The IT Nerd

Donald Trump who has been tossed from pretty much every other social media platform on the planet decided to create his own social media platform:

Former President Donald Trump pitched his new social media platform, Truth Social, as a haven for free speech and a counterweight to the big tech giants that have in recent years put a greater emphasis on moderating content users post to their sites.

But as the platform’s terms of service agreement makes clear, not all speech will be permitted. Specifically, users are prohibited from speaking ill of the platform itself or its leadership.

Announced Wednesday, Truth Social will be part of the Trump Media & Technology Group, which also plans to launch a subscription video service for what it called “non-woke” programming. The company said it plans to begin a beta launch next month with a nationwide rollout early next year.

I guess if you’re such a bad boy that nobody will let you play in their sandbox, you have to build your own sandbox. And I guess because it’s your sandbox, you can create your own rules that protect your thin skin from being harmed.

Here’s where things get funny. Within hours, the website that hosts the sign up page for the site got pwned by hackers:

Mere hours after the world learned of Trump’s social media project, a sign-up link that clearly wasn’t meant to be public was discovered taking users to the domain “tmediatech.io.” A slew of people started registering for the unreleased platform via this page and quickly discovered that pretty much every username was available for the taking. The domain has since been taken down. 

It didn’t take long before usernames that clearly would be Trump’s choice for his own personal handle — @DonaldJTrump, @DonaldTrump, and @realDonaldTrump — were registered. The proud new owner of the TRUTH Social username @DonaldJTrump also took the opportunity to bless his profile page with its first post: the “Pig Poop Balls” meme image.

Usernames like @MikePence, Trump’s former VP, and @CodeMonkeyz, the online handle for QAnon figurehead Ron Watkins, were also quickly taken.

Over on Twitter, the company’s CEO and founder Jack Dorsey noticed that the TRUTH Social handle @Jack, which is what Dorsey registered for his username on Twitter, was used by Trump’s group for its promotional photos for the upcoming TRUTH mobile app on the App Store. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

However, even though the promo used the @Jack handle, the username was not registered on the platform yet either. So, once trolls noticed this, the @Jack handle was scooped up as well and immediately got into banter with one of TRUTH Social’s many Trump accounts about the former president’s ban.

The fun lasted for a few hours before users who had registered for the unreleased platform started to be hit with an on-screen prompt saying “you can no longer use your account.”

Someone with Trump Media & Technology Group noticed what was happening and pulled the plug. The “tmediatech.io” domain is now inaccessible and the registered accounts have seemingly been removed.

Normally, this is the part of this article where I would say what horrible people these hackers are and they should be hunted down by law enforcement. And frankly, they likely should be if I am objective about this. But I find Donald Trump is and all those in his orbit are such unsavory characters. Thus I am fine with this. In fact I find it funny that this was so easy to pull off. Clearly whomever was running this project didn’t have security as a top of mind thing as you have to expect that it would have been a prime target for exactly this sort of thing to happen.

Oh and there’s this part that you might want to be aware of:

One interesting discovery from this whole episode though: Trump’s long-awaited social media platform actually appears to just be a copy of the open-source social media platform Mastodon.

While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with using an open-source platform, it appears Trump’s team may be violating the Mastodon licensing it’s distributed under by removing credits and links in the source code. Mashable has reached out to Mastadon for comment but did not immediately hear back.

#Fail. Clearly there’s a bunch of no-skill amateurs behind this. And apparently, said no-skill amateurs have bigger ambitions:

According to the bizarre Trump Media & Technology Group pitch deck, Trump is also planning on releasing a streaming video service to compete with the likes of Disney and Netflix.

If this social media platform is an indication of what these clowns can do, then there’s zero chance that they will compete with Disney and Netflix.

This entry was posted on October 22, 2021 at 9:30 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Donald Trump. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.