Some Restrictions Apply

The Loneliest Room With the Biggest Megaphone

Truth Social opened its doors in February 2022, billed as the answer to a man who had just gotten the boot from Twitter. Donald Trump, freshly banned, needed somewhere to type in all caps, and Trump Media & Technology Group built him a house for it. The pitch was freedom: "open, free, and honest global conversation," no censorship, no gatekeepers. The fine print, however, undercut the pitch. Users posting pro-choice content or discussing the January 6 hearings have found themselves banned. Free speech, it turns out, has an asterisk roughly the size of the Capitol dome.

So who's actually in this room? Mostly, it's a very specific guest list. The crowd skews conservative and supportive of Trump, and Republicans now lead X usage too, while Democrats and left-leaning users have largely scattered to WhatsApp, Reddit, TikTok, Bluesky, and Threads. It's less a town square than a clubhouse with a "no girls allowed" sign, except the sign says "no liberals" and somehow still leaves the place half empty.

Is Trump the only one talking? Not literally, but functionally, the data agrees with your gut feeling. According to Pew Research, only 27% of U.S. adults have even heard of Truth Social, and a mere 2% use it to get news. Just 3% of social media users overall touch the platform, only 5% of American men, and even Reddit, Reddit, outpaces it with 9% crossover usage. Traffic spikes are basically a Trump-shaped seismograph, usage jumps only when he posts something big, then sags back down. The app doesn't have a community pulse so much as it has a Trump pulse, and everyone else is just standing around the heart monitor.

Now for the size comparison, which is where the comedy really lives. TikTok and Facebook each command roughly a billion-plus and three billion monthly users, and even X, despite a real decline that saw it drop 13.3% year-over-year to about 128.8 million daily mobile users worldwide by October 2025, still operates on a completely different planet from Truth Social. Nobody actually knows Truth Social's real number, because TMTG declines to share user figures at all, leaving every outlet to guess. The guesses range wildly, somewhere between 5 million monthly website visitors and 1 million app users, or 6.3 million active users, or 9 million "aggregate signups" by the company's own SEC filing. Three different ballparks, none of them confirmed, all of them dwarfed by Threads, X, or basically anything else with an app icon.

In 2024, the company reported just $3.62 million in net sales against a staggering $400.86 million net loss, run by roughly 29 full-time employees. That's not a tech company, that's a very expensive group chat with a board of directors.

Even Trump's own political allies aren't fully sold. An investigation found that only about one-fourth of the candidates Trump publicly endorsed for the 2024 elections were actually active on Truth Social, meaning even the people who owe him their campaigns can't be bothered to log in. If loyalty had a Yelp review, this would be one star: "Endorsed me, never visits."

There is, in fairness, real loyalty among the people who do stay. Nearly 70% of current users say they intend to keep using it, and Trump's own following has ballooned, with over 11.8 million followers tracking his account as of March 2026. That's the real trick of Truth Social. It isn't really a social network in the traditional sense, where millions of strangers argue about brunch and politics in equal measure. It's closer to a presidential newsletter with a comments section nobody outside the fan club reads, and a company that won't even tell you how many subscribers are getting the mail.

Strip away the politics and Truth Social is a publicly traded company whose entire balance sheet depends on one seventy-something man staying online and staying angry.

@Santitos

@salinasmariasantos

Copyright © 2026 Maria Santos Salinas for FRONTeras.

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