(Headline USA) Former President Donald Trump’s new social-media platform, Truth Social, received so much support on its launch day that hundreds of thousands of people had to be placed on a waitlist upon trying to sign up.
Trump’s new app launched on Monday, and by Tuesday morning more than 1.5 billion people had viewed it in Apple’s App Store. Nearly 400,000 people are now on the app’s waitlist.
“Due to massive demand, we have placed you on our waitlist,” Truth Social’s notification to waitlisted users reads. “We love you, and you’re not just another number to us.”
The new app topped Apple’s download chart with 170,000 downloads in its first day, according to AppTopia, making it the most successful alternative conservative social media platform.
Rumble, for example, has averaged 10,600 downloads per day on Apple over the last month. Parler netted only 1,500 downloads per day.
Former congressman Devin Nunes, who is now Truth Social’s CEO, told Fox News that the company is working to get the platform’s kinks sorted out, and that he expects the app to be fully operational by the end of March.
“Every day we bring on more and more Americans, and we’re getting to you as quickly as possible,” he said.
“It’s such a great opportunity for President Trump, for me, for our whole team that’s working at [Trump Media & Technology Group] around the clock, especially as you see the excitement of people who have been booted from social media for the last two or three years,” he added.
Nunes said that Trump’s new platform aims to strike a sharp contrast with online publishers like Twitter and Faceook, who threaten to punish users for having a diversity of viewpoints.
“We want them to tell us what they would like to have on the platform, which is the opposite of some Silicon Valley tech oligarch freak telling people what they want to think and deciding who can or cannot be on the platform,” he explained. “I mean, we’re really taking just the opposite approach, which is valuing our customers.”
