Gab, Parler and now Trump’s Truth Social may never rival Big Tech, but the movement they’re fostering is dangerous
If you know anything about the history of alt-tech, you may have greeted yesterday’s launch of Donald Trump’s Truth Social, a Twitter alternative, with a giant yawn. Who cares if there’s one more social network trying to appeal to conservatives and the far-right by promising to allow all forms of speech? After all, none of the many platforms launched as alternatives to the Big Tech mainstays have gained much traction.
InfoGalactic, the “planetary knowledge core” launched as a rightwing alternative to Wikipedia in 2016, gets about 300,000 visits a month, compared to more than 5 billion for Wikipedia. Voat, which launched in 2014 and positioned itself as a censorship-free social news aggregator akin to Reddit, shut down at the end of 2020. Hatreon, GoyFunder and Wesearchr, crowdfunding platforms that each sought to displace GoFundMe, have all gone out of business. Rumble, which was founded in 2013 as an alternative to YouTube, made a mere $7 million in ad revenue in the first nine months of 2021; YouTube made $9 billion in just one quarter.
Parler and Gab, the two biggest hubs for people who have gotten kicked off the mainstream social networks for hate speech, haven’t exactly knocked Twitter or Facebook off their pedestals. On Parler, for example, Mark Levin, a far-right talk radio host who revels in conspiracy theories about the election, claims that Democrats hate America and hate the police, and calls on his audience to “crush” them, is a big fish in a small pond with 5 million followers. For comparison, Joe Biden gained 5 million Twitter followers in just the first 24 hours after he was sworn in as president. And getting onto these platforms isn’t that easy. Parler, which is has been propped up by investments from Rebekah Mercer, a conservative donor who is a close ally of Steve Bannon, was removed for a while from the Google and Apple app stores after the Capitol riot last January. Gab was never even accepted onto those two key platforms for mobile app users.
That said, if it weren’t for Trump’s election defeat and the failed January 6 insurrection, Parler and Gab might already be in history’s trashbin. An academic study of Gab that came out in 2018 found the site was then almost a ghost town, with few of its top users (by follower count) posting on it even once a month. But in the fall of 2020, a few million Trump diehards unhappy with Facebook and Twitter’s decisions to clamp down, somewhat, on hate speech and election disinformation, started flocking to Gab and Parler. According to one web traffic monitoring service, SimilarWeb, Gab got 18.7 milllion visits last month; Parler was one-tenth its size. For comparison, Twitter had 7 billion visits in that same time period.
Trump’s Truth Social will likely get a burst of early sign-ups; the Former Guy did have a massive following on Twitter and Facebook before he was, respectively, kicked off and suspended from those sites. And he and his financial backers are likely to find lots of ways to milk more money from his followers using this new platform. Grifters gotta grift. But in all likelihood Truth Social’s growth will flatten after the first few months and then also plod along at levels similar to Parler and Gab. That’s because the big platforms have become too-big-to-quit for most of their users, who value the ease of connection with friends and family first and foremost. Only the most diehard of rightwing political activists and entrepreneurs are quitting places like Facebook for the redder pastures of Parler, Gab or Truth Social.
Back in early 2021, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz warned that Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome of the election would be dangerous and unprecedented in our history. He told Thomas Edsall of The New York Times that in doing so, “Trump would be trying to establish a center of power distinct from and antagonistic to the legitimately elected national government — not formally a separate government like the Confederacy but a virtual one, operating not just out in the country but inside the government, above all in Congress.” Wilentz imagined Trump setting up something like “a counter-government, administered by tweets, propped up by Fox News or whatever alternative outlet Trump might construct for himself — a kind of Trumpian government in exile, run from Mar a Lago or maybe from wherever else Trump selects to reside in, in order to avoid prosecution by the State of New York.”
Now Trump is actually trying to do that with Truth Social. But as prosecutors close in on him and his businesses, and courts also rule against his efforts to withhold information from Congress, his play at a virtual counter-government isn’t providing him with much legal cover. This, however, isn’t a cause for rejoicing. For what the rise and persistence of these alt-tech platforms shows is that millions of Americans have decided to quit our shared reality. Call it the Great Secession, a choice to leave the Union and all of its messy and discordant voices for an echo chamber filled mainly by people who think their whiteness or their Christianity is under attack. Unlike the Great Resignation, which is a search by millions for more meaningful and better paying jobs, the Great Secession is a search by millions for a place safe from mainstream norms and values.
America’s history is littered with cults, religious sects, and political movements that have chosen to separate themselves from mainstream society in order to pursue visions of spiritual or secular purification. Some live quietly among us, like the Amish. Others, like the Shakers or the Oneida Community, left behind little more than some fine furniture and a cutlery company. The hubs of alt-tech are different. Even if they never grow big enough to rival the dominant social networks, on a daily basis they are giving a few million hard-core users a fantasy of cultural domination. As the January 6th insurrection showed us a year ago, and the “freedom convoy” movement in Canada just demonstrated, it doesn’t take that many people to disrupt the orderly operations of our democracies. It just takes thousands of well organized fanatics, and alt-tech is making more of them every day.