Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company’s Plugged In.
When last Saturday’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner was disrupted by a would-be assassin, an event intended to celebrate the First Amendment descended into chaos. After President Donald Trump and other administration officials were whisked to safety, it was unclear whether the festivities would resume. More than an hour later, White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang returned to the dais to acknowledge that Trump had posted that the night was over but would be rescheduled.
“This is a room full of reporters,” she said. “So I know you’ve all seen the president’s tweet.” Then she immediately corrected herself: She was talking about Trump’s Truth Social post, not one on Twitter/X.
It almost didn’t matter. Yes, Trump had posted his announcement on the site he cofounded after being banned from Twitter and Facebook in the aftermath of a throng of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. But in screengrab form, his message was instantly omnipresent on Twitter/X, Threads, and beyond. The same has been true of countless previous Truth Social posts, including Trump sharing an AI meme of himself looking like Jesus, threatening to eradicate Iran, announcing his firings of Cabinet secretaries Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, and on and on. Even on Bluesky, where the population of Trump fans must be close to zero, legions of users share his rants in order to hate on them.
The power of Trump’s Truth Social megaphone has surprised me. When social media’s overlords deemed his use of their platforms to incite violence to be beyond the pale in 2021, I was relieved. I was dismayed when their “permanent” bans were undone less than two years later. And then I was relieved again when Trump chose to mostly post on Truth Social, which I figured would greatly limit his reach.
But Trump’s current online presence has little to do with Truth Social. It turns out that it’s possible to dominate the conversation regardless of the social network you’re on—at least if you’re Donald Trump.
As a media presence unto itself, Truth Social is dinky, averaging 700,000 global daily active users in April, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. That’s 0.35% of X’s 200 million and 0.38% of the 185 million on Threads. Though it positions itself as a bastion of free speech and offers groups on topics such as fitness, photography, and dogs, the site is resolutely Trump-centric. Memes boosting him and bashing his adversaries are plentiful, but some discontent over the Iran war is also apparent.
By anything resembling conventional standards, Truth Social is also not much of a business. Its parent company, Trump Media & Technology Group, had revenue of just $3.7 million in 2025—about what Meta rakes in every 10 minutes—and managed to lose $712 million. A public company and textbook example of a meme stock, it has a market cap that’s down nearly 90% from its post-IPO peak. The company seems more focused on operating a cryptocurrency treasury and its bizarre plan to merge with a nuclear fusion startup than operating a social network, which it’s reportedly thinking about spinning off.
Whatever Truth Social’s ultimate impact on Trump’s pocketbook, it’s already his dream online home. Posting on the one social network where he’s impervious to moderation and then watching it spread is a superpower. Far more than his comparatively sedate in-person speeches, press conferences, and other modes of communication, it drives news. No wonder he can’t keep away from it.
Even in the Musk era, X has policies on hate speech and violent content, including a ban on “explicitly threatening, inciting, glorifying, or expressing desire for violence.” Regardless, it’s tough to imagine the service would have held Trump to account for posting that Iran’s “whole civilization will die tonight.” But the president was posting from the safety of Truth Social, and his threat became the talk of X and other networks anyhow. So did his Trump-as-Jesus post—and when he ended up deleting that one from Truth Social, it didn’t retract the screengrabbed version that appeared everywhere else.
When Musk let Trump back on Twitter in 2022, the then ex-president’s contract with Truth Social required him to give it a six-hour window of exclusivity on his social posts. Since I’m not on Twitter/X much these days, I hadn’t been paying attention to his current tweets there (which, since the rebrand, are technically just “posts”). Checking in recently, I found they’re relatively sporadic and anodyne by his standards, skewing to stuff like get-out-the-vote messages and promos for products from his family members. This explains why they’ve fallen off the cultural radar, though they continue to get tens of thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of likes.
But again, where Trump posts is now largely irrelevant. From the days when he used his Twitter presence as a springboard to win the 2016 Republican nomination and then the presidency, he has often been called a master of social media, a misleading term given that he’s always been a broadcaster, not a conversationalist. His posts are wholly self-contained, which is why they lose nothing when they travel around the internet as static screenshots. (On Truth Social, his replies tab is empty, indicating that he’s never publicly interacted with its members except through reposts.)
As long as the president uses his online presence as a mashed-up blog, bulletin board, burn book, and expression of pure id, he could be posting on Friendster—which still exists—and the world would have no choice but to take heed. He gets that. He revels in it. And billions of people who will never log on to Truth Social have to live with it.
More stuff I’m following this week:
The Vision Pro: Toast?
MacRumors’s Juli Clover reports that Apple has “all but given up” on the Vision Pro after last year’s minor update, sporting an M5 chip, failed to boost the $3,500 headset’s sales. The team, she says, has already been dispersed to more urgent products, such as Siri, as Apple diverts its attention to smart glasses more akin to Meta’s Ray-Bans. I count myself as a fan of VisionOS and hope that the wildly ambitious, polished “spatial computing” operating system has a future—preferably on a device with a price tag mere mortals can afford.
Electrical slop revisited
When I was a kid, I could have asked my great-grandmother what it was like to witness electricity becoming a thing as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. Sadly, I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask. But there are some wonderfully evocative details in venture capitalist/LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman’s “In Defense of AI Slop,” which contends that electricity was disruptive and gimmicky before it became essential. His point is that we should be patient with AI. However it pans out, I loved reading about an advertising sign atop a New York hotel that used “nearly 20,000 light bulbs controlled by high-speed mechanical switches to stage a 30-second loop of stampeding horses and spinning wheels that was so mesmerizing it compelled some onlookers to view it for hours on end.”
You’ve been reading Plugged In, Fast Company’s weekly tech newsletter from me, global technology editor Harry McCracken. If a friend or colleague forwarded this edition to you—or if you’re reading it on fastcompany.com—you can check out previous issues and sign up to get it yourself every Friday morning. I love hearing from you: Ping me at hmccracken@fastcompany.com with your feedback and ideas for future newsletters. I’m also on Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads, and you can follow Plugged In on Flipboard.
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