Trump Announces His Own Social Network, 'Truth Social,' Which Says It Can Kick Off Users For Any Reason (And Already Is)
from the because-of-course dept
Last night, Donald Trump sent out a press release announcing (effectively) the launch of his new social network, "Truth Social." The press release shows that it's a bit more complicated than that. Trump is launching "Trump Media & Technology Group" which is entering into a reverse merger agreement to become listed as a public company in order to launch this new service. Apparently, Truth Social will let in "invited guests" next month, followed by a full launch in early 2022. The press release has the expected bombastically ridiculous quote from the former President.
"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech. We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American President has been silenced. This is unacceptable. I am excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon. TMTG was founded with a mission to give a voice to all. I'm excited to soon beginning sharing my thoughts on TRUTH Social and to fight back against Big Tech. Everyone asks me why doesn't someone stand up to Big Tech? Well, we will soon!"
I mean, first off, it's an interesting world in which you can both claim to be silenced, but also (a) put out a press release read by millions and (b) launch your own damn social network. Doesn't seem that "silent" to me, but what do I know?
Anyway, given that Trump claims that the mission here is "to give voice to all," I was pretty interested in Truth Social's terms of service which (unsurprisingly), make it clear they can kick you off for any reason they want at all. Specifically, it says:
We reserve the right, but not the obligation, to:
(1) monitor the Site for violations of these Terms of Service;
(2) take appropriate legal action against anyone who, in our sole discretion, violates the law or these Terms of Service, including without limitation, reporting such user to law enforcement authorities;
(3) in our sole discretion and without limitation, refuse, restrict access to, limit the availability of, or disable (to the extent technologically feasible) your access or any of your contributions or any portion thereof; or
(4) otherwise manage the Site in a manner designed to protect our rights and property and to facilitate the proper functioning of the Site.
In other words, like every other website out there, Truth Social will moderate content.
Also, there's this:
If we terminate or suspend your account for any reason, you are prohibited from registering and creating a new account under your name, a fake or borrowed name, your email address or the name of any third party, even if you may be acting on behalf of the third party.
In addition to terminating or suspending your account, we reserve the right to take appropriate legal action, including without limitation pursuing civil, criminal, and injunctive redress.
So, it sure sounds like Truth Social, giving voice to all, is pretty damn sure it's going to have to kick people off its site (and maybe even sue them!). And why might they kick you off? Well, there's a very long list of "Prohibited Activities." I'll highlight some of them...
use the Site to advertise or offer to sell goods and services.
How much do you want to bet that Trump himself will violate this?
engage in unauthorized framing of or linking to the Site.
If you LINK TO THE SITE in an "unauthorized" way, they can remove your account.
trick, defraud, or mislead us and other users, especially in any attempt to learn sensitive account information such as user passwords;
MISLEADING OTHER USERS is grounds for having your account banished. So much freedom.
use any information obtained from the Site in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person.
This kind of thing is standard on all social media sites -- but which is notable because it's what many Trumpists get kicked off other platforms for. And yet, here it is.
use the Site as part of any effort to compete with us or otherwise use the Site and/or the Content for any revenue-generating endeavor or commercial enterprise.
Any effort to use the site to make money and they'll shut you down. That's... weird.
harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten any of our employees or agents engaged in providing any portion of the Site to you.
If you annoy Trump or any of his employees, no more Truth for you!
upload or transmit (or attempt to upload or to transmit) viruses, Trojan horses, or other material, including excessive use of capital letters and spamming (continuous posting of repetitive text), that interferes with any party’s uninterrupted use and enjoyment of the Site or modifies, impairs, disrupts, alters, or interferes with the use, features, functions, operation, or maintenance of the Site.
One of those is not like the others. Excessive use of capital letters? I mean, that's not banned on any other social media platform I know of. Seems a lot less "freedomy" than we were led to believe. Also... excessive use of capital letters? Can I think of a famous social media user who regularly made use of that... hmm... who could that be...?
Also, there's an indemnity clause (a pretty broad one actually), so that if they get sued for something, you may be on the hook for the legal bills:
You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold us harmless, including our subsidiaries, affiliates, and all of our respective officers, agents, partners, and employees, from and against any loss, damage, liability, claim, or demand, including reasonable attorneys’ fees and expenses, made by any third party due to or arising out of: (1) use of the Site; (2) breach of these Terms of Service; (3) any breach of your representations and warranties set forth in these Terms of Service; (4) your violation of the rights of a third party, including but not limited to intellectual property rights; or (5) any overt harmful act toward any other user of the Site with whom you connected via the Site.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, we reserve the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter for which you are required to indemnify us, and you agree to cooperate, at your expense, with our defense of such claims. We will use reasonable efforts to notify you of any such claim, action, or proceeding which is subject to this indemnification upon becoming aware of it.
So, when I first wrote this article I had a paragraph noting that once it actually launched I expected that Truth Social would speedrun the content moderation learning curve just like every MAGA-wannabe social network before it. But... of course, it's even faster than that. You see, despite saying it wasn't open, a bunch of fairly enterprising people figured out how to access the site and sign up for accounts via an unadvertised link. So someone set up a Donald J. Trump account. And posted quite an image.
The "donaldjtrump" account of Trump's TRUTH Social has already been hacked. pic.twitter.com/LDQ5w24tcV
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) October 21, 2021
Someone else created their own Donald Trump account:
Was just able to setup an account using the handle @donaldtrump on 'Truth Social,' former President Donald Trump's new social media website.
Although the site is not officially open, a URL was discovered allowing users to sign up anyway. pic.twitter.com/MRMQzjNhma
— Mikael Thalen (@MikaelThalen) October 21, 2021
And a Mike Pence account:
Anyone can create an account on Trump's social network TRUTH Social using a publicly available link. I literally just registered "mikepence." The site hasn't even launched yet and it's already this vulnerable pic.twitter.com/v9nPN8ibDS
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) October 21, 2021
And thus we learned that, indeed, the "freedom loving" Truth Social... is already banning accounts.
A hush falls upon TRUTH Social. pic.twitter.com/HSKMTMlEMU
— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell) October 21, 2021
Freedom is so fleeting. I mean, it went away even faster than all those other Trumpist social media sites. Oh, and it seems notable that even pre-launch, Trump's "freedom" loving social media site has text ready to go for suspended accounts:
You can no longer use your account, and your profile and other data are no longer accessible. You can still login to request a backup of your data until the data is fully removed, but we will retain some data to prevent you from evading the suspension.
So... it seems that Truth Social has "permanent suspensions" all ready to go. Just like every other social media website, of course. But, at least they don't present themselves as the antithesis of those other social media sites while all doing the same thing.
Either way, this can't be a good week for all those other super thirsty MAGA wannabe social networks. Gab is still out there pretending Trump is posting on its platform (they just repost every one of his press releases on his "verified" account and say they've "reserved" the account for him). Then, of course, there was Parler, who promised not to remove content, but whose former CEO gleefully told reporters that he was suspending "leftist trolls." And, then, of course, there was Gettr, which was taken over and "launched" by former close Trump aide, Jason Miller, and which also speedran the content moderation learning curve. Miller was unable to get his recently former boss to get on his own platform, and now they'll be competitors.
And, hey, competition is a good thing. Let a million social networks bloom. But don't expect one that is actually "taking on Big Tech" or guaranteeing that everyone has a voice. Because that's not Truth Social. It's just more lies.
Oh, and there are even some people suggesting that Truth Social is merely a reskin of Mastodon, as it matches almost exactly. If that's the case, then it's almost certainly violating Mastodon's AGPL license. And, considering that Truth Social's terms of service say that it is forbidden for you to:
copy or adapt the Site’s software, including but not limited to Flash, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, or other code.
Then it seems that it certainly would violate such an open source license. And, I'm not even going to ask why they're including "Flash" in that list other than to wonder where they copied this list from...
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Filed Under: content moderation, donald trump, hacked, mastodon, social media, terms of service
Companies: tmtg, trump media and technology, truth social
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'Truth'... as defined by the Dear Leader
Ah the irony of calling a platform run by a pathological liar 'Truth', it's like calling a completely vegan restaurant 'The Meat Locker'.
The trolls missed a golden opportunity, if they really wanted to mess with him they could have just started posting links to the many press releases about his lost lawsuits and how badly he lost the election, more than anything else I imagine 'Hurting Trump's fragile ego' will get you thrown out of that cesspit so it's not like there's any need to create bogus accounts like they did.
As always with the 'alternative' social media platforms like this you just gotta love the glaring hypocrisy that is denigrating other social media networks for 'censoring'(read: moderating) users while not only having a TOS that allows anyone to be booted for any reason but also puts the users on the hook for any lawsuits they site might face because of them. Funny how the ones crying 'censorship!' always seem to have no problems making use of that 'tyranny' when it comes to their own platforms and those they don't like.
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Re: 'Truth'... as defined by the Dear Leader
More like calling a steak&beef house "Just Vegan" because it has catsup. Truth is a thin line, the absence of any lie. There is nothing wrong with a restaurant called "The Meat Locker" offering catsup.
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It's not just Flash.
1.1. Also, any 1x1 image is by definition a pixel, no?
Even assuming there was an actual lawyer involved in writing that text, I doubt they consulted technical experts. Though I guess that's kind of to be expected.
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"yet your favorite American President has been silenced."
Surely you mean ex-president?
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Re:
"favorite American President" implies acting as well as former presidents as the base set because you don't get to have more than one acting at a time except in case of sedition or an actual controversy.
And if that were intended, you'd rather see "legitimate American President" or something like that bandied about.
I rather think that "favorite American President" is more in the line of "largest inauguration crowd in history". Different kind of delusion than what you imply.
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Re:
In Trump's imagination, he didn't lose the election to Biden, so he probably still thinks of himself as "President Trump".
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Re:
And also "least favourable".
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Well someone was feeling lonely & needed to restart his 15 minutes of infamy...
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Cant wait for the lawsuits over user content! Rather, cant wait for trump to start hugging his old nemisis 230 as a defense!
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You're fired!
I am seriously inclined to join, but only if when I get booted off, it's Trump telling me, "I'm very disappointed with your performance on my website. You're fired!", Cameo style!
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ToS Grifter typo
There's a typo in the Terms of Service ..
That should read, "... to facilitate the proper funding of the Site"
You know the Grifter-in-Chief is just running this as another scam to part fans from their money.
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Time for The Lincoln Project to start up Consequences Social.
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No suggesting about it—it is a Mastodon reskin. The timeline and settings screenshots in those tweets are of a Mastodon instance as seen through the end user’s side of things. All Truth Social did was recolor stuff so it would resemble Twitter, because Trump is that obsessed with “owning” Twitter or whatever.
On the bright side, the “Fediblock” movement already put out a notice about Truth Social. They want to make sure as few instances as possible can be tainted by Trump’s instance via federation. Can’t say I blame ’em.
Also: Any bets on how long this Trumpian business venture will last? I’m guessing that this thing doesn’t make it to 2023.
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Translation
Translate the name of the platform into Russian: PRAVDA!
Does that mean Donald has become communist?
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What, you mean you believe this thing has a chance of making it to 2022?
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Re:
"Surely you mean ex-president?"
Some 73 million americans still believe he was violently deposed by the evil liberal cannibal cult. Those are the benighted morons to which he addresses himself.
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Re: ToS Grifter typo
"You know the Grifter-in-Chief is just running this as another scam to part fans from their money."
Of course he is. And even if he put that dead center in large letters on his website the loyal adherents of Dear Leader would just laugh that off with Donald Being Donald and send him more money.
You seriously can't help some people. Especially if the only reason they're following him in the first place is because he promises to make the "damn liberals" even more miserable than they are, and implies he'll guarantee a safe space for all the bigots and racists who feel butthurt because their "conservative values" aren't popular any longer...
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I believe it will at least open as promised. I don’t see it lasting even six months, though. Giving it a year may be too generous, but I think Old 45 would at least try to keep it alive through the midterms.
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Re: Translation
No no. It just means he's honoring one of the few things he admires in this world.
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I CAN'T HEAR YOU
OVER THE SOUND OF MY FREEDOM!!!
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And now for some
"Truth Social" anagrams
Lost haircut
Chariot Slut
Coital Hurts
Cultist Hoar
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And nothing of value was created.
Trump is boring. What he says is predictable.
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Mislead us
"trick, defraud, or mislead us and other users, especially in any attempt to learn sensitive account information such as user passwords; "
Yeah. It probably won't be long before "Truth Social" Experianses the joy of some "hacker" finding this stuff hiding in plain view in "View Source"
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Re: Translation
ҬяЦꚊ ꙄꙨϿїДГ
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Re: Re:
Naw, only had one real acting president in the US, despite the Schwartzenegger Presidential Library.
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Anyone want to bet that when Trump and his cultists spew lies that won't be considered "misleading other users" but when mainstream media sources post on there and left-wing trolls try to spread some actual truth to counteract the lies it will be?
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THIS IS NOT A PLACE OF HONOR
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Not going to last.
I mean, take a look at the comment section(s) of OAN. It's such a tiny echo chamber that you get claustrophobia. And there really are no libs to troll.
And that doesn't even require you to get warm with some newfangled social networking paradigms.
Well, since they apparently chose the AGPLed Mastodon as their software base, at least they are going to contribute lots of accessibility improvements facilitating non-technical users back to the developer community.
Or maybe they hope to be sued for compliance in order to have a dramatic excuse for shuttering their doomed performance piece with a florish, pocketing all their accrued funding.
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Re:
"What's a "web bug"? More importantly, how does one "upload or transmit" one?"
They usually take the form of a single pixel that's loaded without the end user noticing, often used to confirm (for example) that someone's read a spam message or visited a particular web page without the user noticing or having to take any explicit action, even if you have things like JS and cookies blocked. This is why when you go to your spam folder, they usually disable all images by default.
This is also why the things in point #1 are mentioned, since that's how they usually manifest.
"Cheat utility??? How does that make any sense?"
I'd imagine that including everything you can think of, even if it's not directly relevant, is an ass covering move in case, say, someone modified a cheat program to do whatever they're afraid of then uses the fact that it's not explicitly including in the list of outlawed programs to wriggle out of consequences.
"Offline reader that accesses the site?"
Well, in order to see something offline, the program will usually have to access the site and retrieve whatever version of the page you'll see in offline mode first.
Everything else does support the idea that they copied from another source, most likely an outdated one.
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Re: Re:
Hey he won those ...
...no, wait, he lost massively in the popular vote both times, never mind.
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Re: Not going to last.
"And there really are no libs to troll."
Because all of those right-wing bastions of "free speech" will permaban you in a. heartbeat if you inject anything related to reality into a conversation, let alone actual "liberal" speech.
This is why those people are always so angry and confused about the type of speech they get on mainstream platforms. They literally don't get exposed to someone not already in the cult unless they venture elsewhere.
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Oh, so a "web bug" is basically the same as the "1x1 pixel" thing? That's good to know, thank you for the information.
Cheat utility is something I found strange because I have yet to see that in any Terms of Use clause prohibiting unauthorized scraping or automated access.
The offline reader bit makes sense, given your comment, though I guess it's also kind of strange because why would they want users to refrain from offline reader use so specifically?
All of this terminological weirdness ("clear graphics interchange formats", etc.) actually made me think the terms aren't just copied from elsewhere verbatim (probably their baseline version was copied from elsewhere), but that the copied terms were later modified by a non-technical person who thought they know a lot more about technology than they actually do... while their actual tech knowledge was closer to cliches than reality.
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The truth is the only people interested in [using] this site are not interested in truth at all.
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Trump canceled by TRUTH.....
If Trump isn't careful, he'll run afoul of the Truth Social network's terms and conditions. Then he'll be banned from the truth.
(yes, I know, he's already banned himself from the truth years ago)
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Re:
Yeah, I'm just familiar with the web bug thing years ago because when I had to work user support in a former life I got a lot of whining about not being able to see images in messages that hadn't been whitelisted. The basic point is that by virtue of being a simple image request from a URL without scripting being involved, a bad actor can gather a lot of info even if you're relatively locked down and use common sense about security and not clicking on suspicious messages - by the time you load them with images included the damage is done, even if your immediate response is to press delete.
"The offline reader bit makes sense, given your comment, though I guess it's also kind of strange because why would they want users to refrain from offline reader use so specifically?"
Could be anything, I'd guess they just wanted to make sure there was an explicit ban on anything capable of running scripts, and anything that's able to access a site would implicitly be capable of attempting an injection or other attack, even if that's not its intended purpose.
Everything else is either covering their asses or copied from elsewhere, or maybe both. EULAs are rarely tested in court, but I imagine that this site has an implicit "please legally attack me" target posted for all political sites to see - and that they're not necessarily getting the cream of the crop in terms of real life knowledge building it, so anything's possible.
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Re: Trump canceled by TRUTH.....
I'd imagine the mascot of this site is Lionel Hutz, and any Simpsons fan knows his opinion on "the truth".
Sadly, Lionel Hutz and Dr. Nick Riviera seem to be that standard of staffers that Trump surrounds himself with. They were meant to be ridiculous satirical characters, damn it!
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Why am I not surprised that it's a shit show even before it's launched?
This is going to end up like all his other failed businesses... INCLUDING HIS OTHER FAILED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM.
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Re: Translation
ctrl_f "pravda"
Surprised the article missed the obvious point. Who here wants to take bets on if Putin himself recommended the name to trump?
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Re: Re: 'Truth'... as defined by the Dear Leader
Nah, "ketchup is a vegetable" was the other guy.
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Re: Translation
Pravda was government propaganda.
Trump is not part of the government anymore. He just likes to pretend he is.
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Re:
Fuck the Lincoln Project, nothing but a bunch of grifters!!!
They play the same game as Trump, constantly begging for donations, but from the anti-Trumps. And most of the money goes to the handful of guys running it as "administrative costs" and very little of their money goes to do anything other than make digital ad spots of marginal production value.
Their organization sounds like they do good, but in the end, it's just another con job by right wingers, as that is all they know how to do.
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Re:
I don't take sucker bets like that.
Of course Dear Leader and his loyal cadre of facehuggers will try to shove unpalatable and erroneous bullshit down everyone's throat.
And of course any attempt at fact-checking will be met with strident complaints about "Muh Freedum! Ahm bein' Silenced!".
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Talking Points Memo has a story on it this morning:
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Re: Re:
Not exactly a plausible fear given that they already reserved the right to ban people for any or no reaeon...like all sites do.
But I'm sure some lawyer was happy to bill them for many hours of researching (googling) and writing (copypasting) a giant list of redundant jargon anyway.
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Re: Not going to last.
WAIT! Someone goes to the OAN comments section!?!
Ohhh you poor baby! WHO hurt you so badly?!?
Well do yourself a favor and hang around here more and get yourself healed.
(obvious snark/joke. I'm a newbie, so sue me)
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Re:
Technically, a pixel is a segment of your monitor/screen/display that can be turned on or off (lit or unlit), not something that is transmitted over the network. What is transmitted is an instruction to light up that one pixel. But, and here's the definition of "clear", if the transmitted image tells the pixel to assume the same color as the pixel would otherwise display, then it is transparent, or "clear". IOW, if the pixel is supposed to be red, then it will transparently display red, but the instruction, having loaded and told the pixel what to do, will go on to report back to the server both that it was loaded, and other privacy-invading data.
That transparency format, and the 1x1 size, is how ad blockers find and eliminate these things.
BTW, a device need not be hardware. Remember your school English teacher telling you that "this author used a plot device...", and you can see that it merely means "a way to get a desired result".
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Re:
"INCLUDING HIS OTHER FAILED SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORM."
You mean the blog he abandoned after traffic dropped once it became clear that it was a blog and even the people who only went there to mock him couldn't be bothered?
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Absent any proof of those assertions, we'll just go ahead and assume that you a lie like a Trump.
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Re:
And predictably wrong, every time.
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Re:
^^^ I see what you did there, good play. :)
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Re: Re: Translation
That just means the propaganda on Truth Social won't be from the US government. It doesn't rule out any other government. Not that I have one in mind or anything.
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Re: Re: Re: Translation
The problem is that a significant amount of his dumbass followers still think he is part of the government and will be there any day now to secretly take back control. Whether the actual propaganda is coming from the same source as Pravda or somewhere else is the least of the problems here, especially given that he's trained the cult to believe that any facts coming from elsewhere is "fake news"...
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Re:
I disagree; I could not have predicted much of the rambling word salad that escapes his mouth. For example:
Even he could not have predicted he was going to say that.
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Re: Re:
It was predictable that whatever he said was word salad ;)
Anyway, reading that - telling the marks of his con that they were the most important people in the world, general whining about how his ego was bruised, name dropping that nobody else would really care about, anecdotes about people telling him he was important that can't be verified, obsession over ratings and not ideas or actionable policy..?
Seems predictable to me.
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Re: 'Truth'... as defined by the Dear Leader
Be careful if you visit that site without a VPN. You might catch some kind of disease from the bottom feeding mods.
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But.. but.. I thought it was all about..
"Free speech!!!!!!!!!" (only if it conforms to their wacky ideas 🤪)
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It's kind of my point I suspect the "lawyer" bit isn't even true. I'm not sure if my expectations are excessive, but I would expect a competent lawyer to recognize the need for a technical expert when writing legal documents that touch technical subjects. Otherwise there's a lot of risk of ending up with laughable nonsense or serious loopholes.
I wouldn't say "cheat utilities", modified or not, is what a reasonably proficient technical person expects to be used for scraping websites. What if someone modified a Bitcoin miner to scrape a website? Why aren't Bitcoin miners listed there?
I may not have any formal certifications here, but as a rather technical person the terminology used just screams "written by a non-technical person" to me. Which, given the above, leads me to think that either: 1) the lawyer involved wasn't really a good one; 2) the lawyer involved was heavily influenced by the client; 3) there wasn't a lawyer involved.
Given the AGPL issue described in other comments, I'm leaning towards the third option.
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Screen readers for the blind?
What about screen readers for the blind? Are they banned? If so, that's a clear ADA violation.
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Only needs to last until the merger
Gab has been running two years on Mastodon, despite multiple... issues. This may end up being similar.
As Matt Levine wrote (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-21/matt-levine-s-money-stuff-donald-trump-does-a -spac ), the sole purpose of the website is to serve as an excuse to sell stock to gullible followers:
The website only needs to last until the cash goes into Trump's bank account, then it can vanish. Maybe it doesn't even need to last that long; a mere promise to put it up later might be enough for people to hold the stock.
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Oh come on.
Banning Trump from the truth would be like banning Peter Pan from the Supreme Court.
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Do as we say, not as we do
As in TRUTH Social? At least they spelled capital right.
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Re: Re: Re:
True, the broad strokes are predictable.
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Re:
How about his from The New York Times:
Yes, they have done a measurable amount of good against Trump and his sycophants, but at it's core, it's just a right wing grifting machine as that is typical for any right wing organization that is political in nature and survives on donations. The founders / organizers take huge amounts of money for their administrative costs and salaries.
The only difference between them and Bannon's "Build the Wall" is that they actually do spend a small amount of money for its intended purpose, but they both are using their organizations as a means to line their own pockets.
Maybe you should speak for yourself and not assume that everybody has the same view as you do?
And do you still think I am lying?
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MISLEADING OTHER USERS is grounds for having your account banished. So much freedom.
Uhhh. I detect a possible sitewide and maybe even corporate conflict here.
a reverse merger agreement
Just when i thought i'd heard all the top nonsense of shit allowed in the business world...
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Re:
Cheat utility (also, offline page caching): This is a step up from the recent, It is the illegal hax to look at html source! Some clowns are just broadening it to offline reading (doesn't MS still have a system folder for that in Windows?), saving a page (lolwut?), or apparently... looking at the data from the page in RAM?
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Re:
Also, possibly ex-silenced. or non-ante-silenced. (more accurate description, probably questionable use of latin bits.)
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Hence the "you can't look at the site code" admonition. (Since the whole "viewing locally is yet another copy for purposes of copyright enforcement" movement has made its waves.)
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Translation
The only correction i would add to the two comments above is that both he and his adherents think he is the government. (just currently in exile) L'Etat, c'est gasbag.
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Einstein on the Beach is a long opera.
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I thought this was pretty well understood at this point. I've read a few articles and watched a few news pieces that have pretty much come to the conclusion above. I figured that's why they've gone quiet recently.
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What does Trump know about 'truth' in the first place...?
So on TRUTH Social you can -
Post outright lies - no problem.
Post racist diatribes - no problem.
Post bigoted rants - no problem.
Post criticism of Trump -- oops, bye-bye.
Strangely, to me that sure sounds like 'cancel culture' made real. Another Trumpian hypocrisy, in it's full glory.
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'The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less.' - #29 in The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries
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Where’s Koby?
Hahahahhahahahaha. Was hoping koby would find some way to defend Trumpcancelslibs.com.
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Comparisons
Comparisons to Any fantasy novels is Totally denied.
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Re: users
Nah, I’m looking forward to seeing how long I can keep using “Dumald J Drumpf”.
Gonna use a mastodon wearing an awfully fitting blue bird costume and an orange comb-over as my avatar.
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"yet your favorite American President has been silenced"
Well THAT'S clear not true. I checked and Jimmy Carter is all over twitter.
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Re: Re: Not going to last.
You cannot figure out what is happening by reading up on facts. You need to read the stuff other people read in order to figure out what they are going to do and what their reasons are.
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Re: Where’s Koby?
It's hard to type paragraphs of poor arguments thinly veiled by a veneer of concern when you're trying to break the record for going without oxygen under someone's desk.
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Re: Screen readers for the blind?
Actually, the law is not yet set in stone on that one. Several organizations have lobbied Congress over the years to enlarge the ADA to include the internet, and thereby any and all websites found on therein, but to date, Congress has failed to actually do so.
There have been numerous private law suits, some of them successful, but those are essentially civil - a non-government party sues a website claiming an unlawful violation of the ADA - but they are usually accompanied by other claims as well.
Some states, California in particular, have stricter laws on this topic, and where nexus can be proven, suits of this nature are more often successful.
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"That transparency format, and the 1x1 size, is how ad blockers find and eliminate these things."
As trivia to boot, 1x1 pixels used to be a common vector for sql injection attacks. Possibly still are, I'm a bit rusty on security these days.
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I hate to say it but there's hardly absence of proof here. There may be a few Lincoln Project members who are in it for the ideology...but most of those have long since gone independent or joined the right-wing democrats.
Politics is much like cooking with a hundred chefs. Most participants in a saner and more healthy body politic will try to cook up a dish of whatever will fit the taste of the majority to whom it will be served, or cater obsequiously to anyone buying the ingredients. There will always be a few trying to sneak in a few dollops of theoretically edible yet odd ingredients; a dab of licorice, papayas or wasabi into a pot roast, for instance.
There's always going to be a few laughably inept people trying to add inedible or hazardous ingredients, like bleach or gasoline.
And there's always that one guy who'll try to shit in the pot and trust heavy use of salt and pepper will mask that.
That's how the democrats cook up their politics.
Mainstream republicans have, for the last decades, just shat in the pot, held it up to their base, and blamed the democrats.
The Lincoln project in this metaphor are the ones trying to sell their base the dish which was cooked 50 years ago when republicans still had policy. Only issue with that is, none of them are chefs, none of them are in the kitchen, and none of them have the recipe or ingredients to deliver that dish. All they've got is a bunch of full-color posters of what that dish is supposed to look like.
The Lincoln project is as bereft of actual policy as the mainstream GOP. They still do 100% negative partisanship, just aimed at their own old party.
I could be wrong. Aside from the guys caught in recent scandals it may very well be the Lincoln Project was primarily staffed by idealists. Doesn't change the fact that all they stock is the same type of overblown bullshit and hype the GOP does; they have no plans. No roadmap. Just a few high-flying slogans about how it would be good to move back to good old principles.
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He certainly is.
Jimmy Carter may have been a lame-duck president but he stands head and shoulders over any other US ex-president through history.
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Leave it to Mike Masnick to make the comment: they can kick you off for any reason they want at all.
Did he seriously say that? It's what twitter, Facebook and Google/YOUTUBE have been doing all along to conservatives. They have been kicking everyone off their platforms with no evidence, and relying on heresay, innuendo and accusations instead of actual proof.
About time we got a social media platform that gives fanatical liberals a taste of their own medicine.
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“The libs” won’t join Truth Social for any reason other than trolling, much as they did with Parler. They already have Twitter; why would they ever seriously sign up for a service full of nothing but the kind of people they’re actively trying to avoid on Twitter?
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"Did he seriously say that?"
Yes, because it's funny to see you hypocritical pricks doing exactly the same thing you whine about happening to you.
"They have been kicking everyone off their platforms with no evidence, and relying on heresay, innuendo and accusations instead of actual proof."
This is where I ask you to provide evidence that this has happened, since every time one of you bozos is pushed enough to actually provide an example, it's always nothing like what you claim. Do you have any real examples? Or, are you following the usual trend of parroting whatever the right.wing echo chamber tells you to think without evidence?
"About time we got a social media platform that gives fanatical liberals a taste of their own medicine."
A community infested with morons so they can stay over there and the rest of us can avoid you like the plague you are? We've been asking you to do that for years instead of demanding you get forced into the places we've told you that you're not welcome, but all you've shown so far is laughable incompetence. After many failures, hopefully this is the one that gets you idiots away from the adults.
I'm not going to get a "taste of my own medicine" when you accidentally do something effective. I'm going to stay far away from you and not have to deal with your bullshit every day, as I've been asking you to do for me for many years... and good riddance if you don't fuck it up this time.
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"“The libs” won’t join Truth Social"
Of course we won't. We've been asking not to have to deal with these people, and now that they're finally getting off their arses and doing something instead of whining that they can't force the rest of us to host them, if they succeed then the rest of us will continue to stay far away. The track record isn't great, since not even people like them want to spend too much time hanging around with people like them, but here's hoping they eventually get it done.
That's right - I'm actually sick enough of these people that I'm hoping a Donald Trump venture actually works, though history says that it will be as miserable a failure as everything else he puts his name and "business acumen" to.
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Taking stock of the situation
I look forward to shorting DWAC once the buying frenzy is over.
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Interesting history of FLASH, PHP phrase
I did a little googling with date ranges. this is a very common clause in modern TOS! ... Though I couldn't find anything from the 90s, I found this from september 2000
https://www.echo-social-services.com/terms
Which says at the top:
Last updated September 01, 2000
Have I found a root document of TOS prohibited activities clauses?
Anybody spot an EARLIER occurrence of this phraseology?
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These terms also have the exact same "cheat utility" and "clear graphics interchange formats" issues.
But there's this notice on the bottom:
I looked at that generator, and the preview generated with the default settings has all of these issues as well. This does explain things.
Also, I kind of doubt 2000 is the actual update date, though I have no evidence.
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How??
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Lame duck has a very particular meaning in US politics. A lame duck president is one who is serving out the remainder of his term after an election he or she has just lost. So Carter was only a lame duck president for the last few weeks of his administration.
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I give it six weeks before it's first massive data breach and some hacker group using Donald's account to shill bitcoin.
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I'd expect the data theft to be baked in like it was with Parler.
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You know, AChole, the reason you think conservatives are being kicked off of mainstream platforms is that these poster-boys-for-better-child-rearing-requirements are not getting kicked off for their partisanship, they're being shown the door for a myriad of reasons. The fact that they happen to be Republican is actually sad, because it denigrates a once useful party that helped prevent government waste of taxpayer dollars. Now, the only way they they can accomplish anything in the way of policy is to commit acts of social terrorism, and then complain to the high skies that they've been somehow wronged.
But the final straw, when you get down to it, is that they are constantly pounding the drum about the Constitution and 1A, but they willfully refuse to read all of that particular Amendment. If you can't figure out what I mean by that, then you're part of the problem, not part of the solution.
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The Apple App Store Page has this beauty on it...
Yeah right...
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Re: The Apple App Store Page has this beauty on it...
I mean, so long as there's no actual users or posts on it those categories will be true...
But seriously though, are you saying that this dumpster fire not only has an app version but Apple is crazy enough to voluntarily offer it on their store?
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Re: Re: The Apple App Store Page has this beauty on it...
Believe me, I'm as surprised as you are - android I could believe, but apple???
It's gonna take Trump all of 10 seconds to start begging for cash on it and we all know how apple feels about not getting its 'pound of flesh'.
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'Yes the app somehow violates more rules than we have but...'
Setting aside his begging for money which I agree is likely to pop up really quickly because if a con-man has an audience of idiots he'd be a fool not to exploit that/them my first thought was that it would take even less time for the scum that follow him to start posting 'let's see how many Apple TOS' rules we can violate' content, leaving Apple to either give him the boot and draw the ire and attention of his cultists or cover for him/the app and seriously screw over their image in the process.
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Re: 'Yes the app somehow violates more rules than we have but...
Concur - there appears to be no upside for apple in this, which makes this DEEPLY suspicious.
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Re: Screen readers for the blind?
According to US law right now, a screen reader is a copyright violation. I'm not confident the ADA wins over copyright in this legal climate.
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Re:
Cheat utility.
They mean reading the HTML page source from RAM with something like Cheat Engine, of course.
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