Conservative Entrepreneur Banned from Facebook Launches Competing Social Media Platform

According to a press release through MarketWatch, Addison Riddleberger said his “innovative new social networking platform geared toward conservatives, TrumpTown.com, has officially opened its virtual doors in an attempt to give users an alternative to Facebook.”

“After years of Trump supporters’ right to free speech being silenced by Silicon Valley — and ultimately culminating with my network of conservative followers being purged — I decided the far-left tech industry needed a real competitor. And thus, TrumpTown was born.”

Riddleberger — whose pages included Standing for Americans, Freedom Catalog and Patriotic Folks — says he was sent a vague warning letter by the social media giant saying that he was in violation of one of its terms of service, although the letter didn’t make it clear what term he was violating.

He told The Western Journal that he originally thought it had to do with a new firm they had partnered with to handle their advertisements, so he suspended them — and all advertisements on his websites — going forward. That apparently wasn’t it, however, since the pages were deleted along with Riddleberger’s personal account.

“TrumpTown has actually been in development for several months — once my account and pages were shut down, we went into overdrive getting the site into a position where all the basics were in place,” Riddleberger told The Western Journal. “The timing was pretty incredible the way it all came together.”

The idea of a conservative alternative to traditional social media platforms isn’t a particularly new one, although few examples have met with any sustained success. The most notable has been Gab, a Twitter-like platform that promised a policy of unfettered free speech in response to a spate of high-profile social media bans.

The problem for Gab was that while few mainstream conservatives established a presence there — instead deciding to stay on established platforms — the conversation quickly became dominated by either fringe figures or individuals whose speech had gotten them exiled elsewhere. The network came under the microscope because of the recent Pittsburgh synagogue shooting after it was revealed the alleged killer was a member and often posted his paranoid, anti-Semitic theories there.

“Gab is a great site in theory — and setting up your platform solely on the basis of free speech is fantastic — but the marketing and execution is where we differ,” he told The Western Journal. “We wanted to angle our site as being a conservative social media alternative first, not just a free speech platform. Our platform offers both characteristics, but leads with the healthy passion that 65 million Americans have toward President Trump and his conservative agenda.”

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