Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes is sounding the alarm about politically motivated ad blacklisting, saying partisan ad boycotts are robbing Trump’s social media platform of revenue.
The former congressman also said he was talking to his old colleagues in Washington DC about the problem, which has long been a tool of leftists seeking to destroy conservative media by undermining their revenue. Organizations like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) make it their business to warn advertisers about “risky” websites to advertise on — almost always conservative ones.
Via Reclaim the Net:
Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) CEO Devin Nunes says Truth Social‘s ad platform is getting “pennies on the dollar” because of ad blacklisting based on political and ideological grounds.
The former California representative, who resigned from Congress to head TMTG, has called for congressional action over this issue during an episode of his podcast where he had John Solomon, formerly of Fox News and the Washington Times, as a guest.
In a Rumble video, Nunes first explained that Truth Social has built its Ad Center using Rumble, which runs independently of Big Tech infrastructure. He said raising awareness that this is a possibility was one of the reasons he spent several days in Washington, talking to his former colleagues.
Truth Social isn’t the only major social network to face down ad boycotts. Twitter is in the middle of an ad revenue desert after major advertisers pulled out in response to its new owner Elon Musk’s determination to reinstate major conservative accounts, including former president Donald Trump’s. Recent reports show that Twitter ad revenue fell by 70 percent in December due to ongoing boycotts.
Ad boycotts have also been used against Facebook and YouTube in order to pressure the platforms for more censorship. In 2020, the media encouraged a boycott against Facebook, driven by concerns that the platform wasn’t going far enough in censoring “misinformation.”
And in 2017, a media-incited ad boycott of YouTube over “hate speech” concerns cost the platform hundreds of millions of dollars, causing the Google-owned platform to overhaul its ad revenue system, destroying revenue streams for small and mid-sized content creators in the process.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.