Just Pick One. You’re Getting Scammed Either Way

Last Updated on: 21st April 2022, 04:05 pm

So apparently there is an app (probably more than one but this is the only one covered here) that is, either deliberately or by accident, tricking people into thinking that it is the Android version of Truth Social, the social network that Donald Trump put his name on now that he’s not allowed on any of the ones people actually use. According to the story, the app, called “MAGA Hub — Truth Social Trump”, has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times in only a few days.

Normally this would be the part of the post where I remind everyone that slowing down and paying attention would save a lot of trouble and heartbreak, but honestly, something with Donald Trump’s name on it stealing your money and not delivering what it promises falls under the category of bare minimum you should expect it to do, so I’m just gonna go ahead and save myself the effort today.

MAGA Hub, for what it’s worth, contains $28.99 in-app purchases with an unclear purpose and automatically subscribes users to a global chat group which Insider reports sends out “a constant stream of memes and messages.” The page lists as the developer a man named Lukas Neissen, who has published several other apps under the “SocialHubs” brand, including virtually identical apps for LGBT people and fans of YouTuber Jake Paul or Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. A residential address in Germany is also listed as the company’s location.
MAGA Hub promises various features for users, including that it is “End-to-end encrypted, no algorithms,” has a Stories feature, and boasts an “endless amount of content customized for you.” It also states users will be able to play the curiously titled “MAGA-Game”:

Play the game that was specially created for the MAGA community. Check out the global leaderboard, how well did you play?

And just to make it that much harder to sort out the real Truth Social from the fake one, this one, like Trump’s, appears to be full of technical problems.

Gizmodo would have loved to explore this delightful experience even further, but when we attempted to register an account on the app, it presented an error message stating that it had already exceeded the allowed number of daily email verifications. While our account was apparently created, the password we chose during the signup process didn’t work, and the account recovery feature simply returned the message “Something went wrong.” Eventually, the app randomly began displaying content from its news feed, which almost exclusively consisted of the kind of things you’d see in a QAnon channel on Telegram or a t-shirt at CPAC. An attempt to access the “Global Chat” was blessedly blocked by MAGA Hub’s inability to send a verification email.

I don’t know that there’s a lesson to be found in any of this, but for the sake of ending this thing neatly I feel duty-bound to find one. Perhaps never trust Trump or Republicans in general is it, but I feel like there has to be more. Maybe it’s just that if you must use a social network and the garbage cesspools we already have aren’t friendly enough to you and your kind, perhaps the garbage cesspools aren’t the problem.

Yeah, I think that might be it.