Roger Stone complains he’s being ‘censored’ by Trump’s Truth Social

Roger Stone, the longtime ally of Donald Trump and former “dirty trickster” for ex-President Richard Nixon, says he’s being censored on the social media platform launched by the 45th president.

Mr Trump launched his “Truth Social” platform in recent months to much fanfare on the right but staggeringly lower user base numbers than those enjoyed by mainstream competitors like Facebook and Twitter. The platform has for weeks featured a several-hundred-thousand long “wait list” for new accounts as the site administrators appear to be having issues dealing with a large volume of new accounts.

On Saturday, Mr Stone took to the platform to complain that the site’s auto-moderating ai system had slapped a “sensitive content” warning on an image post by the conservative operative that merely depicted an old Trump presidential campaign button.

“Why would this be censored content on TruthSocial?” he wrote in a follow-up post, screenshotted by The Daily Beast.

Contacted by the news outlet, Mr Stone contended that the content warning was a “glitch” that had been fixed. His second post, which contained the same image, was not slapped with a content advisory.

The possible reason for the “glitch”, in Mr Stone’s words, could have been his caption on the original post, which referred to a terrorist attack: “Trump also warns again a growing threat of terrorism by radical Islam mix in the predicted the 9/11 attack.” Some ai content moderation systems flag such content to avoid the spread of gruesome or upsetting images of war or terrorist attacks.

Truth Social has struggled to establish itself as a home for conservatives angered by Twitter and Facebook’s efforts to remove content related to conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and Covid-19 from their platforms. The site faces competition for the “aggrieved conservative” consumer base in the forms of Gettr, Gab, and Rumble, all of which are positioning themselves similarly as alternatives to big-name brands like YouTube and Instagram.

The former president meanwhile continues to publicly raise the possibility of a 2024 run for the presidency, a prospect which would certainly complicate his management of a social media company.