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- Former President Donald Trump's new social media network, Truth Social, is set to formally launch in 2022.
- Insider previously reported that it has already been hacked and trolled by Twitter users.
- Truth Social is headed for a "series of embarrassing security and policy failures," a cybersecurity expert told the Daily Beast
Former President Donald Trump's upcoming social media network has already had its' fair share of problems, including hackers breaking into the site to post a photo of a defecating pig.
And several social media experts told the Daily Beast that things might only get worse.
Described by reporters Adam Rawnsley and Shannon Vavra as a "hacker's wet dream," experts say that Truth Social, set to launch in 2022, is showing early warning signs of failure.
"These new platforms have to try and learn all of the lessons of running a social network in a compressed time scale, so they tend to miss a lot of stuff," said David Thiel, the chief technical officer at Stanford Internet Observatory, during an interview with the Daily Beast.
"And a lot of times, the people that are implementing this haven't been at a company that has had a significant trust and safety operation, so they just don't know the things they're going to be facing," Thiel continued.
The chief technical officer noted that Parler, a comparable social media network popular with Trump supporters, which relied on user reports and volunteer moderators instead of paid ones to remove rule-breaking content, could not keep up with a backlog of content violations.
Adam Hadley, the director of Tech Against Terrorism, a company that works with smaller social media platforms to police terrorist content, warned that Truth Social could struggle to find the resources to remove extremist content.
"You can be swarmed very easily by terrorist use," Hadley told the Daily Beast. "There's no easy solution. You need people to be making difficult decisions about content and before you even do that, you need to know what your policy is and you need a press and PR capability to deal with media responses."
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told the Daily Beast that Truth Social not only risks falling behind on moderation but that it might struggle to comply with external regulations.
Insider previously reported that the Software Freedom Conservancy had accused Truth Social of ripping off code and violating a software licensing agreement, potentially opening it up to litigation or the need to rebuild the platform.
"It does not sound like [Truth Social has] a compliance team. It does not sound like there are lawyers on staff, or anybody even doing the basic due diligence in the same way it doesn't sound like they have anybody doing the most basic security engineering," Galperin said.
Galperin's assessment of Truth Social's future did not paint a rosy picture for the social media network. "I imagine a series of embarrassing security and policy failures followed by a very boring fizzle," she told the Daily Beast. "I don't imagine any of these sites are going to replace any of the tech giants anytime soon."