Twitter and Snapchat have bowed to the liberal media and censored President Donald Trump. Just in case that censorship continues, the president’s re-election campaign has a back-up plan: the official Trump 2020 app.
The app, launched on April 23, was initially meant to allow voters to “engage with the campaign from their couch, or wherever they are,” according to Trump’s presidential campaign manager Brad Parscale. But in the face of Twitter’s fact-check of a Trump tweet and labeling and suppression of another, the app might serve a different purpose. Parscale told Reuters, “We have always been worried about Twitter and Facebook taking us offline and this serves as a backup.”
Tech newsletter Protocol found that the app was better than former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s app. “The app’s news stream is impressive,” wrote Protocol’s producer Sofie Kodner about the Trump 2020 app. It features original content from the Trump campaign, multiple updates per day, and social media feeds from Trump himself as well as “his favorite voices.”
Meanwhile, the Biden app “provides little new information; no news or social feeds.” According to Reuters, the Biden app is not even ranked by Apple in the top 200. The Biden campaign told Reuters that it uses the app for organizing supporters and almost nothing else.
On June 3, according to Fox Business, the Trump 2020 app saw a spike in downloads, placing it at No. 323 in the Apple App Store. The app had jumped 1,177 ranking spots. On both the App Store and Google Play, the Trump 2020 app had been downloaded 385,000 times this month. It ranked No. 13 in the App Store’s “News” category, alongside Fox News and CNN.
With tech platforms like Snapchat refusing to promote Trump’s content, this app serves as the way to get through to potential voters without the threat of Big Tech censorship. Snapchat announced on June 3 that it will no longer allow Trump’s account to be boosted in the “Discover” tab. CEO Evan Spiegel declared that “we simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform. Our Discover content platform is a curated platform, where we decide what we promote.”
