The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly

The good:

Former president Donald Trump’s Truth Social app is seeing a 93% drop in signups and similarly steep decline in traffic after a rocky rollout last month fraught with technical issues and an extensive waiting list for new signups to actually use the service.

After going live on President’s Day, the Twitter-lookalike app saw installs decline by more than 800,000 since its launch week, according to Sensor Tower. Installs on the Apple app store this month have fallen to about 60,000 per week, based on early estimates.

“This is down 93% from its launch week, when it saw 872,000 installs during the week of Feb. 21,” Stephanie Chan, mobile insights strategist at Sensor Tower, told TheWrap. “We estimate that Truth Social has so far reached approximately 1.2 million installs since its launch.”

And there is no data about how many actually use the site, which is not yet available to Android customers.

The bad:

Jurors on Tuesday saw chilling social media posts by two people charged in a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor, including references to hanging public officials and attacking authorities, even if it might end in death.

“The government has stolen enough from me,” Brandon Caserta said on Facebook in late March 2020, a few weeks after Covid-19 hit the state and around the same time that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer began a series of economic restrictions to fight the spread.  [snip]

In the months that followed, Caserta and others trained to snatch Whitmer from her vacation home, according to evidence, before the FBI arrested the antigovernment extremists in October 2020.

Digital maps of the Elk Rapids area were saved on the phone of Adam Fox, 38, an alleged leader of the scheme, agent Chelsea Williams told jurors Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors are poised to finish their case Wednesday, which will be the 13th day of trial in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They’re trying to show in the final stretch that four men charged with conspiring to kidnap Whitmer were firmly committed to a plan without influence by informants or undercover FBI agents.

The ugly: 

Facebook parent company Meta is paying one of the biggest Republican consulting firms in the country to orchestrate a nationwide campaign seeking to turn the public against TikTok.

The campaign includes placing op-eds and letters to the editor in major regional news outlets, promoting dubious stories about alleged TikTok trends that actually originated on Facebook, and pushing to draw political reporters and local politicians into helping take down its biggest competitor. These bare-knuckle tactics, long commonplace in the world of politics, have become increasingly noticeable within a tech industry where companies vie for cultural relevance and come at a time when Facebook is under pressure to win back young users.

Employees with the firm, Targeted Victory, worked to undermine TikTok through a nationwide media and lobbying campaign portraying the fast-growing app, owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, as a danger to American children and society, according to internal emails shared with The Washington Post.

Cue Hugo Montenegro.