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UX for evil: the truth about Trump’s truth app

The Truth about Truth. How Truth has used UX best practices and patterns to successfully radicalize users and foster extremism.

Ben Davies-Romano
UX Collective
9 min readOct 19, 2022
Image credit: Brandon Bell/Getty Images/Christoph Dernbach/picture alliance via Getty Images

We need to talk about Trump’s Truth Social app.

Back in February, the much-anticipated “Truth Social” app was launched. Intended to be a social network for “Truth”, it’s essentially a carbon copy of Twitter, except instead of Tweets, you write and share “Truths”.

When it launched, a lot of people smirked at reports of people having issues signing up or getting in in the first place. It certainly wasn’t a smooth launch, and there was a sense that something launching this broken probably wouldn’t amount to much.

However, quietly and without much noise, it’s been gaining hundreds of thousands of active users and become a hive for right-wing evangelic extremism, an echo chamber in which Trump rules and anyone against him is attacked. Indeed, it has been the number 1 downloaded app in the US at times and still sits comfortably within the top 10.

Back in August, it briefly returned to headlines for getting banned from the Play Store due to concerns with the moderation of content. So I decided to check it out for myself and see…

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Published in UX Collective

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Written by Ben Davies-Romano

UX, Product, Growth | https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-w-davies/ Leading content design at Klarna | Founder of Tech Outcasts | ☕️ and 🏳️‍🌈

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