Can Conservatives and Christians Create Their Own Internet Platforms?
Can Conservatives and Christians Create Their Own Internet Platforms?
By Todd Strandberg
Former President Donald Trump will launch his own new social media platform, Truth Social, sometime next month. Trump’s ability to galvanize conservative social media users in support of the venture could soon be tested. So-called experts quoted by Time and Newsweek say the inherent nature of the site — i.e., catering to a specific ideological viewpoint — will likely prevent it from reaching the same heights as mainstream platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.com.
Joshua Tucker, co-director of NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics, suggested that even if Truth Social does not break into the mainstream, it may “suck the air” of other right-wing platforms such as Gettr, Gab and Parler, and reduce their popularity.
Previous screenshots from an App Store listing showed that the platform appeared to be very similar in design to Twitter, with Trump Jr.’s post appearing to confirm Truth Social will look very much like the social media platform previously beloved by the former president.
Truth Social should be wildly successful, considering that all of the major social media sites are controlled by liberals. Since about half the US population is on the right, millions of people would be happy to join Trump’s platform.
The video site Rumble has had huge gains in its traffic. Rumble’s monthly user count has experienced rapid growth since July 2020, from 1.6 million monthly users to 31.9 million by the end of the first quarter of 2021. In January, Rumble announced that it reached new highs with approximately 10.8 billion minutes watched and averaging 4,383 hours of uploaded video per day. The company also posted 19% growth on monthly active users (MAUs) over the previous month, reaching 39 million viewers.
Rumble prides itself as a neutral video platform that is creating the rails and independent infrastructure designed to be immune to cancel culture. Rumble’s mission is to restore the Internet to its roots by making it free and open once again.
Facebook’s parent company Meta recently delivered an alarming earnings report to Wall Street, which promptly cut an astonishing $250 billion out of the company’s value in a single day — a 26 percent drop. The liberal media tried to blame a host of other reasons for the decline. Facebook has been heavily censoring accounts, and people are leaving for other platforms.
I don’t see it as very likely that any conservative site will be able to dethrone a behemoth like Apple or Google. I like the search engine DuckDuckGo. It processes around 1.5 billion searches every month. Google, for contrast, processes around 3.5 billion searches per day. DuckDuckGo has a single data center, while Google has data farms all over the country.
Google controls 90% of search traffic; it has the most used browser and the most used email service. I was surprised to learn last week that more people get their news from Google than any other source. Google could so easily crush DuckDuckGo, but it doesn’t do so, probably because of monopoly laws. Standard Oil was broken up for being a monopoly in one field. Google has a monopoly in at least four areas.
Trump’s Truth Social could easily be blocked from the market by Apple and Google refusing to put his app on their stores. Google’s Android and Apple’s IOS control 100% of the smartphone market. Any browser can be used to block a website by having it labeled as a dangerous site and warning users not to visit it.
Another way to destroy a freedom platform is to block it from various financial services. When a bunch of people donated $7 million to the Trucker protest in Canada on a GoFundMe page, the company tried to steal the money and give it to a charity. When six state attorney generals got on GoFundMe’s case, it decided to refund the money to the donors. I’m guessing that GoFundMe doesn’t have fine print that states, “if we don’t like the recipient of your donation, we’ll steal your money.”
I think the only reason why we still have access to the Internet is God’s restraining grace. The enemy has the will and the power to take complete control of the web, but so far, it is unable to act. The rapture is the only answer I can think of for why they are being restrained.
“So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies” (Romans 1:24, NLT).
– Todd