#279/ APRIL 3, 2022
TRUMPSTER IN THE DUMPSTER
Former President Donald Trump's social media start-up is hilariously named "Truth Social." Trump wouldn't know the truth if it grabbed him by the pussy.
Truth Social is starting to look like many of his other business brainstorms - a long hard slog through the bankruptcy courts. Since its remarkably incompetent launch in February, the service has experienced a 93% drop in sign-ups and a similar drop in traffic.
It's hard to see how being Putin's Poodle for four years endears him to even the most deluded MAGA maniacs.
After the Truth Social app launched on Presidents Day it trended at about 800,000 installs a week. The latest count has it down to about 60,000 a week. The app was positioned to compete with Twitter. Twitter has 217 million users. Truth has 1.2 million.
Truth Social is already under investigation by two federal agencies for not disclosing to investors that it was in talks with a potential merger partner. And speaking of investors, Trump refuses to divulge who his investors are (he claims to have $1 billion in investor cash.) Anyone wanna bet that some of the money behind "Truth" belongs to those paragons of truth in the Saudi royal family?
At the beginning of this month, Trump had 80,000 followers on Truth. That's 0.09% of his former following on Twitter.
The head of Truth Social is a former congressman from California named Devin Nunes whose only credential for running a social media company seems to be his unbridled enthusiasm for kissing Mr. Trump's ass.
Big Tech, Big Lies
A few months ago I wrote a piece for European magazine Euractiv about how Facebook and Google justify their dangerous practice of spying on individuals by hiding behind the skirts of small business. I wrote...
"To justify this scandalous intrusion on personal privacy, Facebook, Google and the rest of the adtech industrial giants are now claiming they are doing it for the benefit of small businesses. This is nonsense."
This week, CNBC reported on how Google and Amazon are involved in a devious scheme to deceitfully use small business owners here in the US to pimp for them.
The CNBC report says, "The Connected Commerce Council, which pitches itself as a grassroots movement representing small business owners, is actually a well-financed advocacy group funded by tech heavy hitters Google and Amazon."
CNBC interviewed a blacksmith, a hair salon owner, a barbershop owner, and a towing service owner all of whom are listed as members of the Connected Commerce Council. Every one of them said they had never heard of the group.
The Connected Commerce Council, pretending to be the voice of small business, spends hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying congress and running ads on Facebook that denigrate privacy legislation with horseshit like this, “Harmful legislation in Congress will weaken America’s economy and threaten our small businesses.”
You can't make this shit up.
Facebook Outrage of the Week
Of course, when it comes to sleaze Facebook is in a class by itself. This week the Washington Post revealed that Facebook has been involved in a smear campaign against its biggest social media rival, TikTok.
According to The Post, Facebook is paying Targeted Victory, a Republican consulting firm "to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok."
"The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor."
Targeted Victory created something called "Bad TikTok Clips" which highlighted ugly trends supposedly started on TikTok. One was called "devious licks" which showed students vandalizing schools. The only problem is this trend started on Facebook.
Another trend labeled "Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge" by Targeted Victory never existed on TikTok. But the rumors about it started on Facebook.
No, you can't make ...well, you know.
Google Ad Network Supporting Russian Propaganda
One of the huge idiocies of the hideous programmatic advertising ecosystem is that buyers of advertising don't know who the sellers are or where their advertising is going to land.
According to the website, Branded, "Google — is still monetizing dozens of Russian disinformation operations despite telling advertisers otherwise." Software developer Braedon Vickers says, "Google is withholding industry standard ownership information on 90% of the accounts that sell ad inventory via their systems."
To learn more about how ad dollars are being funneled to Russian disinformation networks through Google, I highly recommend a read of this article.
Recommended Reading
For some worthwhile reading on how screwed up online advertising is I recommend two articles that dropped this week.
First is called "Marketers Rarely Get What They Pay For" by Samuel Scott in The Drum. Next is "Big Tech Behaving Badly: Why you can’t trust Facebook and Google" by Toby Shapshak in FinancialMail.
Taking It On The Road
The blogweasel express takes its act to Sweden this week. I'll be speaking at the NextM conference in Stockholm. The theme of the conference is sustainability.
Of course, in my usual role as designated pain-in-the-ass, the title of my talk is "The Delusion of Sustainabilty," specifically as it pertains to the advertising and marketing industry.
Sincerely hoping Will Smith isn't in the audience.
