this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
316 points (97.6% liked)

News

23669 readers
4399 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Former President Donald Trump hit the jackpot this spring when his social media company finally went public.

Even though Trump Media & Technology Group DJT generates very little revenue, investors are assigning an eye-popping valuation north of $9 billion to the company. Trump’s dominant stake in Trump Media is now valued at nearly $6 billion.

Yet new data shows its main product — the conservative-friendly social network Truth Social — remains a very tiny player in its industry, and it’s getting even smaller.

Truth Social’s average number of daily active US users on iOS and Android dropped by 19% year over year in April to about 113,000, according to data shared exclusively with CNN from Similarweb, a data intelligence company.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] reagansrottencorpse@lemmy.ml 37 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Why is it valued so high to investors if the company makes almost no revenue? 9 billion ? What the fuck?

[–] Got_Bent@lemmy.world 83 points 7 months ago

Money laundering

[–] cygnus@lemmy.ca 47 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Let's say you're an organization (or foreign actor) who wants to get as many no-strings-attached dollars into Trump's hands as possible. You can't do that through campaign donations because those are watched way too closely. You can't just cut him a check, because that looks suspicious too. What you can do however is buy stock in the company he mostly owns, and inflate the stock price as much as you want.

[–] ApostleO@startrek.website 44 points 7 months ago

Which explains why it was standard procedure for presidents to put their money in a blind trust. And why Trump didn't.

[–] andrewta@lemmy.world 7 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

That is one hell of a theory. Not sure how you would even stop it.

[–] dhork@lemmy.world 13 points 7 months ago

You can stop it by enforcing the Emoulents Clause, and forcing Presidents to disclose all of their finances, and prove they are not taking money from any Foreign government. But Conservatives are very selective about which parts of the Constitution are worth upholding.

I really really hope a journalist somewhere is investigating the individuals and shell companies that purchase Truth Social stock, because I would bet that this is happening.

Russia in particular would find it useful because even if it's done with plausible deniability, it's another secret that, upon being revealed, would cause major problems for Trump. That is enough to function as leverage.