Almost immediately after Twitter and Facebook banned President Trump in January, Trump began to look for a way to get back onto social media.
One possible route: through Gab, a social network popular among conservatives. Trump had never been active on the site, but when his team thought about joining it in January, representatives of Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, asked for equity in the company in exchange for Trump’s presence and voice on the platform, says Gab founder Andrew Torba. The offer was made over a telephone call, and Torba declined it: “The second it was brought up, it was, ‘No, I’m not entertaining that.’ ”
The former president is eager to return to social media, one of his most effective tools for building his political career and maintaining his base of support. But he’s being forced to go outside the mainstream platforms after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol prompted Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many others to expel him—pushing Trump toward niche sites like Gab. And the request for equity in Gab doesn’t seem to be the first time such an idea has circulated: Brad Parscale, then Trump’s campaign manager, tried to arrange a deal for equity in Parler in 2020 in exchange for Trump making the conservative social media app his primary outlet, according to BuzzFeed.
Trump never joined Gab or Parler. A spokesperson for Trump and Kushner wouldn’t comment for this story. Parscale and former Parler CEO John Matze didn’t respond to requests for comment.
On Sunday, spokesman Jason Miller told Fox News that Trump would launch his own social media network in about “two to three months,” touting it as the “the hottest ticket in social media.” Trump confirmed the news a day later, while offering no details on his plans. “I’m doing things having to do with putting our own platform out there that you’ll be hearing about soon,” he said, appearing on “The Truth with Lisa Boothe,” a right-leaning podcast.
Could Trump build a social media network from scratch? Maybe, but it would be challenging. Trump would need to contend with getting any new platform onto Apple and Google app stores and finding a web-hosting provider such as Amazon Cloud Services or Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering. But those companies have shown a growing reluctance to allow conservative apps to flourish using their technology. Both Apple and Google removed Parler, another popular right-wing social platform, from their stores after the January insurrection, while Amazon refused to host Parler on its cloud servers any longer.
Even if Trump could successfully woo Big Tech firms, it would almost certainly take longer than a couple months to build out anything more than the most rudimentary site. “I don’t see this thing really taking off unless they’re willing to invest a lot more two to three months—and a lot more money than I think they are probably willing to,” says Nina Jankowicz, who studies social media as a disinformation fellow at The Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program.
Rather than build his own network, Trump could probably more easily buy one, then rebrand and expand it, and the overture to Gab is an indication that he may know it. Plus, Trump’s a guy who often buys instead of building. The real estate billionaire hasn’t erected a new skyscraper from scratch since the Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago, which opened its doors in 2009. More recently, he’s gravitated toward sprucing up properties like Trump National Doral resort in Florida and the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C., a former Post Office, and signing licensing deals on overseas locations that he doesn’t own.
He’d have the money to make it happen. The president’s Trump Organization has more than $100 million in cash, according to Forbes estimates. It still generates steady profits from commercial real estate holdings, even though they’ve strugged during the pandemic. What about debt? The company doesn’t have to start paying back its most troubled loans until 2023. And it would probably amount to no more than $5 million or so to get a social media site up and running, based on Pitchbook data on early stage funding deals within the industry over the past year,
The encounters with Gab and Parler show that Trump is finding resistance even among sites that share his politics. “It could not be more clear or well-documented how difficult it is to work with him,’’ says Cooper Teboe, a Democratic fundraising strategist in Silicon Valley. “I don’t think any entrepreneur, regardless of political orientation, wants to partner with someone who will take 49% control of their company on certain terms and conditions and then decide a month later he wants new terms and conditions.’’
As with all things Trump, the details around a purchase would almost certainly be fungible—whether he’d own it all or own it with other investors, whether he’d pay cash for it or take on debt.
Parler and Gab would be the most obvious targets for the simple fact they’re the biggest of their kind. (Parler had a little more than 10 million users before its shutdown, Gab reportedly around 3 million, numbers that nonetheless pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions on Twitter and Facebook.) But with negotiations having failed once with each, the president must now either rekindle talks with Parler or Gab or find a smaller home to buy. For his part, Torba, the Gab founder, is adamant he wouldn’t go back to the bargaining table. “Gab’s not for sale,” he says. “There’s no amount that would get me to sell. Zero.”
While it’s unclear exactly how Trump might build a social network, experts who studied his presence on Twitter, Facebook and the other large platforms think they have a pretty good idea what type of content would exist on a Trump-branded social app. “Hate speech,” says Leysia Palen, a University of Colorado Boulder computer science professor. “It’s going to be incredibly inflammatory. Very, very loud and noisy—and active.” Palen recently completed a months-long postmortem on Trump’s Twitter account, finding he averaged more than three dozen tweets daily. “And if it was 40 times a day when he was president, I think it’s going to be a lot more than that.”
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March 23, 2021 at 07:19PM
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Trump Approached Conservative Media App Gab Before Announcing Plans To Start His Own App - Forbes
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