Elon Musk officially owns Twitter now and it’s cause for celebration in some conservative circles. The new ‘Chief Twit’ has already made public his intentions to bring back right-wing accounts that were banned after breaking Twitter’s rule
But now that Musk is intent on making Twitter more « red, » where does that leave other alternative conservative platforms like Truth Social and Parler? How will they be affected by Elon Musk’s Twitter acquisition?
The truth is…nothing much will change for these social media sites. These platforms barely get any traction to begin with.
Take Parler, for example. This alternative conservative social network has recently been in the news thanks to rapper Kanye West, who claims he’s going to buy the platform. According to the most recent Comscore data, Parler receives roughly 137,000 unique visitors per month. The platform has been on the decline since its peak in January 2021. The week before the Kanye news gave Parler a slight bump, its mobile app was only pulling in around 17,000 installs, according to mobile analytics firm SensorTower.
For comparison, Twitter so far has received 153 million installs of its mobile app this year, according to SensorTower. It currently has 238 million daily active users.
Former president Donald Trump’s TruthSocial is easily the biggest current alternative conservative social media platform. However, because it was so late to the game — it was launched in February 2022, more than a year after Trump was banned from Twitter — it was dwarfed by its dying competitors. According to SensorTower, TruthSocial has seen a cumulative total of approximately 3.8 million installs, compared to Parler’s total of 11.7 million installs and ghost town Gettr’s 7.4 million. (All look tiny when compared to Twitter’s 1.3 billion installs since 2014.)
Still, Truth Social remains the most active of the bunch. Why? Because of Donald Trump. The platform has morphed from its original idea of being an alternative Twitter into literally just a place for conservatives to grovel in the replies to Trump’s posts. And when they’re not doing that, they’re spreading conspiracy theories in the hope that Trump will notice and share them.
Trump has nearly 4.4 million followers on the Truth Social platform. That’s close to the entirety of its users. They are there for him. And Trump says he’s staying solely on the financially struggling Truth Social, too.
The problem for these alternative conservative platforms is that they primarily appeal to the group of conservatives who want to preach to the choir. For the subsection of this audience intent on sparring with the other side of the political spectrum (to « own the libs »), a conservative-only platform was always a turnoff.
So, even with Musk owning Twitter, the state of conservative social media platforms remains…pretty much the same. Sites like Parler and Gettr will continue to struggle to find an audience. Other platforms like the white-supremacist-friendly Gab will carry on catering to its extremist niche. And Truth Social will continue chugging along as a Donald Trump fan club.
As for Musk, well, he still has to keep advertisers happy to justify his $44 billion purchase and he’s already hedging just a bit on his plans. For example, on Friday afternoon, Musk said he would be putting together a « content moderation council » to review major content decisions and account reinstatements before they happen.
So, at least for now, the options for right-wing social media users are to either play ball with Twitter’s rules or go kick rocks in social media’s conservative ghost towns.
