Truth Social, the social media platform backed by Donald *****, is still not available on the Google Play Store. That’s because Google has yet to approve the app due to violations of standards and inadequate content moderation.
The company informed Truth Social earlier this month about “several violations of standard policies in their current app submission and reiterated that having effective systems for moderating user-generated content is a condition of our terms of service for any app to go live on Google Play,” a Google spokesperson told Axios. “Last week, Truth Social wrote back acknowledging our feedback and saying that they are working on addressing these issues.”
Devin Nunes, Truth Social’s CEO, said last week that it was up to Google to determine when the Android version of the app would be available on the store. However, Google asserts that Truth Social will need to resolve the moderation issues first. Google reportedly has concerns over certain content on the platform, including incitements of violence and physical threats.
The platform does apply a label to some posts indicating that the content “may not be suitable for all audiences.” However, at least some content alluding to violence does not feature the banner.
Truth Social’s iOS app debuted on February 20th. Two days later, it emerged that Truth Social was censoring some content and kicking out certain users, so moderation is not a foreign concept to the company.
Truth Social hasn’t offered a web-based version of the service that Android users can try. Nor has it provided a way to sideload the app, even though there’s nothing to inherently stop it from doing so.
There are broader issues at the company, such as an investigation into how it became publicly traded. It’s said to owe a vendor $1.6 million too. On top of that, two key executives resigned soon after the iOS app went live.