PALM BEACH, Fla. — Former President Donald Trump is returning to social media with his own web platform.
The Trump Media and Technology Group was announced in a news release on Friday and datelined on Palm Beach, the location of Trump's Mar-a-Lago home.
TMTG, as it is also being called, announced a merger with Digital World Acquisition Corporation and will become a publicly listed company with an initial enterprise value of $875 million.
"I created TRUTH Social and TMTG to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech," Trump is quoted in the news release, referring to his bans by Twitter and Facebook. "Iam excited to send out my first TRUTH on TRUTH Social very soon."
The platform did take a setback this week after being hacked, reportedly by the group Anonymous.
"These days anyone spinning up a platform should be hyper-paranoid about security," said Alan Crowetz ofInfostream. Inc. "If anything, it will get worse, and my suspicion is they found an easy vulnerability, so once you plug that, they will do the next vulnerability."
The Trump platform is expected to have a launch in November for invited guests and then a wider opening in early 2022 with video services, news and podcasts.
"I just think it’s important that President Trump comes out and has his own social media platform," Willy Guardiola, a Trump supporter who has organized many rallies in Palm Beach County, told WPTV. "It's going to be his greatest marketing tool. He's a media darling. That's what he's done for so many years."
Critics of the former president expect Trump to return to his messages, especially about the 2020 election.
"Donald Trump is not trying to calm things down. He's trying to stir things up," WPTV political analyst Brian Crowley said. "If there's something he doesn't like, he attacks it and he rips it apart, even if he doesn't have the facts to back what he says, and he has his enemy list. That's probably the most important thing to him."
