open-source platform Mastodon
The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) says former President Donald Trump’s new social network violated a free and open-source software licensing agreement by ripping off decentralized social network Mastodon. The Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has 30 days to comply with the terms of the license before its access is terminated — forcing it to rebuild the platform or face legal action.
TMTG launched a special purpose acquisition company fundraising effort yesterday with promises to build a sweeping media empire. Its only product so far is a social network called Truth Social that appears strongly to be forked from Mastodon. While anyone can freely reuse Mastodon’s code (and groups like right-wing social network Gab have already done so), they still have to comply with the Affero General Public License (or AGPLv3) that governs that code, and its conditions include offering their own source code to all users.
Truth Social doesn’t comply with that license and, in fact, refers to its service as “proprietary.” Its developers apparently attempted to scrub references that would make the Mastodon connection clear — at one point listing a “sighting” of the Mastodon logo as a bug — but included direct references to Mastodon in the site’s underlying HTML alongside obvious visual similarities.
TMTG’s strategy hasn’t sat well with the SFC, an organization that enforces free and open-source software licenses. “The license purposefully treats everyone equally (even people we don’t like or agree with), but they must operate under the same rules of the copyleft licenses that apply to everyone else,” SFC policy fellow Bradley Kuhn wrote in a blog post. “Today, we saw the Trump Media and Technology Group ignoring those important rules — which were designed for the social good.”
Truth Social hasn’t officially launched. But users could access a test version of the platform, where many of them created prank accounts that flooded the service with false company announcements and even fake Donald Trump posts. (The platform has since been replaced by a waitlist.) The SFC demands that TMTG offer all these users access to the Truth Social source code. “If they fail to do this within 30 days, their rights and permissions in the software are automatically and permanently terminated,” Kuhn says.
If Truth Social fails to make the source code available, the SFC could sue it for violating the terms of the license it used. Earlier this year, the group sued electronics maker Vizio for “repeated failures to fulfill even the basic requirements” of free software licensing. “We will be following this issue very closely and demanding that Trump’s Group give the corresponding source to all who use the site,” Kuhn writes.
Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko also said yesterday that he intended to seek legal counsel about the situation, although he didn’t discuss a specific course of action. “Compliance with our AGPLv3 license is very important to me as that is the sole basis upon which I and other developers are willing to give away years of work for free,” he told Talking Points Memo .
Why Trump’s pathetic social media platform is probably doomed
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/21/trump-social-media-political/
What if Donald Trump was never the media genius he appeared to be? What if despite all his ability to commandeer our attention and get everyone to talk about his tweets, he never really understood the nature of that success or of his own supporters’ relationship to the media?
Those are among the questions raised by the former president’s latest doomed media venture.
Seven months ago, an adviser announced that Trump would launch a social media platform in “two or three months.” Though it’s a bit late, the product has arrived (though it has apparently been temporarily pulled for a quick retooling). The good news is that it’s comically stupid in almost every way imaginable.
Going by the name Truth Social, the new Trump platform is billed as a way for him (and all of us) to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” most especially Twitter and Facebook, which have banned him for repeatedly violating their terms of service. Speaking of terms of service, Truth Social’s terms forbid users from saying anything to “disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site.” At last, free speech has been restored to the Internet!
Even more amusingly, Truth Social users must agree to avoid “excessive use of capital letters,” something of which Trump himself is quite fond. And the terms themselves contain extended passages in, yes, all capital letters.
This is just the latest of many recent attempts to create a Trumpist Twitter, all supposedly devoted to free speech. There was Gab, then Parler, then Gettr — none of which exactly set the world on fire — and now Truth Social.
The problem the first two encountered, and this one will as well, is that a safe space where they can converse free of engagement with liberals isn’t just not what devoted Trumpists want. It’s the opposite of what they want.
As a political style, Trumpism isn’t about avoiding the libs, it’s about triggering the libs, owning the libs, enraging the libs. If you’re a liberal, have you ever found your blood boiling because of something someone said on Parler? Of course not, because you’ve never even heard about anything anyone said on Parler. It might as well be a social media platform on Mars.
That highlights the essence of Trump’s success on Twitter: He wielded so much influence there because that’s where the journalists are , and they provided the conduit for Trump to speak to a broad audience.
Political reporters are obsessed with Twitter. So every time Trump launched some offensive new tweet, the reporters were bound to see it, amplify it and write stories about it in their own publications, which enabled Trump to dominate the mainstream political conversation. It was the engagement with the mainstream that created the conflict that fueled Trump’s rise.
In that way, Trump’s social media presence was fundamentally focused on the elite, not the millions of conservative followers who were retweeting him and cheering him on. Whether he understood it, it was a top-down strategy.
The most successful conservative media, especially Fox News and right-wing talk radio, is likewise in a constant conversation with the mainstream media. The supposed sins of those media were the founding raison d’etre of Fox and conservative talk, and remain one of their primary themes. Their power comes in no small part from their ability to engage with, and influence, reporters at traditional news outlets.
For years, people speculated that once out of office, Trump would create his own TV network to compete with Fox News. That might have a better shot at success than Truth Social, because it would be harder to ignore. So why won’t he try? The simple reason is probably that creating a news network is extremely difficult and requires an enormous upfront investment — studios, equipment, reporters, anchors, technicians. By comparison, starting a social media platform is easy. I’d be surprised if Truth Social has more than a dozen employees.
That suggests another interpretation of what Trump is up to. Perhaps this isn’t really a political project at all. Perhaps he knows this will do nothing to make it more likely that he becomes president again.
It could be that it’s nothing more than one in a long line of small-time business schemes, akin to Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka. The general public can no longer be a target for Trump to earn a few bucks as he tries to shore up his failing business; if he started a scam like Trump University today, no one would be naive enough to sign up.
So who are Trump’s potential customers? His most devoted political supporters, who can be lured in with the promise of participating in the project of Trumpism, then be targeted with ads for MyPillow, gold coins or whatever other bottom-feeding enterprises can be persuaded to advertise on Truth Social.
But there’s only so much revenue to be had from those sources. And after an initial wave of loyalists signing up for Truth Social, the number of subscribers will probably wither away. Sooner or later, they will probably realize that yelling about liberals who have no idea you exist isn’t nearly as much fun as yelling at liberals.