Truth Social Was Hijacked To Get #DeSantis2024 Trending

In the space of a couple of hours, and with the help of a single TikTok video, a group of three friends were able to hijack Truth Social and get the hashtag #DeSantis2024 to the top of the trending section on the site owned by former President Donald Trump.

Then, the social network went offline.

With Trump’s possible indictment and arrest looming, Ari Cagan, Adam Faze, and Peter McIndoe, who created the viral Birds Aren’t Real movement, turned to Truth Social, the social media platform owned by Trump, to see what was happening. In recent months, Truth Social has become a QAnon dumpster fire. Trump also posts most of his all-caps updates on the site, including everything from conspiracy theories to his hatred of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a likely rival for the GOP nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

The trio decided that they would try and hack Truth Social’s trending section. “We downloaded Truth Social to see what Trump was saying about his arrest,” Cagan tweeted. “We realized the top trending topics only had 100 people talking about them.” 

“We wanted to make something trend that would really piss off Trump,” Cagan added. “We noticed that he was ‘truthing’ a lot about DeSantis. If DeSantis started trending on his own platform, it would annoy him to no end.”

To get as many people as possible to follow their lead, they went to Trump Tower and shot a video for TikTok, then posted it on McIndoe’s account. 

It quickly gained traction, and to date has amassed over 1 million views. 

Within hours, the #DeSantis2024 hashtag appeared on the Truth Social trending pane. By 4 pm on Tuesday afternoon it was at the top of the trending section, overtaking pro-Trump hashtags like #PrayforTrump, Trump2024 and #IStandWithTrump.

Then, suddenly, the site went down.

Truth Social did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the outage or the fact that it happened just as the #DeSantis2024 content was trending.

“Our initial inclination was to get inside Trump’s head on the week of his likely arrest,” Faze told VICE News. “But in doing so proved the ‘free speech platform’ is anything but, with #Trump2024 immediately replacing ours as the top trending hashtag within hours even though it visibly had thousands of less mentions.”

One user who took part in the campaign, who had never used his account to post anything before and only posted the term #desantis2024, claimed his account was banned as a result.

But despite the downtime and possible banned users, the #DeSantis2024 hashtag continued to trend on Truth Social on Wednesday, along with the hashtag #ResearchBirdSurveillance, which is a reference to the viral satire/conspiracy theory movement known as “Birds Aren’t Real” that McIndoe started in 2017.

Under this “Birds Aren’t Real” TikTok account, McIndoe encouraged his almost 900,000 followers to post the #ResearchBirdSurveillance hashtag on Truth Social. Like the #DeSantis2024 hashtag, it managed to break into the trending section on Truth Social.

However in a follow-up video, McIndoe, claimed he was being censored on the app, highlighting how a search for the #ResearchBirdSurveillance hashtag returns no results, despite hundreds of people using the hashtag.

“We are actively being banned by the same platform that talks about freedom of speech,” McIndoe said. “Why? Maybe because we are right.”

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