Truth Social

I got banned and don’t understand why

I guess people where thinking I was a bot but I’m not I’m really upset that I got banned I wrote a email linking to appeal please fix this!!

An observation.

When you first download Truth Social, the app makes a lot of choices for you. Before you've done anything, you're already following 104 accounts. Automatic follows include news sources, politicians, members of the Trump family, the White House, RFK Jr, and the President of Brazil. I can’t remember the last time I joined an app and automatically was required to follow certain accounts. After that, you get to choose which groups you want to be apart of. In an attempt to learn the app beyond its political reputation, I joined Camping, Movies, TV, Gaming, Pop Culture, Photographs, and Anything But Politics. I also joined MAGA, Donald J Trump, and Patriot Made. After you get through your selections, you’re met with a list of suggested accounts to follow. I scrolled through close to 200 of them. I then noticed something that made me reflect on what TruthSocial’s description boasts on the App Store. The description uses a wedding metaphor, which I thought was weirdly specific. It references an idea called the “Big Tent,”where people from all different ideals can come together and share their unfiltered opinions. In other words, their “Truth.” The description highlights Uncle Jim the libertarian, Aunt Kellie the conservative, and cousin John the die-hard liberal, all together having an amazing time sharing their different viewpoints. Of the 104 accounts I was automatically following, and the nearly 200 additional suggested ones I paged through, not one was self-identified as liberal. Or even moderate. To speak plainly, cousin John from California was not there. But I moved forward. Once you're in your feed, the pattern becomes clearer. The first thing I landed on was a post about a 12-year-old boy who was uncomfortable because someone was handing out hijabs and Qurans at his public school. The comments were what you'd expect, people saying "Enough is enough,” "Muslims only goal is to invade,” and “The left would have a conniption fit if someone handed out Bibles." But here's where I paused: they're not entirely wrong about that last part. Handing out Bibles would cause outrage from Liberals. But also, conservatives on this app are currently having the same conniption fit in reverse, and nobody noted that. Commenters weren’t talking about the kid, or the actual policy question, or what voluntary participation even means in a school setting. Everyone was already three steps ahead, playing a hypothetical game about what the other team would do. It made me want to scream, “DOES ANYONE SEE THE HYPOCRISY?!”Because that's not a conversation. That's two people yelling into mirrors and hoping to get their point across. They’re debating with themselves. After this initial post, my feed was relentless with this pattern. Every “Truth” was either something political (RIP Camping, I guess,) that people would be thrilled about, or something designed to make them furious enough to comment. There's not a lot of middle ground offered. In hopes of exploring everything the app had to offer, I turned to the AI feature. This is what surprised me the most. I went into it expecting, honestly kind of hoping (I really noticed my bias here), that it would spit out something totally unhinged and plainly conservative. I asked it whether Trump was the best president the US has ever had. It told me no, that presidential rankings are subjective, noted that its search results from the app were from conservative outlets and therefore lacked counterpoints, and flagged that there was no mention of controversies or legal issues. It was the first genuinely balanced perspective I encountered in days of using this app, and it came from the robot. After exploring TruthSocial, I have to be honest about something. I went into the network looking for things to be outraged about without even realizing it. I found them, but I also found something I wasn't expecting. It was so easy for me to clock this app as an echo chamber because I’m not apart of their beliefs. I was watching people pile onto the same ideas and make them more extreme, and watching verified political accounts use language about immigrants and liberals that genuinely shocked me. However, I kept thinking: these people might believe they are seeing the full picture. The App Store description told them so. The word "Truth" is everywhere, in the name, in the posts, in the “ReTruths.” It’s a clever piece of design because you inherently can’t be seen as spreading misinformation when everything is framed as your truth. It works really well. At this point, I turned it around on myself and did some reflecting. My algorithm on TikTok feeds me political content that almost never challenges what I already think. I believed, without looking it up, that Texas schools were requiring the Bible as a classroom text because I had seen it on social media that I trusted. The 12-year-old-boy incident prompted me to look it up while on Truth Social, and I found out that it was more complicated than I had been told. I had blindly walked around with that assumption for weeks, and probably told some of my friends, too. I’m humbled by the fact that the app I downloaded expecting to feel superior to is the one that made me fact check myself for the first time in a while. I’ve decided to keep the account. As much as the discourse made me uncomfortable, there's something really valuable about being able to see a completely different media ecosystem laid out plainly in front of you. I truly think that the only way to understand what's happening in this country is to stop only consuming media you agree with. You can't diagnose a problem you're refusing to look at. I'm giving the app three stars because it did something I didn't expect, which is make me genuinely uncomfortable about my own political consumption in a way that was probably overdue. Uncle Jim the libertarian is not on this app. But I'm not sure the platform I'm on every day would show him to me either.