Did the social media platform Truth Social shut down as of May 3, 2024, as claimed in a post on the Threads social media platform? No, that's not true: Truth Social has not experienced any widespread disruptions in service since May 3, 2024. As of May 9, 2024, the platform was functioning as usual.
The claim originated in a post (archived here) on Threads by @ill_will69 on May 3, 2024. The post read:
Breaking news, truth social is shut down, no longer operatable. God i hope so!!
This is how the post appeared at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Thu May 09 15:41:37 2024 UTC)
At the time of writing, May 9, 2024, the Truth Social platform was up and running. A check on the network insights platform downdetector.com showed that Truth Social had a minimal number of outage reports in the past 24 hours (archived here) as of May 9, 2024. There were only a small number of comments on the dedicated Truth Social page at Downdetector.com, and none were left on May 3, 2024, the date the Threads post purports the platform shut down.
A Google search using keywords returned several fact-checking articles debunking this recent viral claim as well as a news story that may have been the source that inspired it. This real news broke on the same day that the false claim was posted on Threads.
On May 3, 2024, Newsweek published an article, "Trump Media's Auditor Hit With 'Massive Fraud' Charge: What We Know." It began:
An accounting firm that handled former President Donald Trump's social media company has been accused of 'massive fraud' and shut down by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The shutting down of an auditing firm is not the same thing as the shutting down of a social media platform, one of 369 clients the auditing firm did work for.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims about Truth Social can be found here and here.
