You might be surprised how much Truth Social is worth based on its small number of users.

In November 2024, Truth Social generated around 427,000 downloads from the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in the United States combined. The social media app Truth Social, officially launched on February 21, 2022, saw approximately one million downloads in the remaining days of February 2022. The app, which became available to Android users in October 2022, saw around 353 thousand downloads from Android users in the first month of its release from the Google Play Store. The Truth Social app, which is published by T Media Tech LLC, and it is owned by Trump Media & Technology Group, went public on the New York Stock Exchange on March 26, 2024, at a staggering valuation of almost eight billion U.S. dollars.

As of January 20, 2023, former United States president Donald J. Trump had approximately 87.73 million followers on his Twitter accounts, registering his biggest audience across all social media platforms. Trump's profiles on Facebook and Instagram followed with 34.49 million and 23.3 million followers each. Meanwhile, his profile on his own platform Truth Social, created after he was banned from mainstream social networks at the beginning of 2021 due to inciting violence, amassed an audience of around 4.83 million followers.

Trump’s own vessel adrift

Although similar alt-tech platforms like Gab and Rumble already existed, the ban of Donald Trump from mainstream social media and the creation of his own network Truth Social were significant but brief boosts for the proliferation of alternative social platforms, which started targeting users who felt displaced or were also banned from traditional platforms. Even though receiving moderate attention during its launch, Truth Social is currently at its lowest popularity so far, with even less relevance in the public debate.

The sprawl of alt-techs

Focused on providing spaces for right-wing publics and their respective discussions, alt-tech platforms have so far only managed to gather niche audiences and limited reach. Parler’s unique monthly visitors shrank from 12.3 million in January 2021 to around 137 thousand in August 2022. Founded by Trump’s former political advisor Jason Miller, Gettr only had mild success at its start in the United States, although recently amassing more followers in countries like Brazil, especially due to its usage by supporters of former president Jair M. Bolsonaro during its last federal elections’ campaign.

The largest social media IPO seen in the last 15 years was Facebook, which went public in May 2012 with a valuation of 104 billion U.S. dollars. Snapchat ranked second, with a valuation of 24 billion U.S. dollars in March 2017. Twitter – later known as X after its 2023 acquisition and subsequent delisting – went public in with a valuation of 18 billion U.S. dollars. Former U.S president Trump's social media app Truth Social went public on March 26, 2024, after merging with Digital World Acquisition Corp.

Digital IPOs in the U.S. The year 2021 was characterized by the highest number of IPOs recorded in the U.S. since 2000, with over a thousand companies entering the public market. During the first years of the COVD-19 pandemic, the digital and tech sectors enjoyed stellar development thanks to the increase in usage and inflated adoption trends of digital solutions among global users. In comparison, 2022 was characterized by an unusually quiet public market. Snap Inc and Meta, as well as other social media platforms, reported a loss in expected revenue driven by a slowing advertising spending trend.

While social video and streaming platform Rumble filed to go public via SPAC merger in September 2022, market volatility dragged IPO plans for others. At the end of 2023, the market appeared to be in recovery for digital companies. Fast-fashion brand Shein entered the U.S. public market in September, followed by Instacart in November.

Reddit’s IPO Reddit's entrance into the public market is expected to be the largest social media IPO since 2019, when Pinterest became a public company with a valuation of 10 billion U.S. dollars. Reddit, which is expected to go public in March 2024, is reportedly seeking a valuation of 6.5 million U.S. dollars. The company had previously reached a valuation of 10 billion U.S. dollars, after securing 410 million U.S. dollars in its Series F funding in August 2021. In February 2024, Reddit gave potential investors a peek into its financials, by releasing the company’s S1 registration statement: the company was not yet profitable in 2023, with a negative EBITDA of 70 billion U.S. dollars. Despite not having released a planned price for its stocks, Reddit invited some of its users to pre-register and grab the possibility of buying into Reddit.

People tend to be bad at explicitly detecting lies. However, indirect veracity judgments and physiological responses may yield above-chance levels of accuracy in differentiating lies from the truth. If lies induce a threat response, vasoconstriction should reduce peripheral cutaneous blood flow, leading to finger temperature drops when confronted with a lie compared to the truth. Participants (N = 95) observed people telling lies or the truth about their social relationships, during which participants’ fingertip temperature was recorded via infrared thermal imaging. Results suggested that the accuracy of explicit veracity categorizations remained at chance levels. Judgments of story-tellers’ likability and trustworthiness as indirect veracity measures, as well as observers’ fingertip temperatures as a physiological veracity measure significantly differed between lies and true stories. However, the effects pointed in the opposite direction of our expectations: participants liked liars better than truth-tellers and trusted liars more; and fingertip temperatures increased while confronted with lies compared to true stories. We discuss that studying observers’ physiological responses may be a useful window to lie detection, but requires future investigation.

Social network Twitter, founded in 2006, was taken over by tech-billionaire Elon Musk at the end of October 2022. As the company's new CEO, Musk reinstated numerous Twitter accounts that had previously been banned from the platform. Recently reinstated conservative author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson currently has 3.5 million followers on Twitter, after being suspended in mid 2022.

Deplatforming public figures Andrew Tate, a former kickboxing champion, had his Twitter account reinstated in November 2022 and has around 2.5 million followers. Tate had his Twitter account removed in 2017 due to controversial tweets about women, and in addition, found himself deplatformed from Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. American Rapper Kanye West, also known as Ye, had his Twitter account reinstated on November 20th, 2022, but his Twitter presence was short-lived after getting suspended again two weeks later for making anti-semitic remarks. Many of the formerly banned accounts were suspended pre-Musk takeover due to their violations of Twitter's conduct, spam, or misinformation policies. Kathy Griffin is a notable exception, as the comedian was banned from Twitter after changing her original Twitter name to "Elon Musk", which ended up getting her removed from the platform in November 2022.

Will Donald Trump return to Twitter? After Musk posted a Twitter poll asking followers if they believed the former president should be allowed to return to the network, the account of Donald Trump was restored. Of the 15 million votes, about 52 percent said Trump's account should be reinstated. It was permanently suspended in the days following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, due to the potential for inciting violence. The former president has since founded his own social network Truth Social and Trump's 87.8 million followers are yet to see him post on Twitter again.