In a rapidly changing social media landscape, Truth Social, the app launched by former U.S. President, Donald Trump, faced technical difficulties and crashes, coinciding with a mass migration of users from Twitter at the weekend.

This exodus was prompted by Elon Musk’s implementation of daily posts limits, intended to combat data scraping and system manipulation on the platform.

Truth Social was founded after Trump was permanently banned from Twitter over an allegation that he incited the rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol building in January 2021.

Musk, renowned entrepreneur and influential figure in the tech industry, recently disclosed that temporary reading restrictions were introduced on Twitter to address the growing concerns of excessive data scraping and system manipulation.

The implementation of these restrictions has sparked a wave of users migrating to alternative social media platforms, including Truth Social, which was launched as a platform catering to conservative voices.

Musk highlighted the severity of the issue by stating that unverified accounts are now limited to reading 600 posts per day, while newly created unverified accounts face an even stricter cap of 300 posts per day.

Verified accounts, typically belonging to public figures and influencers, have been temporarily limited to reading 6,000 posts per day. The aim is to prevent the exploitation of Twitter’s data and ensure a better user experience.

However, many Nigerians have started relocating to Truth Social as an alternative microblogging app. Despite many expressing concern about the app because of Trump and his supporters’ involvement, they described it as a new home to express themselves.

Although Twitter has rescinded the policy, it has not stopped the migration. Musk later revised the daily limits to 10,000, 1,000 and 500 for verified, unverified and new accounts respectively.

Mobile messaging services have become influential in recent times in reshaping social movements, discussion and dissecting policies. They also circumvent conventional communication networks so people can create personalised narratives, decentralise logistics, and gain expansive power.

In 2020, the Nigerian government banned Twitter. Despite this, resilient young people stuck to the platform as they continued to use the site through by-pass channels using Virtual Private Networks (VPN) while the ban lasted for seven months. Twitter is a one-stop shop for young Nigerians, who put it to a range of uses including job connections, marketing products, finding missing people and directly challenging public officials. (AFP via Guardian)

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