E70: We hold these Truths & Replies to be self-evident: What is Truth Social?

3:40PM Jul 28, 2022

Speakers:

Alex Helberg

Calvin Pollak

Keywords:

truth

post

trump

twitter

social

platform

users

hashtag

content

tweets

called

absolutely

truths

algorithm

hutchinson

banning

quote

account

term

true

Welcome to reverb everyone. My name is Calvin Pollak and I'm joined today by my co host and co producer Alex Helberg. Alex, how's it going?

I'm doing pretty well. Calvin, just bearing, bearing through with the heat. How are you?

Jeez, this heatwave is crazy. And I'll tell you what, things are certainly heating up on the political scene here with the topic of today's episode. Actually, this episode is a bit of a spiritual sequel to our first Trump January 6 episode, you may remember, loyal listeners will remember that the second half of that episode, we talked about, then President Donald Trump being banned from social media. At that time, I think he was just banned from Twitter. But shortly after that, he was also banned from Facebook. Alex, do you know if there are any other social media platforms that he was banned from that week? Was he banned from GrubHub?

I think he was. He was banned from DoorDash, Friendster, MySpace, his his MySpace he was producing a lot of like scene tracks at the time that are unfortunately cancelled. We're never going to get to hear Donald Trump screamo tracks ever again. Which to be frank is just a--it's it's a huge travesty. I feel like it's a big loss for the music community and

for the discourse for

the discourse more generally. So yes, yeah.

We gotta hear both sides. Yeah,

that's exactly right. You have to you have to you have to hear both sides of the frequency spectrum when he goes up on those, hits those high notes on those screamo tracks. But you know, despite that, being being deprived of his voice on various other platforms. Yeah, I mean, there he

He was banned from Letterboxd. He was. He had some reviews that were--he was, he was using film reviews to organize insurrections.

That's right. Yeah, he was posting reviews that were dangerous to our democracy.

Absolutely. So that episode, we got into some of the implications of why these tech platforms might have banned him, how we sort of theorize it politically. And in recent weeks, this issue has come back up in a particular context of Trump's own social media platform, which is called Truth Social. Truth Social. And Alex, let me ask you this. When did you first hear about Truth Social? Do you remember?

Yeah. So I mean, I remember there being this ambient kind of narrative going around that, you know, Trump as an independent media mogul kind of came out of, you know, the oldest speculation that he was using his 2016 presidential campaign as a precursor to launching his own television network, right, because to counter the liberal media, the bias, liberal media, which is of course, the oldest hobbyhorse in the conservative, right wing, discursive tropes to discuss the media. But I remember hearing about the alternative to Twitter discussion starting up probably around like the middle ish of his presidency around 2018, 2019 moving towards the latter half, when, you know, there was all this discussion about like "shadow banning", right, this is when the QAnon movement really started to take hold. People were, you know, starting to say "my posts are getting shadow banned", you know, with this term for, I feel like my my content is not doing as good as it used to, I'm not getting that sweet engagement that, you know, totally coincidentally is happening at the same time that all these platforms are sweeping bots off of their networks. I'm getting shadow banned is the real thing that's happening here. So, but Truth Social in particular, I, I kind of didn't really even notice it when it first launched. I kind of just figured, like, this is a flash in the pan thing, like, nobody's really like the extent to which this is going to be taken up is going to be so minor. Like, why even pay attention to something like this, but I imagine that now it's you know, I mean, Trump is Trump's tweet, and again, you know, we have like the greatest one to ever do it, as some might say is now back in the 240 character microblogging game. So

right so I was kind of like you and that I did not really even know that it launched like I sort of vaguely might have seen it tweet about it in like, early 2022 when it launched, because my understanding is that it went into beta in like December 21. Right. And then they opened it up to the public, like sometime around January, February. But for a while it was just a phone app. And then they made it available as a like, you can tap into it on your browser in May of this year. So it is pretty new.

Right? And am I thought I saw some article out there. Can you I think, can you get it on on Android phones? Or is it only for Apple? Right?

It can still only be for iPhone. The there's only an iPhone app. You can get to it on an Android phone? Oh, three of the browsers. But I assume Yeah,

I don't know. Man. I feel like this is all red already. We're in front territory of Android users are being you know, D platformed. From this. Yeah. From this platform. i This is this is really unfair, right out of the gate.

It is absolutely. Particularly given, you know, how liberal the average iPhone user is. That's right.

Yeah. Does that. Does Apple still have the taint of like being like the liberal? Like the liberal working at Starbucks on their Apple laptop?

Yeah. Who was that actor? Justin? Justin Long. Yeah. In the old. I'm, I'm a PC. I'm a Mac. Hello.

I'm a Mac.

I'm a PC,

which was the great the great curmudgeon John Hodgman playing on husband that actually those commercials made me want to buy a PC. I think they had the opposite intended. I was like, I'm actually more like that guy. I want to buy a PC now.

But anyway, anyways, so yeah, so the app basically has only been around for a few months. It came really into my awareness in late June. And this is another interesting connection back to January 6, because the January 6 committee had a surprise hearing with this witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a former White House aide and assistant to the Chief of Staff under Trump's administration, and Hutchinson delivered like a lot of really important evidence for the committee. Basically just making it a lot clearer that people high up in Trump's administration knew how bad January 6 was going to get and didn't do anything to stop it, you know, confirmed a lot of suspicions about these weird meetings between Trump and Michael Flynn, and Steve Bannon and all of these extremely unsavory characters. And so Hutchinson gave a really critical testimony. And Trump like immediately went on a five to seven, truth social post, rant against Hutchinson, and those posts, then traveled back to Twitter. And so then I was like, Okay, I want to take a closer look at this thing, because he really is using it. And as you're saying, he's using it in a similar way to how he used to use Twitter as a kind of like, instant rage reaction to what's going on to try to control the narrative of like, events involving him. Yeah.

And yeah, specifically how he's being talked about on TV. Like, I think that that that is not to be discounted, and it was, you know, initially, I was thinking about the fact that like, the January 6 hearings, were on you know, NBC primetime, you know, they got like a primetime slot on NBC for at least the first broadcast. And I think subsequent ones also had like, pretty good, like TV spots on network television, which I get that that was, you know, part of it probably was audience demand. But I imagine like the the knock on effect that that has, with Donald Trump just being like the the TV watching president that everybody knows that he is, like it was I almost feel like it was kind of designed specifically to Kim a little bit. That Oh, yeah, it 100% was Yeah, and so yeah, seeing himself being lambasted on you know, television, especially with Cassidy Hutchinson. This was the burger throwing testimony to right, like, I don't mean to downplay the other much more serious things that were you know, talked about in that but one of them was that yeah, he threw his he threw a plate with a burger on it at the wall and it was splashed with ketchup,

which just yeah, there was ketchup dripping down the walls, which is a very evocative image

very, very, but also the fact that yeah, they talked about like the Oathkeepers and the proud boys being there and how that might be strategically useful for them. Like, you know, crimes of sedition. So yeah, that's also important to mention.

Yeah, and like, Trump was aware that members of the crowd had guns and said he was fun. And without because they weren't gonna use them on him. Stuff like that. And so really explosive testimony and of course, Trump, this is his medium. This is his platform, if you will to respond to stuff like this. And so I thought, you know, what is this thing? I signed up for an account? Oh, man, we decided to do an episode on it, basically just thinking through, what is this weird platform? And what do we make of it? And what are its implications, if any. And now I understand that there are a couple of news pieces about truth social, that have come out recently, one of them involving Trump's legal issues.

Yes. So I mean, first and foremost, you know, we talked towards the beginning about the fact that this app was launched as kind of a rejoinder to Twitter's censorship and shadow banning and all of the the awful things that it's doing to conservative voices, allegedly. And so you know, this platform was I think, billed initially, as I think on their website, they call it truth. Social is America's Big Tent, social media platform that encourages an open free and honest global conversation without discriminating on the basis of political ideology. So very quickly after that, there were articles that were posted this one on June 10. From variety, Trump's truth socialist banning users who post about January 6 hearings, according to reports, where it specifically talks about people who signed up for truth, social, mostly to do their own little experiments to see what can I really get away with posting on here, and some of them this one came from Travis Allen, who is a information security analyst posted a screenshot from the truth social app that said account suspended. He wrote my truth social account was just permanently suspended for talking about the January 6 committee hearing shortly after the first one aired. So immediately, it's sort of like okay, well, you know, it's passe, I think, at this point to point out hypocrisy from the Trump anything to do with Donald Trump, but it's still you know, kind of important at least to showcase that like there is there is content moderation that happens and there is definitely an ideological bent to, to that content moderation. Other ones that have just come out in the past couple of days. This one from The Daily Beast, truth, social users are fuming over censorship on Trump's platforms. I read through their terms of service to see how they do content moderation. According to the truth social website here, we use artificial intelligence AI to assist our hard working moderators and some posts are flagged for deletion and marked as quote sensitive by AI. Human moderators oversee this process conduct multi level reviews and are empowered to reinstate posts conduct the multi level marketing, conducted multi level marketing schemes against to defraud you have the last $10 in your bank accounts. So anyway, this Daily Beast article though, is specifically talking about the main point of contention among users is that Trump's site continues to apply sensitive content notices obscuring some posts, including a popular anti Biden meme that marks the president over increasing inflation rates. I don't know that that's an I did that sticker, whatever that you see on all the gas pumps, but that's apparently a little too sensitive. For the snowflakes over at truth, social

cheese, what I know like what is the point of truth, social if you can't post about inflation? Yeah, it's like it seems to be like,

and it was something that was criticizing Biden too. So I don't know. I mean, their AI just it's, it's, the AI is,

AI has a liberal bias.

It's only a matter of time before we're going to start hearing, you know, Fox News contributor screeds about about the liberal algorithms, the liberal the liberal artificial Intel liberal algorithm. Yeah, the liver algorithms. That's right. The content warning. The Daily Beast article continues has also covered up a popular graphic depicting Jesus Christ and a quote from the Bible with a gray filter, leaving users fuming quote, truth social loves censorship. One user wrote whose bio on the site included the hashtag quote, no more rhinos, another Trump, another pro Trump user, quote, ultra Magga peanuts. That's the accounts name, responded to on the platform that truth social quote, should be embarrassed over this censorship and quote, so Wow. Yeah, it's a it's been a real interesting ride just in terms of the what is what is allowed to be considered truth, which I'm sure we'll go into a little bit later. The only other thing that I wanted to note as well about the sort of material basis of this, especially as it regards Trump's legal issues is that Donald Trump has recently according to this Paste Magazine article from July 8, Donald Trump removed himself from the board of truth socials parent company just before being served with federal subpoenas the This is related to the Trump Media and Technology Group, which is the parent company that runs truth social is in talks to be acquired by this what's called an S pack, a special purpose acquisitions company called the Digital World Acquisition Corp, which is kind of a little bit sort of like a private equity firm that just basically exists to acquire businesses and then flush them with cash before taking them public. But basically this there's a lot of speculation around this deal about whether or not TTG Trump media and technology group needs to go public before being acquired by this s PAC. But at any rate, Donald Trump has removed himself as the board chairman, ostensibly pulling the same move that Montgomery Burns did in that episode of The Simpsons, when he reveals that the real cm burns that runs the nuclear plant is Canary Montgomery burns. It's just a bird.

Hey, wouldn't go to jail. The legal owner of this plant would Canary M burns. This entire plant is in his name Serkan. Can you do that? Who Yes. tycoons have been doing it for years why? Standard Oil was once owned by a half eaten breakfast.

So so so so dog J. Trump is the actual the actual chairperson of the board of

charge. He's not running any No, not at all. He can't be held responsible.

That's right. Yeah. It's Canary. Um, Trump. Yeah. Oh, my God. So anyway, already very a platform very fraught with both legal and principal based

content. Yeah. content on it. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think what we should do now is take this platform for a test drive, I made a dummy account, I will be giving us a little tour of it nice. And so what I've done here is I've pulled up true social.com/real, Donald Trump, and we got buttons on the top left search bar,

instead of instead of a blue check, it's a red check now next to Donald Trump's red. But otherwise, like it looks almost identical to Twitter, I It's like a pretty clear rip off of the precise interface of Twitter.

For the given post, we can on a given post, we can click these three dots and do more things with a post, right? And like I said, we can search.

So yeah, the immediate difference that I that I noticed. Oh my god, sorry, I just for those of you who are listening to this in podcast form, like we If only you could see all the tweets that are up there right now these are fascinating. So and

we will be releasing a clip of this of the video of test driving truth social here, but I will also do our best to narrate what's happening.

Yes, absolutely. So the biggest thing that I noticed immediately was that if you scroll up to the top of at real Donald Trump's truth social page, instead of usually on the Twitter interface, you have, you know, tweets, tweets and replies, media and then likes for the different tabs that you can scroll through. So this is a little different. Instead of tweets, it appears that these posts are called truths. Is that is that is that a common parlance across the platform?

Yes, Alex. posts on truth social are termed truths. So as you pointed out here, you know, at the top of Trump's account, we can click truths, we can click into truths and replies. I don't believe that he's replied to anyone elses truths doesn't look. But if he had, we can see those there. And then we can see media, which is like images that he's posted. Mostly a lot of gifts. Yeah,

it looks like a lot of videos

from from Fox News shows. Yeah, a lot of them are press releases that he is putting out from his I guess he's still listing himself as President Donald J. Trump fast. Which, you know, is not uncommon for former presidents true,

but for some but for somebody who claims that the previous election was stolen, and that he is truly the the rightful heir, the Juan guaido of the United States, you might say he is the the true the true pro, the occluded president.

Now I'll point out as well that when you open one of the media items, like an image, there is a little link under the image that says View context interest if we click that, it takes us to the post truth. Well, interestingly, they use the word posts, so there is some inconsistent, some inconsistent nomenclature going on here. And if we look at the options available for a given post when you're when you've maximized it, you can retrieve it so you can reply to it. You can retrieve their email, or you can like it. And then when you expand further options, you can mention the user mute them, block them, report them or report them.

Wow. Interesting. Yeah, this is this is really fascinating. So we're still in media so we can go back to Trump's truth. Go back to Trump's truth. Okay. Big rally in Arizona Friday evening. See you there. Yeah, this is pretty much of a piece with the way that he used

to tweet. Yeah, it's a lot of responses to

sorry, I just I just caught a I just caught a, a truth up there where he called the House Select Committee. II called the select committee of political hacks and thugs.

Yeah, that's what he calls the the January 6 committee. Oh,

I'm sorry, I have to read this one. This is so good. I want the Secret Service tapes far more than the unselect committee of political hacks and thugs. Just for context here. There has been recent reporting from Ken ClipPin Steen at the intercept that the Secret Service deleted text messages and potentially other information relating to the January 6 riot in that ridiculous and libelous story of me supposedly choking a big and strong Secret Service agent around the neck. Well, in the beast, wrong car would be shown to be as the Secret Service has already confirmed fake and fraudulent in parentheses. Likewise, there was no throwing of food and I did not want to be surrounded by strangers, quote with guns during my quote peacefully and patriotically. In quote, speech fake news. So Right. Oh, man, I feel bad saying I miss it so much. But like this, man, nobody

says the content that he that he did best. Who else sounds like this is worth pointing out that he's still stuck on the castI Hutchinson testimony. I mean, this is everything he just referenced there is from that testimony. And so this is precisely why true social has kind of become more known, because he's now really using it as his kind of spin room against the select committee and the whole January 6 investigation, and it's covered its coverage in the media. So this is really his all purpose propaganda outlet against the investigation. Absolutely. So what else do Alex What else do you want to see on here? Anything I can try out for ya.

So could we go to the homepage, just so we can see what that looks like? We

click true. Okay. Now, I should note that I think the only person I follow on here is Trump. Okay, got it. So it is showing me all his posts on my homepage. Got it. Is there anyone else that you want me to look up and and follow?

Well, let's see. There are the there is a recommended list of people to follow based on what I presume is your algorithm that's starting to be generated here. First and foremost, we have Tulsi Gabbard, which let's follow. Let's go ahead and give Tulsi a follow.

There's good question Gorka. So

Sebastian Gorka, absolutely there's gruesome Gavin Newsom is getting that he's on he has a truth social account. Yeah. Dan Scavino former Trump press secretary, is that right? Sure. Okay, let's

follow him. Scott Adams. Scott

Adams, the Dilbert guy. Oh my god. Of course the Dilbert guy is Maria Bartiromo dogs of true dogs okay we have to look at the okay let's go to I want to see the dogs of truth account 100

Austin truth account so their their profile says the hashtag dogs of truth channel tag us and use our hashtag to be featured cat owner question mark followed cats of truth only another cute pet follow pets

true so and it's important cats. Okay Absolutely. So on dogs of truth their header image is three different dogs in squat deprecating squatting social media logo, I think are they are they deprecating on them? Or are they or are they pooping them out? I don't know if that's hard to be to say yeah, they're I think Instagram

Facebook and Twitter so dog shoe shots yeah two shots and meta Yep. For the price of

one There you go. Yep. And of course the hated the the absolutely hated Twitter. So what are they posting here on dogs of truth?

Okay, so we this first post it says featured hashtag truth user at muddler. Good morning coffee, Sun emoji. We want to connect all pet owners on hashtag truth social and build a supporting animal loving community heart follow us and use the below hashtags to have your pets featured on our pages. And then they provide a photo of a cute dog in their owner's lap. So okay,

so as dogs of truth they don't post any ideological content on here. I'm guessing this is just the

it's just dog owners who use true social social. Okay, got it. Yep. Which is fascinating. I mean, they're creating a community of pet owners. And they do say on all of these posts carbon copy, it's like the same, the same copy. We want to connect all pet owners on truth, social and build a supporting animal loving community.

I would like to post that photo with the hashtag of animals of truth and then post the photo of Donald Jr. and Eric Trump, from their elephant hunts, just to see if the animal loving community if they consider that fake news or if that's or if that is indeed a truth.

Yeah. Are they aware of the fact that the Trump family engages in incredibly cruel poaching of exotic animals? Yes, I want to know that. So pets of truth, again, it seems to be kind of the same copy. But now we're getting some more exotic pets, horses.

This is very interesting, though, because this is I mean, I will say this is the first indication that I think any, what any social media site has to go through is the phase of like, okay, we're doing animal sharing here now, right? Like, I feel like Facebook, Facebook went through that Instagram is probably perpetually used for that there's a huge animal Twitter community. So this seems like a movement to this is more sort of like horizontal propaganda, right? Not trying necessarily to give a sort of top down ideological messaging, but to build social cohesion across the platform, you know, through something as simple as sharing photos of cute animals, as you know, basically giving like one more incentive for people to come back to it. I mean, yeah, it doesn't seem all that insidious. Obviously. It's just like, Oh, look at these cute things. And then, right below, you get a message about, you know, like the latest, like Q anon conspiracy theory, or something like that. Yeah, this is Oh, my God. Dave Mustaine from Sorry, I just noticed over on the side, Dave Mustaine of Megadeth is on here which I think I think he's kind of a right wing dude. Megadeth. His account Megadeth founder, former Metallica member,

okay, but he hasn't been on since May. He's clearly not not a power user. And

incidentally, his his profile pic is of his dog. So I mean, right now, just lots of lots of pets on truth. Social is what I've noticed lots of

pets. Lots of are there any search terms you want to put in here? Well, I think

maybe we should follow some of these trends. Over on the right. Yes, which is good call, which I also find fascinating. So for those of you listening right now, the trend link is a little bit different from Twitter, in that it seems to include a graph that

includes a line graph that seems to be apparently I mean, my assumption is that this is showing the popularity of the term over time. Yeah, but it's also like they're all trending downward and

most of them are like the first one is hashtag truth. The second one is hashtag ko Fifi. And then the third one,

perplexity 2000 mules take disciples evils which I believe is a reference to the new Dinesh D'Souza film. Oh, okay. All right. So I think Dinesh might be using truth social heavily audit to promote his work. But let's let's just look at hashtag tree. Yeah, let's go for then see what that shows us. Okay, so we're seeing something from I love America news about a smuggling case in Texas. But they're using truth, cafe crime, and Biden border crisis. And they're linking to the Gateway Pundit, which is like a right wing propaganda say yes, but why are they using this hashtag? Professor? Do you know what that means? In this?

I mean, it sounds like it's probably a term of art for I mean, I don't want to get like, you know, cryptographic rhetorical analysis here. But it seems to be like they're thinking about the term ko Fifi, in the same way that you know, the term Yankee, I guess, is re appropriated by American revolutionaries, or so we're told where it's sort of like, Oh, you made fun of us for liking their, you know, for Trump using this term, Kofi, but we're going to reappropriate we think it's cool that he's co fafi. And so that's what we're doing with, I don't know, maybe it made me the truth to them.

There's also a possibility that they think it was some kind of coded message or like a Q anon type eating that when Trump garbled out CO Fifi and that famous tweet, that that was actually a message to them that he's really with them.

Yep. Here we have a really interesting tweet about that sculpture that replaced General Lee in New Orleans. Jim referring to General Robert E. Lee. This is a photo of a snake winding around a pole with a circle on top of it. Oh wait, no, sorry. That looks to be a is that a human figure with a bare bottom right there? Is that what that is?

I guess so. They can't i can't even really tell

this post is calling it if you scroll up just a little bit. Check this out the Satanist replace General Lee statue in New Orleans with their satanic statue and people are dumb enough to go admire it. This is who these people are demonic and evil. From the real Suzie Q.

Within the hashtag this one is Yeah, hashtag truth. Hashtag devil Free. Great, which sounds pretty sweet. Absolutely. Yeah. So I mean, truth just seems to be like a term that that's tagged just about everywhere, on posts here which, which is why it might be the top trending like it's people just like to put hashtag truth Yeah, in their content. Let's look at 2000 mules real quick. Now 2000 mules, I was expecting this to all be like sponsored content for the D'souza movie. But I'm wondering if it's like a broader claim about sort of great replacement, maybe, because it's like, mules are bringing people over the border to take over our democracy. And so they're using it in any kind of post that is conspiracy oriented.

It's possible, I think, I want to, I want to suggest possibly a more banal, but no less kind of funny and interesting read, which is that in the same way that you know, Twitter, Twitter, trending topics are a little bit more immune to this because they have a broader user base. But occasionally on Twitter, you'll see like, if you do a hashtag, if you search one of the top trending hashtags at any one time, you're just gonna get something that is like totally random and off the wall that it was probably some kind of botnet that saw this topic, or this hashtag was trending. So we decided to post something that's like a link to advertising content, or whatever, and it threw the hashtag on there, because it's trending just to get it to just to get the post to rise in search ranks. I'm guessing, it seems like because some a lot of this content is so diverse and and seemingly unrelated to one another. I think that basically what we're getting here, because there is such a small user base, relatively speaking on truth, social, the search content, or the trending topics have basically already been hacked by, you know, whether it's auto posting botnets, or it's, you know, real users who are just like, oh, this is a trending hashtag, I'm just going to use it so that it comes up in search results more easily. That to me seems to be what they're kind of using it for, which kind of like, seems to defeat the purpose of trending hashtags. I don't know. I don't know. Do you think that that's Do you think that that's a fair read?

I think that's plausible. Yeah. I think everyone who's but it's very hard to tell which of these posts are authentic and which are bots?

Yeah. Well, even if they aren't bots, it's the kind of thing where like, you know, you just have to use the trending hashtags in order for your posts to get seen. So 2000 mules appears often in usually within like this post right here. Like a dozen other hashtags. You know, Trump hashtag Trump rally hashtag Trump one, hashtag Trump trains hashtag ko Fifi hashtag

Maga. Patriot gay. Yes.

Hashtag when we go when we go all Yeah, right. Stuff like that. So yeah, it seems to all kind of be of a piece like, like I said, this is this just reminds me of so many sort of like weird knockoff social media websites that never garner a big enough user base to actually have things like trending topics function in the way that you figure they're supposed to where you see content related to the trending topics when you search them instead of just spam

right. Now there are some some other buttons here under the people to follow on the homepage. Okay, blocks, mutes Help Center, legal logout.

Let's see, oh, you haven't blocked anybody.

I haven't blocked anyone yet. Let's say I block. Let's block Dave Mustaine man, he's going to be soonest Let's block and report him.

Blocking is my business. Sorry, that's, we can cut that part out.

That's all fake account. Well,

you Megadeth accounts out there.

Not the real Dave. Yes, block, submit. Okay, so maybe we'll get a response on that during the recording and I'll update us who knows?

Well, we didn't we didn't report it. We could we could go and report. Can we go report Donald Trump? Can we be can we be epic legends and report the former president?

Let's report Trump Jr.

Okay, there he's a lot easier to report.

What what category do you think we should?

Oh my god.

This is fast too sensitive content and content. Animals harmed animals harmed. Bad news? Yep. There we go. Nice. Animals harmed bad news. Let's block him. Absolutely. There we go. And we'll submit that we'll see if we get anything on that. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. I would hope that their content team is is working around the clock. Well, now let's just let's try a mute as well. Okay. This does I really want to see what this looks like on the sort of muting at history.

Typical liberal just muting history ignoring our ignoring our heritage.

So we go to muted users It seems that you can't mute like terms the way you can on Twitter. Oh, that's a bummer. Which is a bummer. Yeah,

yeah. But you know, that's that's part of this is this is why this is more of a public square. You can't shut your ears to, you know, to words and things that you don't want to hear.

Right. So blocks and mute. It's a very basic interface, we just get the list and then we can unblock God or unmute God, if we want to hold the Help Center.

Truth, social common terminology shadow banning, we have to repeat what

they have to say about shadow banning. So shadow banning is deceptive and manipulative practice whereby a social media platform artificially limits the visibility of users posts, without the users awareness. Shadow banning is a practice often used by big tech social media platforms to effectively censor users who question prevailing narratives or hold disfavored political viewpoints. Unlike its big tech competitors, true social does not and never will shadow banter to users. Now, do you think that's true?

I don't, I don't know. Because that's the thing. I mean, Shadow banning is not real, like that's, or at least it's it's, I guess it's contested in terms of like, the way that actually works, like shadow banning is just black box algorithmic workings, which completely it relies on, you know, who you are as a user and what you can see, like the way that people engage with your content, it could very easily just be people not liking your stuff, because they don't like you anymore, right? Like they could rise and fall with, I think, I don't know, to me, it's always seemed like shadow banning was something that was invented by people who are like, I deserve to be listened to and people aren't listening to me. And I want to say that it's because of big tech.

And I think the real question here is, is their algorithm any fundamentally any different in that regard than the others? And I think that the story you brought in from The Daily Beast suggests that's not the case.

Yeah, no, I don't think so. In fact, their algorithm is probably because it's not getting as much training data. For those of you that don't know how algorithms work. It's only algorithms are only as good as the data that you give them to work with. So that they learn from the basic rules that that the data is supposed to teach them, and then it can act accordingly. So in terms of what it determined sensitive content, that's why if you don't get if you have like a very naive algorithm, that you train it for, like a nudity screen, or something that is going to blur out content that appears to be human nudity. That's how you could get, you know, a blurred out Christ on the cross, because the algorithm doesn't read that as you know, religious figure that a lot of people on this site probably are, you know, very attached to, it reads it as nude man, we must blur. So yeah, I mean, I don't know, it sounds like a naive algorithm or a naive AI that they're using just from these basic reports. But it's hard to say without actually having access to their tech.

Right. So a very kind of cagey definition of shadow banning there that seems to evade their own algorithms problems with selecting and filtering content, right. So if we look at truth, we got to look at this truth glossary definition, a truth is a post that you share to those following you. A truth can be a comment, image or video and can contain links to other content, using truth, son truth socially, you can share your thoughts, photos, videos, memes, links, and more, you'll quickly get the hang of it. Okay, so that's what a truth is, what about retrieve a re truth is a repost of a truth. Users can retrieve their own posts as well as others. When a user re truths a truth. The real truth post is shared with the users followers, and will be marked in the feed as a read truth.

This one feels like new speak to me.

The target into that? Yeah, we'll get into that suggested accounts or accounts, we recommend that we think appeal to you. That's an interestingly, dodgy way of describing how their algorithm algorithm is suggesting accounts that we think appeal to you. And then there's a wow,

yeah, there's a whole there's a whole list of terminology here, which I don't know. Do we does Twitter have something similar? I don't think

Twitter I mean, Twitter, I'm sure has helped pages. But yeah, they're not quite as accessible as these were, which is interesting. I mean, I think it might tell you something about that. True social is to some extent marketing to people who are like, I don't get on that Facebook. Twitter thing. It's too too technical for my bones. Yeah. So they're kind of pandering a little bit to people who are skeptical or nervous or unsure about social media. Yeah, no, that's that feels completely right. Like they're bringing the chain email people straight to truth. Social. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Which I think makes sense. But I think we get the gist here of the platform. From this look, so why don't we take a step, take a step back now and talk about what we make of this. So I think the first thing that I wanted to ask is, what do we make of the use of this term? Truth as a countable noun? Leaving aside like the entire branding, that truth is just everywhere in the branding, but as a countable noun, designating a post on the platform, what kind of work does that do in shaping what this platform is supposed to be? Or in responding to the other sites that it is not?

Yeah, well, so, you know, truth obviously, is a term that is basically ideologically fraught. Now, it always has been fraught. I mean, it's one of the most philosophically fraught concepts, just, you know, in the history of like, at least Western philosophy, but it's also the kind of thing that like, the way that they're talking about truth is like, it's it's your truths. Your truths are your own, right? Instead of say, like, yeah, play off of the the classic Twitter phrase, my tweets are my own or my views are my own. My, my truths or my truths are my Yeah, so it truth, my truth, some are my own, not my employer. That's right. Yeah. Truths are mine and mine alone. But like, yeah, it's it's a way I mean, it's kind of a play off of the common phrase, you know, to speak your truth. But it also, weirdly enough, embodies this sort of like relativistic sense of like, naively relativistic orientation toward truth, where the truth is what I want it to be, the truth is what kind of appeals to my end, you know, I mean, this is probably sounding similar to critiques that, you know, are brought against the left or, you know, against liberals from the conservative side, too. But I mean, it's worth pointing out that this explicit branding of truth, you know, especially capital T truth, as it's written across the across the site, really kind of belies that orientation, where it's like, you know, the truth is, this is why I always say Donald Trump is the most postmodern president because he understands that, like the truth is malleable. And like, if you get enough people to believe that something is true, it becomes functionally true, at least for that broad swath of people that you can gain the consent of, but don't

you think also that Trump and you know, the team that designed this, Trump generally in his discourse on truth, that they want to have it both ways, in their kind of epistemic rhetoric, if we want to call it that their their discussions of these ideas of truth, realness fakeness Real News, fake news, because they're constantly labeling things that liberals and the left are saying, as not true as fake. Right. Right. And the question that that I have is like, how can every post on truth, social, be a truth? How is that possible, without some level of censorship and shadow banning? Yeah, which they explicitly created this platform to resist? Right? Yeah, it would seem to me that if liberals and leftists are able to create accounts on truth, social, you're gonna have to shut them down in order to maintain the integrity of this idea that every post is a truth. Right? Yeah.

We did a little bit of pre reading for the show and I peruse back through James Brown Jr's excellent book, ethical programs, he brings in Derrida's dichotomy between what Derrida calls the capital L law of hospitality, which is the sort of absolutes allowing everything allowing for anything being hospitable and open to any possibility right so on truth, social, it's that you know, capital, anything that anyone posts can be a capital T truth. That's the kind of Yeah,

we're not like those other social media sites that engage in censorship and engage in D platforming of conservative voices. Were allowing it all we're allowing total anarchy, right? So the law of hospitality is total anarchy, right?

But the thing that that's always in opposition to that's constantly playing off of is what are called the the small l laws of hospitality, which are essentially what what Derrida and brown argue are necessary for one another's existence. You can't have this ideal of utopian capital L law of hospitality where you know, anything is allowed without that kind of like well, except for these few things right with when it comes when the particulars emerge, out of interaction when actual people start coming together and conflicts inevitably arise about what should be allowed and what should not be the the laws are The small l laws of hospitality are what ended up being sort of emergent from that initial principle of anything as allowed, right, just a quote from Brown real quick, because he says it much better than I ever could quote, we write the laws and or the laws, the small l laws of hospitality in order to make specific ethical determinations, and in order to avoid the irresponsible piety of pure hospitality. But each of those laws composed in response to a particular rhetorical situation is a betrayal, it is a filtering that excludes every instantiation of hospitality misses the mark and fall short of the capital L law of hospitality. But without these misfires, we would lose sight of the ethical demand of the capital L law of hospitality. So in essence, like we can only we can only define that sort of ideal by placing constraints on it, right? Which is this kind of eternal paradox of, in this case, what we consider truth and what is untruth?

No. And it also makes me think of this idea from Kenneth Burke about deterministic screens, that, that every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing that whatever lens concept method we use to examine something is a choice. And we're choosing not to look at it in another way. So for example, US analyzing the platform of truth, social, looking at the buttons, and how to search how to report accounts. That's one way of looking at it. But we could also examine the most popular posts at a linguistic level, looking at what kinds of words and phrases and sentence structures are popular, these are different lenses that no matter what choice we make, we're limiting the way in which we can understand it. And I think that a similar thing goes on with the construction of these platforms that they can claim to be totally free and anarchistic and allowing maximal discourse. But that's actually materially impossible, because at a certain point, you have limited server capacity. And you do have to implement certain rules just legally, that certain kinds of content can't be there, that's going to get the company in legal trouble. Yeah.

And I would, I would also say, just to add on to that, I mean, we can kind of bring in and economic critique into here too, because so last I saw truth social, I think apt, as of a few months ago, had 40 employees, it's not very many for, you know, what is supposed to be a rival to a tech giant like Twitter, right. And because of that, you know, whether it's because they want to keep their overhead costs real small, they basically have to use AI and algorithmic, you know, processing to do a lot of their content moderation work. Now, that is, of course, going to run you into a lot of the exact same problems that they criticize big tech companies for which they assume I think that whether it's algorithms or humans behind the screen, who are doing the shadow banning or the content moderation. You know, what a lot of people at this point have pointed out is basically just your own what the algorithm is feeding back to you based on what you put into it. Lee gruel had a really good article that that Calvin, you posted for us to read before this, talking about how, you know, researchers, when they when we go on to social media, and we collect information about what we consider to be public consciousness about a certain issue, like the women's march or Black Lives Matter or the elections, it's always filtered through our own algorithmic deterministic screen, right, which we may not even be aware of, you know, why we are being shown what we're being shown. But I think that's that's kind of one of the fatal I don't want to say fallacious ways of thinking, but it is, it is a fallacious way of thinking that has, you know, I think the most famous example of it that I can think of was that just amazing. Jordan Peterson tweets from 2018 that says Google Image Search bikini, then do the same thing with Bing and think hard about Google's desire to shape our perceptions themselves in the politically correct manner. Are you James d'amour and his lawsuit? So I mean, a lot that we could unpack there. But basically, he's saying, like, I went and did a Google search of bikini and it showed me different things on Google and on Bing. And I think what he was getting at was like, it showing me people with a lot of diverse body types, you know, and not just the sort of like, quote, unquote, traditionally attractive ones. And what literally everybody dunked on him for under that was that, you know, Google image search is not the same for everybody. It's based on your prior search history. What you are being shown in there is based on what you've searched in the past, so like, there, this whole discourse around the truth being occluded by these big tech companies totally misses is the point of you know, this is just the algorithm feeding you back to you. And you don't realize that. And so it's a lot easier to say, well, there's some malevolent force working behind the scenes to try and change my perceptions or, you know, do do a bad thing to me. No, it's just an algorithm. For the most part that's been trained on the it's been trained the best it could on the data that you have given it.

On your data trails. Yes. And it's doing its best to serve you the content that it thinks you want to see precisely. But yeah, no, I just I want to come back to this idea that the conservative movement that Trump and truth social represents, they have a very fickle relationship to relativistic notions of truth. Yes, I agree with you that there's something built into this platform that seems to imply a postmodern relativism, allowing just everyone's truths to be anarchistic Lee shared and circulated and posted, or purporting to allow that, but at the same time, we have to think about the dialogical reality of this platform. Why is it that it's parodying? I mean, I think it's impossible to look at the platform and not say, this is flat out basically a parody of the two biggest platforms that banned Trump, Twitter and Facebook looks almost kind of like a remix mashup of Twitter and Facebook, it's like Twitter, with the brighter interface of Facebook. That's how it feels to me as a user. Absolutely. And if that's the case, we have to think about the post, you know, this this unitary, countable noun of the post the truth as a parody of the tweet, yes, as the unitary, countable noun of a post on Twitter. And so the idea is that tweets are fake news tweets are, are circulating and just spreading liberal propaganda. But here, our posts are truths. They're true. This is reliable information. This is information that you can trust, unlike the propaganda on Twitter, and that really strikes me as a fascinating contradiction. Like, is it relativist? Or is this the in fact real, platonic ideal of truth? It's actually the most anti postmodern thing you've ever heard of, because this is real truth. This is the single objective truth as distinct from the nasty propagandistic fake news on the other platform. Yeah,

I'm sure they see it that way. But I mean, it's the kind of like you know, if we want to go back to the essential Ben Shapiro dichotomy of facts versus feelings that don't care about your feelings, like I think that there's, there's there's a slippage here. The truth is what feels right to me, as you know, a Magga supporter as an America First person, so I know the truth when I see it, because it feels it feels right, you know, right like it, it adheres more to my own my priors, so I have no problem calling that absolute truth because it to me, it feels like absolute truth. I don't know it feels very difficult, though, to actually get down to explaining to somebody like the reason that the truth for you is an aspect it's not like an actual verifiable, you know, the way that scientists or you know, other people with like rigorous methodologies would talk about how they achieve a useful truth. This is just, it's totally vibes. It's totally just vibes. So, which I also just have to bring up a comparison we didn't talk about doing this before, but it literally just jumped into my mind. Calvin, do you remember verite?

What was that?

It was it was a it was a project launched by Peter Dow, former former Hillary man and now turns like progressive leftist Peter Dow. Who in the wake of I can't remember exactly when it came out, and I literally don't know how to spell it anymore.

I think it was VE R I T. I remember the AR it

on Wikipedia verite was a liberal leaning political site created by Peter Tao and his wife Lila Tao that showed talking points for use in social media discussions. The site's suspended all functionality on February 11 2018, with a website replaced by only the words reboot summer 2018. As of October 2021, that domain redirects to the now suspended Twitter profile. This comes on the heels of Peter Tao bowing out of public activism So says the Wikipedia site, so this website slogan said it was quote media for the 65 point 8 million referring to the number of votes Hillary Clinton received in the 2016 presidential election. When Peter Dow told Business Insider that he intended the website to, quote, reflect the worldview of those who voted for Clinton and describe the site as a, quote, online hub for Clinton backers so that they can find easy to share facts, stats and other information that you can take out to social media, when you're having debates on key issues people are discussing. So basically, the posts on Verrett were just, they basically were like, quote, infographics that then had a that then had a seven digit code that could identify like, if you went back to Verrett, you could plug in the code to make sure that the screenshot that you were seeing was real.

Give me the code.

Kings, Dan. Okay, sure. So it was like this. It was the it was the sort of like, like, centrist Democrat version of truth social, although it wasn't ever it wasn't ever intended as a social sharing platform. It was basically just a quote and infographic factory that you could take out and say like, Well, Hillary Clinton literally did say this. I got it from this liberal leaning website that is taking its name from the Latin word for truth vary toss, right.

But I do think I do think the similarity is striking because if if someone is sharing, especially via like email, or they're texting it to a friend, a post from truth, social, it says right there truth, it says that it's true. Yes. So it's, it's kind of verifiable in a similar kind of way. At least it purports to be

right. Yeah. So anyway, I didn't mean to sidetrack us, but I just I No, no, that's, that was a fun, fun similarity that I literally just thought about.

No, and I do think we're getting at something here, which is that, like, some of the most pedantic and I guess we might even say, like ideologically epistemologically naive, liberals have a lot in common with some of the most pedantic, epistemologically and ideologically naive conservatives in that they hang on really tightly to this idea of their own verifiable, believable, plausible truth. Yes, that that is unitary. I mean, I think it's it's fundamentally a kind of Platanus view of truth, that it's something that's unitary and objective that can be discovered. And that has to that we have to vanquish these other alternative truths coming from the other side, because they're absolutely verboten and and dangerous, right. So it kind of feeds an authoritarian mindset that leads to more censorship, not less, right. And that's where, you know, the kind of conservative rhetoric around censorship is so Orwellian?

No, it absolutely is the way that so many of the people, the same people who are decrying censorship are also like, so far in support of like, Florida's don't say, gay bill, or any of the bans on teaching critical race theory in schools, like you clearly have like no principled sense of, of being anti censorship being a pro First Amendment's or, you know, free speech, like, clearly there is like an acceptable boundary of what you consider acceptable discourse.

Well, that's my question is like, you know, is it deeper than hypocrisy here? Is this, is this a different view of those things? Where it's not, they're not censoring? It's more akin to stamping out heresy? Or I don't know, I'm trying to think of the right metaphor. But yeah, I think faith and religion metaphors make the most sense here that it's, it's kind of like, there's one doctrine. Yes. And and stamping out heresy is something you just have to do to maintain a strong community.

Absolutely. No, I mean, it's, it's the kind of like that, and I do believe that, you know, in a sort of, like naive religious sense, that is, that's that slippage between the good and the true, happens all the time, right. It's something is good, because it's true. And it's true, because it's good, right? Or, in other words, because I believe that it's good. And those kinds of things like in a truly democratic society or in truly democratic online spaces, those values should be emergent from the community, right? They should be emergent from conversations that you have with people who are positioned differently in society than you trying to understand why somebody believes the things that they do based on their own material circumstances and where they come from. But you know, the internet is not does not have a bad faith filter. It doesn't, you know, it's not able to circulate out the people who are you know, just basically going on there as propagandists, like, you know, your Christopher Ruffo is and you're just James Lindsay, who are literally just like authoritarians going on to try and stamp out things that they find either distasteful or immoral or whatever. Yeah, but But you gain a great deal of I think ideological power or and the ability to persuade people who are looking for absolute truth or who really believe in that ideal. When you label something as truth when you are, you know, when you use that framing that Terminus stick screen, it gets people into the mindset of not just epistemic absolutes, but moral absolutes. And if your moral absolute is the same as your epistemic absolute, then you know, somebody who's, who is not telling the truth is, you know, ultimately evil, they need to be vanquished. They need to be seen, it's

not hard to see, it's not hard to see how that merger of epistemology, and ideology leads to something like the capital riot, but just really quickly, I do think it's funny, just logically, something I noticed on the platform that I forgot to point out, is that, you know, every person's profile has these three buttons, you can click truths, truths and replies and media. What's funny about that, to me is that it implies a disjunct between truths and replies. So the the initial post is, is automatically true. You can't debunk it, you can't disagree with it. That's true. It is a true statement. The reply though, actually, the reply is automatically foul, right. And so it creates a kind of comedic Abbott and Costello routine that's playing out in the style and also the media, any images, or videos and graphics that are being included with the truth. Those are false to those are not true. So you have to be on your toes when you're on this platform. It's not all true confuse

the truth with a reply the common the most common mistake, rookie rookie error is can you get just out of curiosity can you quote truth somebody I know that's like a that's like a combination reply and and truth. Can you quote truth somebody?

I'm gonna give it a shot Okay, I'm gonna try right here and I will let you know I don't think you can you can copy link to post they don't make it. Oh, yeah, quote, there's a called Koecher thing to there is quote, truth. Yes, you can quote true. I love that.

That's that's also though in that linguistic setup, that's also not the real truth. That's just the quote, truth.

Right? It's the quote unquote, quote, unquote. And if you quote, truth, I'm trying to work this out of my head, if you quote, truth is what you're quoting the truth or is your post the truth? At that point? There's so many layers of truth here that hard to parse. But this is this is

why Yeah, I don't know Twitter got it right, when they just call this a tweet, because it's literally you're just making a noise. Like that's, that's the that's, that is the most neutral way I think, to describe

what's your do valuate it, you have to evaluate it as a critical consumer of media. Yes. I think there is a little bit of condescension to in this. I know, they they're rattling the truth, social people are wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of free debate, and anti censorship. But, you know, for all its problems, Twitter does not claim to be inherently true or false. It just it just is people talking. It's people talking on the internet. And you as a user, have to kind of use your best judgment about what you want to do about that. You know, it's a hellish place I don't recommend Twitter to anyone but I probably recommend it over truth social Yeah, if nothing else, I think the animal content is a lot stronger on Twitter. Yes. If your animal lover go on Twitter, and you'll see some incredible things kaput Bara on Twitter. Yeah, are fantastic. Yep. Follow some of those Japanese animal accounts on Twitter. Those are great. Yeah,

no, it's true. Yeah, those are those are truly the best. Just there's one more point that I that I wanted to make about like why I think we might see the truth social plane go down in flames story and it has to do I think with just like media ecologies and the way that they work, especially on the internet. I think one of the reasons that, you know, Donald Trump's Twitter account was so you know, so absolutely controversial and so popular as a result. And I think one of the reasons why conservatives relish still, after all this time being on Twitter is because you there is a certain amount of kind of twisted pleasure to be gained in going into someone's own space and griefing them. Now. This is now griefing is for those of you who aren't familiar With with internet culture throughout history griefing is this process through which you are basically it's kind of another way to talk about trolling somebody, 4chan users on the sort of like icky parts of the non dark web, where it's known for, you know, brigade eating or going into places like Habbo Hotel or other like early social media sites that were populated primarily by children or, you know, role playing adults. And just like just making havoc, like, you know, doing weird voices playing characters, but basically ruining everybody else's good time. And I think that sort of griefing culture is what made being a conservative on Twitter so much fun. My theory now is though, like, how could truth social be that much fun? Because if it's only like Maga doofuses that are on there, like you're not you're not actually getting into it and like owning you can't own the LIBS because there are no live nerdo lips. Oh, truth.

If it's only truth, what can you rail? Yes,

yeah, exactly is that you've lost you've lost your opposition. You've lost the the the alterity and you no longer have that, you know that that fun position to rail from? I don't think it's going to last for that very reason. Because there's nobody, there's nobody to grief. There's nobody to grieve. There's nobody to own.

Now they're claiming ownership over truth. Yes. But as a result of forfeiting the ability to own the libs,

you can't have it both ways. You can't you can't can't No,

not at all. No, we will. We'll keep track of all this. If I get any responses to my reports, you'll remember that I reported Dave Mustaine from Megadeth and Donald Trump Jr. for various forms of misinformation, truth, crime truth,

to also go and report to Babylon B for being not funny.

Yes, I'll go on to do that right away. Thank you. And if we get any response to those reports, we will update our listeners and our fans on Twitter. And on truth social, we will be making a reverb truth social account. Shortly here. Yes. And maybe we'll get some new listeners. Yeah, I mean, Alex, you have gotten off Twitter, but maybe you can spend a little time on truth social. That's now I kind of want to do some experiments. I think it'll be better for your mental health than Twitter was.

Yes, I think so too. i Yeah. Right now I'm just doing the pose of the Bugs Bunny meme. Or it's like, you know, I'm going back to the old me. Word. Forgive me. Lord, forgive me. I'm going back to the old knee.

But, yeah, thanks for taking this strange trip into the truth with me here. It was fun. Stay tuned, folks. We will have a bunch more episodes as we get back into the new school year. We've been on a little bit of a summer cooldown here, but we'll be ramping things back up soon. Indeed. Can't wait for it. And from all of us here at reverb. Thanks for joining us. stay committed to the truth. Yeah. And we will talk to you soon

stay truthful people. Bye bye. Bye bye. Our show today was produced by Alex Helberg and Calvin Pollock with editing work by Alex regroups. CO producers at large our Ben Williams. So he wants Zack and like loud. You can subscribe to reverb and leave us a review on Apple podcasts Stitcher, Android or wherever you listen to podcasts, check out our website at WWW dot reverb cast.com. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter where our handle is at reverb cast. That's r e v e r b underscore C A S T. If you've enjoyed our show and want to help amplify more of our public scholarship work, please consider leaving us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice and tell a friend about us. We sincerely appreciate the support of our listeners. Thanks so much for tuning in.