Trump launching social media company 'TRUTH Social'

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley breaks down the details of Trump’s social media platform.

Video Transcript

KARINA MITCHELL: Welcome back. We turn our attention to politics now, and the stock price of SPAC company Digital World Acquisition, or DWAC, rocketed more than 400% on news of a possible deal to help launch a new social media platform planned by former president Donald Trump called Truth Social. Here to tell us what it's all about is Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley. And Dan, I know half the country is going to be really happy about this news. The other half, I'm not so sure.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah, it's actually really interesting. This is Trump's second time at starting up a pseudo social network, rather. He previously had a site called From the Desk of Donald Trump that, despite the assertions that there may be a huge audience for him on social media, ended up shuttering after just a month because of lack of users. So what he's trying to do here is kick off a new social network that he says will not have the kind of "woke culture" that he accuses other social networks of having. It'll be called Truth Social.

And one of the interesting aspects of all of this is that in order to exist on the internet at all, it has to take advantage of a law that former President Trump tried to destroy, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Now that essentially provides a legal shield to internet sites, such as Facebook or Twitter and even, yes, now Truth Social, to protect them against moderating content posted by third party users. So if I post on that site and I say something wrong, I get in trouble. The site itself doesn't. That's how it works on all the internet.

Now, during his time as president, Trump disliked the fact that Twitter and Facebook would mark posts that he had put up about, for instance, the pandemic or the 2020 election as misinformation or lies, and then tried to go ahead and have those companies punished by attempting to repeal, or at least, narrow the scope of Section 230. So it's interesting to see now that he needs it that, obviously, the fact that it's still in place and never changed is advantageous to him.

But whether or not this is going to end up having as many users as something like a Facebook or Twitter, I highly doubt that, based on the fact that, again, that From the Desk of Donald Trump never really took off. It'll be interesting to see how many people actually jump on here. It's clearly going to be kind of marketed towards conservatives and right-wing individuals. There are sites or there were sites like that. Previously, Gab obviously being one of them that was taken down by Amazon, which hosted it through its AWS services. So, yeah, it will be interesting to see if this actually goes ahead and manages to acquire as many users as clearly they hope.

KARINA MITCHELL: And right now, Digital World seems to be the big winner on this news. Dan Howley, thank you so much for that report.