The Congressman who infamously sued Twitter over a fake cow will soon get to run a different social network. But will he be able to ensure it stays blissfully barren of bogus bovines?
Rep. Devin Nunes (R.-Calif.) emailed constituents Monday to say he will resign his House seat by the end of the year to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group—a firm launched by former President Donald Trump in response to major social platforms evicting him for his incitement of the Jan. 6 insurrection.
A press release from Florida-based TMTG quotes Nunes as saying “The time has come to reopen the Internet and allow for the free flow of ideas and expression without censorship.”
It’s unclear how Nunes will square that anti-censorship stance with the hostility to online scorn and satire he has shown in a streak of so-far unsuccessful lawsuits. As the Sacramento Bee Sacramento Bee writes: “He has filed 10 of those lawsuits since 2019, including against The Washington Post—twice—CNN, NBCUniversal and McClatchy, the parent company of The Fresno Bee.”
The first such complaint targeted Twitter, Republican strategist Liz Mair, and the unknown authors of two parody accounts: @DevinCow, whose bio begins “Hanging out on the dairy in Iowa looking for the lil’ treasonous cowpoke,” and the since-suspended @DevinNunesMom.
(The Iowa reference nods to a September 2018 EsquireEsquire story by Ryan Lizza that reported Nunes had quietly used proceeds from the sale of his family’s farm in California’s Central Valley to buy a dairy in Sibley, Iowa.)
Nunes’ biography suggests no particular expertise in social media or technology in general. But his constant Trump advocacy as chairman and then ranking member of the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence may have been more relevant in landing him his next job.
TMTG plans to launch a social platform called Truth Social, but things are already going badly for it. Its source code apparently borrows from the Mastodon social platform without complying with that open-source project’s licensing terms, which promptly led to a threatened lawsuit. A week ago, Truth Social began crediting Mastodon properly.
Separately, TMTG’s plans to go public via a deal with a blank-check “special purpose acquisition company” named Digital World Acquisition Corporation now face investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.