Despite their close political ties, President-elect Donald Trump and X owner Elon Musk are business rivals.
Trump is the majority shareholder in Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent company of the emerging social truth platform. Musk owns Company X, formerly known as Twitter, which is the dominant player in the microblogging space. The two men, whose businesses compete for users’ time, advertisers’ dollars, and dominance of the cultural conversation, have not allowed their burgeoning technological holdings to interfere with their political union.
Both Truth Social and
“X content has become more like Truth Social since Musk took office,” said Eric Nisbett, director of the Center for Communications and Public Policy at Northwestern University. “His philosophy of freedom of expression is much closer to the philosophy of social truth.”
Crucial to this effort are the lax content moderation standards — a feature, not a bug — on both platforms.
Both Truth Social and X heavily promote themselves as “free speech” platforms that cater to conservative audiences. However, there is a difference in the extent to which moderated content is presented. X, despite relaxing its guidelines, still has strong content moderation, largely because it relies on big corporate advertisers and media partners to generate revenue on the platform. In the first half of this year, X was almost suspended 5.3 million accounts The company said in a report in September that it had violated various content moderation policies.
Truth Social, which has almost no advertising business, is not as obligated to meet the needs of its customers. Truth Social is an “alternative to technology” site, Nisbet said, a term that refers to “platforms that basically purposefully state that they will engage in limited content moderation.”
There is also a stark difference between the size of each platform. X is a global brand with users from all over the world. Truth Social, on the other hand, is a regional player in the US that caters mostly to Trump’s most ardent supporters, meaning it has a small portion of X users. In September, Truth Social had 698,000 monthly active users on its mobile apps Its mobile phone, while X had 70.4 million users, according to data from Sameweb. The difference in total online traffic is even more noticeable. In September, X had 1 billion visits on the web across desktop and mobile compared to just 11.3 million for Truth Social, according to the same source.
Both Truth Social and X play a crucial role in their audiences’ media diets as a place where they get their news regularly. Fifty-seven percent of Truth Social users “regularly” get their news from the platform, according to Data From Pew Research. And at X, the number is only slightly higher, with 59% of users saying the same, Pew research found.
The emergence of Truth Social is consistent with a broader trend in the social media industry that has seen a proliferation of new platforms. Where the space had previously been dominated by There is a more “niche social media environment,” Nisbet said.
The close relationship between Trump and Musk and the similarity in their businesses has led to speculation before Financial Times Veteran technology journalist W Kara Swisher, CNN contributor Truth Social and X may be combined in the future. If such a deal were approved, Nisbett said, it would be “commercially beneficial for Trump but not for X.”
Given its marginal user count and virtually non-existent revenue, Truth Social appears to have little impact on X’s overall business. Truth Social generated revenue of $2.6 million during the third quarter. X, despite struggling since Musk bought the platform in October 2022, still outperforms Truth Social by an estimated 2 billion dollars In advertising revenue.
Oddly enough, Truth Social received a higher than X valuation earlier this year, when its share price – and thus its market capitalization – skyrocketed.
Any potential deal for Trump could still generate a windfall given his stake is worth about $3.3 billion. “It makes sense for Trump to cash out his shares as an exit strategy,” Nisbet said. “It needs someone to buy it.”
Truth Social’s narrow audience means that any major crossover of its content is still limited to posts by its most famous user (and largest contributor). “More people are exposed to Social Truth content through news media reports of Trump’s latest diatribe than by visiting the platform,” Nisbet said.
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