By: John Gillies
Even before his removal from Twitter two days after the storming of the Capital on January 6, 2021, former President Donald Trump (“Trump”), has talked about creating his own social media platform to address censorship by the Big Tech companies. That process has now begun and is much more than just a social media website. Trump announced Trump Media & Technology (“TMTG”), unveiling plans for Truth Social (“Truth”), TMTG’s first product. Truth has yet to be officially launched, but users have already found ways to create accounts. However, before TMTG can “fight for the First Amendment protections and freedoms of all American, protect democracy, and defend capitalism,” (per the company overview deck), it must deal with pending litigation surrounding the licensing of its source code.
Mastodon, a free social media framework, alleges that TMTG is using its open-source software, without credit. Mastodon, which again is a free product, requires any service using the source code to make it (and any modifications) publicly accessible. Mastodon as a company prides itself on granting anyone the capability to run their own social media platform but does all of this with an understanding that after providing the code, it will be returned to the Mastodon community for the benefit of all Mastodon developers. The terms are simple: the software is free, users cannot claim ownership over it, and if you modify (or “fork”) it, you must place the new versions into the public domain.
Truth has chosen a different route. People who have closely examined the code that runs Truth confirm that it is in fact Mastodon, and rather than credit Mastodon and make its personalizations to the code publicly available on Mastodon, Truth has explicitly stated in its terms of service that “[u]nless otherwise indicated, the Site is our proprietary property and all source code, databases, functionality, software, website designs . . . are owned or controlled by us or licensed to us . . .” Mastodon is only seeking the credit that is plainly denied in Truth’s terms of service. On October 26, Mastodon sent a formal letter to the chief legal officer at Truth, in which they have given Truth thirty days to comply.
There are so many users of the Mastodon license that many of the license violations go undetected. Truth, which aims to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, is not one of those instances. The brazen plagiarism of the source code is most shocking for this reason; anything attached to Trump is under a microscope and it was foolish to believe this would go unnoticed.
It is unclear why TMTG has chosen not to give credit to what is a well-known product, but it is clear why it would choose to use Mastodon for its source code: it is extremely difficult to build a social media platform from scratch. Parler,another social media platform marketed to Donald Trump supporters, saw first-hand how difficult it can be running a social media website, as a surge of interest in December of 2018 overwhelmed the servers, causing a collapse.
Mastodon, in its statement on the matter from its founder Eugen Rochko, made its feelings on the matter clear. It appears that he and his team are waging their own battle against Big Tech separate from Trump’s, and that they do not co-sign what Trump is creating here with their code. In the statement, Rochko writes “As far as personal feelings are concerned, of course we would prefer if people so antithetical to our values did not use and benefit from our labour.” He goes on to acknowledge that this is a drawback to making Mastodon available to anyone, and its only practical issue is that Truth doesn’t “even comply with the free software license.”
There is certainly a market for a conservative-leaning social media platform with no restrictions on content. The question is only whether this will be a serious venture, or a website taken over by internet pranksters. Minutes after the announcement of the platform, people had found ways to register fake Donald Trump accounts, and posted lewd images. The anonymity afforded by the internet has posed all sorts of questions surrounding free speech and the first amendment. Donald Trump’s once-beloved Twitter only acted and banned him after the events of January 6, 2021, which he and his supporters view as censorship. While the variety of free speech Truth seeks to protect and publish led to the storming of the Capital that day, it will be interesting to see come November 28 (thirty days after Mastodon’s letter) if Truth does the bare minimum and credits the software it has plagiarized. I’m not counting on it.
Student Bio: John Gillies is a second-year law student at Suffolk University Law School. He is a staffer on the Journal of High Technology Law. John received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Sociology from the University of Connecticut.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHTL or Suffolk University Law School.
