The platform, TruthSocial.com, is set to launch next month to an invitation-only group with the full launch expected early next year, which is just months ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The platform is being hardened in the meantime to make it “cancel culture-proof,” a report said on Tuesday.
“Martín Avila, the CEO of the internet infrastructure company RightForge, told Axios that his web hosting service will carry Trump’s platform and will be impervious to the attacks that are expected once Truth Social is fully operational,” the Western Journal reported.
Axios added that RightForge’s hosting should make Trump’s platform impervious to cancellation: “By relying on a web hosting service that won’t cut ties over controversial comments, Trump’s new platform could avoid the problems conservative network Parler faced when Amazon pulled its web services following the Capitol insurrection.”
The vast majority of Trump’s supporters do not see the incident at the Capitol Building as an “insurrection,” an action that typically involves firearms, but rather as a riot at worst.
“We’re laying the groundwork for that,” Avila said in explaining that developers are planning to launch with around 75 million users within the first few months. “That’s why there will be servers everywhere.”
That said, Trump Media & Technology Group, which last week announced it was partnering with Digital World Acquisition Corp. to create Truth Social, hasn’t yet confirmed that RightForge will host the site.
Amazon’s action came as other major social media companies including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube also banned the former president.
“If you believe that the president should be de-platformed, we believe that you’re not really interested in living in a free country,” Avila told Axios. “And that’s really what we’re all about is making sure that America stays true to its core ideas, and that the marketplace of ideas stays open.”
Avila noted that Amazon’s decision to deplatform Parler was his motivation for starting up RightForge.
“We are absolutely ideological,” he told Fox News last month.
“What we saw here was the need to have the internet, because it was created in America, carry with it as part of its principles American values, American ideology – that’s our ideology,” Avila said. “We believe that the American framework, the core ideas enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution incubated the internet.”
He added that the action Amazon took against Parler was to remove “the actual physical real estate that’s very hard to replicate and very hard to understand what it is.”
“The physical real estate of the servers, the access to power and processing and storage was being taken away, the ability to create the internet and exist on the internet was being taken away by a company,” Avila said.
“So you could be rendered unable to exist online and they did that, so what we saw as the opportunity was to solve for that,” he said.
As for the former president, he revealed why he is launching his own platform: Saving America, as his political action committee says.
“Last week, I announced the creation of a major new company that will challenge the dominance of the Big Tech giants and Big Media bosses. …For me, this endeavor is about much more than politics. This is about saving our country,” Trump said.
NEW!
"Last week, I announced the creation of a major new company that will challenge the dominance of the Big Tech giants and Big Media bosses.
…For me, this endeavor is about much more than politics. This is about saving our country…" – President Donald J. Trump[/quote]
Jon Schweppe, the director of policy at American Principles Project, said the Parler ban was a warning shot to all right-leaning Americans and companies.
“Parler did a great job, built a social media platform that had I believe 15 million users and they were starting to hit an inflection point where you would have started to see more people go there and they really could have been a competitor, but what happened?” said Schweppe, whose news site, the National Pulse, is hosted by RightForge.
“The infrastructure, Amazon Web Services and the app stores, that was what crushed them, and so I think conservatives who are seeking to build that baseline foundation of the internet like what RightForge is doing, are playing a really critical role,” he added.