What exactly is the point of Donald Trump’s social media platform, Truth Social? For some time, no one could give a convincing answer—until now, perhaps.
At first, Truth Social had an obvious rationale. Trump was kicked off other social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook in early 2021 for violating their moderation policies with his posts about the 6th January riots. He wanted somewhere to broadcast his views directly to his base again.
So Trump set up his own platform. He tapped former California congressman Devin Nunes—known for his loyalty to Trump during the House investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election—to set it up. They received help from Arc Capital, a Chinese firm that has previously been investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for misrepresenting shell companies. Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which owns Truth Social, was also investigated for potential money laundering by New York authorities over $8 million in loans from obscure entities allegedly connected to allies of Russia’s president Putin.
Controversies aside, at the time it was founded Truth Social could plausibly claim to fill a gap in the social media market. Conservatives frequently bemoaned the moderation policies of the larger platforms as being akin to partisan censorship. Going live in February 2022, Truth Social promised a safe space for them, drawing right-wingers in with “free speech” absolutism. The magnetic pull of Trump’s personality cult was supposed to help the platform leapfrog its smaller competitors in the right-wing social ecosphere, such as Gab, Parler and the dark corners of 4chan and 8chan.
But this original rationale seemed less pertinent as the interregnum between Trump’s administrations progressed. First, Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it X, hailing a commitment to unadulterated “free speech” that increased the prominence of conservatives on the platform. Meta has followed suit, shifting its policies toward less fact-checking and active moderation. Truth Social had also lost its appetite for truly unrestricted expression, first caving to pressure from Google to enforce restrictions on violent incitement on the platform in exchange for being available on the Google Play store. It was also credibly accused of censoring progressive, inconvenient views on the platform.
Second, Truth Social had always mimicked the look and functionality of Twitter. Now that the right had captured the real thing, why would anyone need the knock-off version? And third, Meta and X lifted their bans on Trump being on their platforms, the former in 2024 and the latter in 2022. He maintained his commitment to posting his round-the-clock musings primarily on Truth Social, where he has 9.78m followers—some of whom are journalists who then report on his posts. But the president has staffers posting for him across various platforms, on which he usually has more followers (105m on X, for instance). His desire to dominate the political conversation everywhere he can has undermined Truth Social’s claim to being the one true home of Trump.
The platform thus faced an identity crisis, which soon threatened to become a financial one. According to SimilarWeb, Truth Social attracted approximately 33.7m visits in April—more than the largest niche right-wing platform Gab (4.8m), but far less than even left-leaning startup Bluesky (185m), let alone the big players. Indeed, in April 2025, one hedge fund was so confident of the platform’s lack of direction it placed a large bet against the company’s stock by short-selling some six million shares.
But is Truth Social finally turning things around? Traffic is up 61 per cent, largely thanks to the president using the platform to make major policy announcements. This month, TMTG reported that net losses were down to $31.7m from $327.6m a year prior. And large institutional investors have significantly increased their stock holdings in the company. Why?
There are two explanations. The first is what some might call grey corruption—actions that might technically be legal, but which nonetheless undermine the integrity of government. The business’s fundamentals have hardly improved. Critics have thus alleged that those increasing their stakes are likely doing so not for independent financial reasons, but to curry favour with the president.
But the company has also developed a new line of business: selling cryptocurrencies to its users. In March, TMTG inked a partnership deal with Crypto.com, a trading platform, to sell crypto products and exchange-traded funds. This is the first major step in Nunes’s vision: repositioning TMTG as a financial services firm first, with a social media platform attached.
What’s in it for Crypto.com? CEO Kris Marszalek says they’re keen to work with “a brand with a loyal following”. In other words: Trump’s loyal Truth Social followers are more likely to invest in crypto if it comes from the president’s own platform. The ads targeted to Truth Social users—Trump-themed hats, flags and shot glasses, for instance—already cash in on his personal brand. Why not encourage users to, say, directly purchase Trump’s own crypto coin $TRUMP and pay TMTG fees along the way? What about the first lady, Melania Trump’s, titular coin, or the crypto schemes run by the company of Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr, World Liberty Financial? There are already sizeable groups on Truth Social dedicated to crypto investment, and, indeed, stock options in TMTG itself. These users trust the Trumps, making them ideal customers.
The Crypto.com deal, along with Trump’s broader embrace of crypto, raises obvious concerns about politics and corruption. A new report finds that the president’s crypto holdings now represent almost 40 per cent of his net worth (approximately US$2.9bn)—though this fluctuates rapidly based on $TRUMP’s price. It has, at various times this year, peaked at almost 90 per cent of his net worth. $TRUMP recently surged 50 per cent after the 220 biggest holders of the crypto coin were offered dinner with the president and a VIP tour of the White House. Simultaneously, the Trump administration has gone soft on regulatory enforcement in the crypto space and has dismissed numerous lawsuits and investigations against crypto companies—including one into Crypto.com itself.
Fewer observers have raised concerns about the risks to consumers. Those with opposing politics may struggle to empathise with a die-hard Trump supporter over-investing in $TRUMP based on ads they saw on Truth Social, only to watch their retirement savings dwindle away. But this could easily happen to Truth Social users investing in crypto because they trust Trump.
So far, about 764,000 out of two million crypto wallets (individuals or corporations’ portals for accessing their digital currency holdings) that purchased $TRUMP have lost money on their investment, according to research by Chainalysis for CNBC. So far, most of those losing out have held relatively small amounts of the coin. The real winners were the 58 wallets that made approximately $1.1bn in collective gains, and those profiting from more than $324m in trading fees. These, Chainalysis believes, are mostly wallets tied to the Trumps and people in their orbit.
There are good reasons to worry that Truth Social’s features could hawk crypto products in particularly aggressive ways, more so than other social platforms. When I made a Truth Social account, I was shocked not by the character of the content, which was predictable—inflammatory headlines from far-right media outlets, poorly made memes, casual antisemitism and bigotry—but by how the infrastructure is set up to push users towards particular ends, both commercial and political.
To set up an account, users must provide their phone number to receive a security code. This is standard two-step authentication, except that Truth Social requires users to opt-in for marketing messages when they sign up to the platform. Users might soon find themselves receiving text messages advertising products such as cyrpto.
When I created an account, I was shown a list of suggested accounts to follow—but I soon realised that my account had been set to follow 44 of these profiles automatically. I later discovered these auto-followed accounts were drawn from a designated “news” list. Some were right-wing news sources that Trump often favours, such as Fox News, One America Network and Breitbart. There were also some lesser-known outlets such as the Epoch Times, a far-right newspaper known for spreading conspiracy theories, which is run by the anti-communist Chinese Falun Gong religious movement. Other auto-followed accounts included White House officials such as press secretary Karoline Leavitt and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard (though, notably, not Trump or his vice-president JD Vance), plus the retail investing platform Unusual Whales. This is hardly all “news” — and crypto companies could easily be added to the list, automatically showing up in most users’ feeds.
But perhaps the most overlooked pitfall of Truth Social is, for want of a better word, the “vibe”. Users just aren’t as active on there as on other platforms. The website frequently glitches. Nunes might have a plan for squeezing more money out of existing users, but it’s hard to see the platform growing its reach without some basic improvements. Until then, Truth Social will remain a digital echo of a slot machine hall: a sad, antisocial space for lonely people to lose money.
Perhaps it’s best to leave the final word to Trump himself. In 2021, he called Bitcoin, then the most prominent cryptocurrency, a “scam”. If Bitcoin is a scam, surely Trump's coin is too—a scam that the US president is now utilising to potentially fleece his most devoted supporters, loyally following his every word on Truth Social—many of whom are American taxpayers—of billions of dollars.
