Trump’s Truth Social — the social media platform encouraging free speech — hit the app store Sunday.

What’s the big deal? After being banned from Twitter in 2021 — Donald Trump decided to launch his own social media platform — a free speech Twitter clone.

• Soft launched last Sunday — its official launch expected in March.
• Reached 170K downloads but went down several times due to

Truth Social is developed by Trump Media & Technology Group — which is being taken public by SPAC, Digital World Acquisition Corp (NASDAQ:DWAC) and rose 72% in 2022.

Free-speech platforms: Can Truth Social acquire enough users to reach commercial success? Let’s look to Parler — the right wing social media platform — for insight:

• Founded in 2018, Parler has over 16M users — way short of Twitter’s 330M users.
• In 2021, Parler was banned for several months from app stores for failing to remove “egregious content”.

Last year, Parler’s app downloads spiked after Trump’s ban from social media platforms but struggled to pick up traction beyond that.

Social media apps need a massive user base to sell ads to and Parler has struggled to reach critical mass — a possible problem for Truth Social too.

Running on dreams: At its current price, Truth Social would trade at over $15B and like many other companies going public, it’s forecasting aggressive growth rates from near-zero to $3.6B by 2026.

The company is trading on momentum and based on these expectations, Reality Check Research gave it a fair share price value of $36 — implying 58% downside.