Who Owns Truth Social?

Donald Trump announced Trump Media and Technology Group in October 2021, ten months after Twitter, Facebook and YouTube suspended his accounts following the January 6 Capitol riot. The stated mission was to build a platform immune to what it called Big Tech censorship. Truth Social launched on the Apple App Store on February 21, 2022, and immediately hit scaling problems, with hundreds of thousands of users placed on waitlists during the first months.

The platform runs on a heavily customized fork of Mastodon, the decentralized open-source social software. Mastodon's developers publicly noted in 2021 that Truth Social's code appeared to derive from their project under the AGPL license, and the site later published its source code in compliance. An Android app followed in October 2022.

TMTG's path to public markets was turbulent. The SPAC merger with Digital World Acquisition Corp., first announced in 2021, took more than two years to close amid SEC investigations, a settlement with the regulator over merger disclosures, and the criminal conviction of DWAC-linked figures for insider trading. The deal finally completed on March 26, 2024, listing the company as DJT.

Product development continued through 2024 and 2025. TMTG launched Truth+, a streaming service, in late 2024, then folded video channels and movies into the Truth Social app. In August 2025 it added Truth Search AI, an answer feature built with Perplexity. The company also introduced the Patriot Package subscription bundling premium features, and began building a digital-asset treasury that now dominates its balance sheet.

By 2026 the platform remains small next to X, Meta's Threads or TikTok. Third-party estimates put monthly active users in the low millions; TMTG does not publish user numbers. Its defining metric is instead political: Truth Social functions as Donald Trump's primary broadcasting channel, where his posts routinely move news cycles and, in his second term, announce government policy.

Devin Nunes, a ten-term California congressman who had resigned his seat, took over as CEO in 2022 and pushed the platform toward a conventional product roadmap: a web version, direct messaging, groups and eventually premium features. The company has never disclosed audited user counts, which leaves outside estimates of its audience varying widely.

Truth Social's content model is deliberately light-touch. Moderation rules prohibit illegal content and a narrow set of abuses, while the company markets the platform as a "big tent" free-speech alternative to what it describes as censorship-prone incumbents. Critics counter that the platform's enforcement is inconsistent and that it has become a distribution channel for election and health misinformation, a characterization the company disputes.

In August 2025 the platform launched Truth Search AI, an answer engine powered by a partnership with Perplexity that returns sourced responses inside the app. The feature marked the beginning of a broader bundling strategy that connects the social product with the Truth+ streaming service and the Patriot Package subscription tier.