Top exec at Trump’s Truth Social resigns

A top executive of the company that runs former President Trump’s app Truth Social has resigned, Reuters reported, the latest stumble in the app’s struggle to gain traction.

Alex Gleason was reportedly hired as the head of engineering for Truth Social in January 2022 to adapt his social media software, Soapbox, to the former president’s app. Gleason said in a statement that he is leaving Trump Media & Technology Group to work full-time to expand Soapbox, which aims to spread “the freedom of decentralized social media,” to social network Nostr.

Truth Social was founded by Trump after Facebook and Twitter suspended his accounts for his posts related to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The app was intended as an alternative to mainstream social media networks and touted itself as “free from political discrimination.”

Since launching the social media app in February 2022, Truth Social has failed to gain as many users as it initially projected, coming up short compared to its older competitors. While Truth Social set out to attract 81 million users by 2026, the app is only home to about 2 million active users as of last month, compared to around 450 million and 2.91 billion active users on Twitter and Facebook, respectively.