Online activists are trying to take down Trump’s Truth Social before the 2024 election

A group of online activists is trying to bring down Donald Trump’s Truth Social ahead of the 2024 election.

In Octobe,r the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO) – a group initially formed in 2022 to combat pro-Russian propaganda about the country’s invasion of Ukraine – launched a campaign to take over the trending topics on the former president’s social media platform, as Wired recently reported. The group’s founder, who goes by the handle Rock Kenwell online, told the outlet he was inspired by another successful campaign that got #DeSantis2024 trending on Truth Social.

Related: Internet laughs as experts expect Donald Trump’s “Twitter clone” to flop hard

Donald Trump got kicked off Twitter, so he decided to start his own platform. It’s not going well.

“It’s a very easy platform to manipulate. It’s a very primitive social media environment,” Kenwell said.

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So, on Halloween, Kenwell and 50 other NAFO “commandos,” as they call themselves, began trying to get spoofs of MAGA hashtags like #StollenElection and #ErectionFraud trending on Truth Social. Within hours, they succeeded, and spent 10 days posting more than 8,000 “truths” — the platform’s version of tweets — containing the hashtags before they were removed from the trending list.

Kenwell claimed that NAFO’s campaign resulted in Truth Social briefly disabling new app downloads and account registrations. Wired reported that while the app was unavailable to download and new account registrations were disabled around the time of the campaign, the outlet could not verify that that had anything to do with NAFO’s posts.

But Kenwell said that the success of the trending topics prank has inspired a more ambitious campaign.

“The goal we have in mind, which is lofty, is to help bring the platform down ahead of the 2024 election,” he said. “We know it’s going to be an aggregator for extremism and probably violence the way things are looking at this point.”

The plan is to flood the platform with spoofs of ads from the few companies that have paid to advertise on Truth Social. “So, all of a sudden, it’s just a glut of fake ads,” Kenwell explained. “It’s really easy to fake ads on Truth Social… If we can take any ad and get a couple of thousand false versions of that ad running, nobody can really identify what is the original ad anymore and what’s fake.”

According to the New York Times, since launching in 2021, Truth Social has struggled to attract major advertisers. An SEC filing last month showed that it had lost $31.6 million since its launch. According to the filing, the loss has contributed to “substantial doubt that [platform owner Trump Media & Technology (TMTG)] will have sufficient funds to meet its liabilities as they fall due, including liabilities related to promissory notes previously issued by TMTG.”

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